I'm not going to get all heavy, or turn into Mr. 1970s Nostalgia Guy but...I feel very lucky to have grown up when I did. There's a lot of stuff from my childhood that I feel strongly about that is still just shit (pretty much any Hanna Barbera cartoon from that era; Happy Days after the first 2 seasons; a lot of disco; and so on).
But some stuff really deserves the fond nostalgia.
And as a fat kid who was raised by divorced parents, one set of grandparents, and the television set, the arrival of John Belushi on "Saturday Night Live" was something I remember vividly.
Saturday nights meant all the great CBS shows, like "All in the Family" and "The Carol Burnett Show", then local monster movies on Channels 20 and 45, and -- eventually -- "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "SCTV" in syndication.
But at 11:30 it was time for "Saturday Night Live".
It's also worth noting that as a fat guy it was especially sad and scary that John Belushi died one day after my birthday in 1982 and John Candy from "SCTV" died on my birthday in 1994.
Okay, enough of that. Here are some of my very favorite pictures of John Belushi from Judith Belushi Pisano's wonderful 2005 book, Belushi.
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards -- in a Peter Tosh t-shirt? -- Ron Wood, Bill Murray, and Belushi backstage at SNL around the time the Some Girls LP was released...
A hospitalized Belushi doesn't disappoint...
On the set of 1978's Animal House...
John Belushi with Gilda Radner...
For the time, this was ridiculously funny...
Wearing a Black Flag shirt when it actually would have meant something...
The expression I am wearing on the inside all the time...
