It is easy to poke fun– obviously– but opening yourself and your own interests and beliefs up to the kind of mockery I usually dish out here is a whole ‘nother matter. You spend enough time snarking, and before you know it you’ve spent ten years online cultivating the image of a bitter old crank without any counter balance. This seems like as good a time as any to try and reverse ten years of damage with a week of slapdash postings. Long planned but poorly thought out, the next seven days will find me trying to exclusively sing the praises of things I like, preferably things that make me come across as lame. I can only think of one thing to start off with:

Christmas is coming, but do not get this for me; I will have it four minutes after it is released. I have wanted exactly this for years. I can’t remember the last time anything online or off made me shout, “Oh f*** yeah.”

Is that sad?

I don’t care.

We are finally reaching the last stage before conventional DVDs become obsolete: all of the shows that were released in “Best Of” compilations from Time-Life by people who signed video deals without realizing where the medium was going are finally straightening themselves out and hopping aboard the money train. (”You can get complete seasons of ‘Mork and Mindy’ but not ‘Star Trek’? I mean… I don’t want ‘Star Trek,’ but that seems apostate or something.”) When the Muppet Show arrived, I knew everything was going to be okay.

I think the reason this DVD set excites me so much is that, although it is something I’ve awaited hungrily for ages, I honestly never thought I was actually going to get it. SNL has wisely been chopped up into bite-sized clip shows on video for years to camouflage what a crapshoot the typical episode has always been, and I was resigned to the idea that the Powers That Be would continue to play this shell game with America’s memory forever. All of those sketches from 12:45 and regrettable musical acts have been disappeared into the dustbin of nostalgia, leaving only the classic moments and a vague, whispering sense that five years of writing produced one good hour of material.

I was an impressionable youngster when Saturday Night Live was going through one of its periodic renaissances, one of the “SNL’s back!” peaks that briefly arise between longer “Saturday Night Dead” valleys. This, combined with the fact that Nick at Nite began showing the ’70s reruns (in 20-minute “Best Of” clip format, naturally) at around the same time, made a fan out of me at that age when enthusiasm is particularly enthusiastic. Though the show had already morphed from rebellion to institution as early as the ’80s, they were still doing the kinds of things on TV that got you sent to bed early on a weekend. (How many kids my age were inconvenienced for months because their moms overheard that Robin Williams opening monologue?) A little nostalgia for those days of sneaking TV goes a long way; I still half-watch the show practically every week, even though it abandoned brief peaks and deep valleys years ago in favor of a plateau of pleasant irrelevance. It’s like being married for 30 years; the show doesn’t excite me like it used to, but we’ve had a good comfortable thing going for so long now I wouldn’t know how to leave.

It seems like it should be the best show on television, doesn’t it? The typical TV show takes forever to produce, and by the time the producers find out people hate what they’re doing they’ve already got half a season more of it in the can. SNL should have the most flexibility of anything going; they can hear the audience, see the reviews, fire the whole staff and be back in a few days with the leanest, juiciest meat from a whole different cow. Frequent flyer miles ought to be shooting out of the pockets on the seat of their pants, yet in many ways SNL can be the most staid thing on TV. They don’t have bad episodes; they have terrible eras. (Funny SNL: that Bass-o-Matic sketch. Unfunny SNL: 1994-1997.) They don’t even have a central premise they have to stick to; they can do an entirely new show every week; and yet they have these ice ages of Bad. One of the most interesting things about these complete seasons on DVD will be seeing what they do when they get to 1981.

But whenever anybody is lamenting (or acknowledging) the state of SNL, it is always in comparison to those first five years, when the show really was unlike anything on TV and everyone involved was like a part-time Beatle. Those years have fascinated me since I was young, in part because I eventually realized that while I thought I loved those shows, I hadn’t actually seen them. I had seen 20-minute Nick at Nite nuggets culled from a 90-minute show and edited to be less ’70s-topical and more suitable for a general audience. “Ready for prime time,” as their marketing wizzes might put it. I’d seen plenty of Coneheads in my day, but I’d never seen the bits about the cast being strung out on heroin or the undoubtedly side-splitting material about President Carter trying to get America to convert to the metric system.

The crapshoot and the dated stuff excised from the reruns is exactly what I’m looking most forward to, especially the dated stuff. I am fascinated by the end of the ’70s and dawn of the ’80s, years for which I was there but unaware.

Actually, some of my earliest memories are of Saturday Night Live, specifically being f***ing horrified by it. I will never forget coming into the room one weekend long after my bedtime just in time to see Dan Aykroyd dressed in drag bleeding to death. Oh, when you’re three or four, there is nothing funnier than a man bleeding to death while no one helps him. We laughed and laughed. The drunk driving parody where Steve Martin runs over a kid with a steamroller was another childhood highlight. The less said about Mr. Bill, the better.

I love the primary sources, the biopsies of the culture sliced out and tucked away in formaldehyde. I love watching old movies or reading old comics and seeing the pop culture references that mean absolutely nothing now. Those old Bugs Bunny cartoons full of caricatures of no-longer famous people? “Abbott & Costello” radio shows? Forget about it. I’m all yours. I bought the “Star Wars Holiday Special” at a convention years ago, and while I’ve never watched the entire thing without cracking I could sit in front of the TV all night watching the 1978 commercials that are on the tape. (The “Union Yes!” ones in particular seem more otherworldly now than an hour of Wookies.) On one of the rare occasions I saw a longer rerun of the original SNL (E! used to show versions that only had 1/3rd of the episode deleted, instead of Nick at Nite’s 2/3rds) they were showing some sketch about Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture or something. I was paralyzed until the commercial break.

Love your Daily Show, because it will only be funny today and you will never, ever see it again. Except for when they rerun it three times tomorrow. After that, though, poof. Enjoy it while it lasts.

So yes, lame or not I will be counting the days until I get my 1975 box set. I will get to see old things with new eyes. I will get to understand the generation before mine from a whole new perspective. I will get to see a sacred cow through the veil of nostalgia, warts and all. I will dance around my house with my Best Buy bag. I will get weary two discs in and put the rest of the box on a shelf for a year and a half. But I will enjoy the enthusiasm while it lasts.