November 27th, 1976, host Jodie Foster and Musical Guest Brian WIlson

Here's some stuff that happened in the past

There are certain things children should not do for the sake of their mental health and emotional development. Playing a child prostitute in a brutal, gritty character study of madness and obsession for Martin Scorsese is one of them. 

Venturing into the tension-filled drug den that was Saturday Night Live to be the show's very first child host is another endeavor perhaps best left to those 18 and older. 

But Jodie Foster was nothing if not ambitious, prolific, and professional. She was a raspy-voiced prodigy, baby-faced yet wise beyond her years. 

Jodie is adorable, but saying that the show was not child-friendly would be a wild understatement. 

In the actress' first sketch, for example, she plays a fourteen-year-old in a Peter Frampton tee-shirt who is stoned out of her mind on LSD when bees, played by Laraine Newman and John Belushi, visit her. 

It's a twist on Peter Pan with a delightful, delightfully appropriate gender switch. In this incarnation, its squeaky-voiced Peter is played by Laraine Newman in yellow and black garb while a silent John Belushi is cast against type as Tinkerbell.

The stoner tells the invaders that they're not bees but rather television actors. "You're okay when you get a good concept," she tells the fake bees, a line that is as funny and mean as it is true.  

Peter Bee admonishes the audience to clap to show that they believe in bees while Belushi lies prone on the ground with a look of anguish and death on his face. 

The whole weird point of the Bees was that they didn't serve any real point and fundamentally did not work within the context of the show. 

But, in a neat bit of psychology, the show kept shoving the bees down the audience's throat so relentlessly that after a certain point, you give in and start to get excited when you see cast members in bee costumes. 

Peter Bee describes the Bees as being "like the Muppets, but with longer contracts." It was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of one of the show's few outright failures.

Foster stumbles over her lines sometimes in a manner that is charming and ingratiating rather than annoying, but if she seems more than a little out of place, she's also a consummate trooper who gives this strange gig her all. 

Late in the episode, there’s a character sketch with Foster as a student with a painful crush on a teacher played by Dan Aykroyd. It's a deft acting duet between a motormouthed teen overcome with hormones and lust and a teacher who is trying to extricate himself from the situation as quickly and painlessly as he can. 

Aykroyd would go on to become an Oscar-nominated dramatic actor thanks to Driving Miss Daisy, but he does a lot of acting here, playing a dazzlingly vast array of different roles. 

The future Blues Brothers screenwriter is in his element in pitchman mode peddling "Rovco's Puberty Helper", a wonder device that lets teenagers get through the inhuman gauntlet of humiliation that is high school by wearing giant paper bags that obscure their appearance. 

From its inception, Saturday Night Live has been a television show about television. More specifically, the show is a television show about Saturday Night Live and its various players. 

Announcer Don Pardo takes center stage in "Don Pardo: The First 50 Years" even though we never see his face. The sketch is a mock biography of Pardo's colorful life so even though we do not see him in the flesh, that booming voice and caffeinated caences could only belong to one man.

Speaking of American originals, Brian Wilson is a musical guest who utters the words no one wants a classic musician to say, "This is a new song I just wrote." Wilson's appearance is rough. The material just doesn't measure up to the classics. Even "Good Vibrations" came off as a little lackluster. 

Wilson's most memorable moment on the show, weirdly enough, comes in a sketch where Dan Aykryod has to give up a comically excessive number of metal items while going through the metal detector at the airport. 

Aykroyd has a devil of a time getting through, but the Tinsman from Wizard of Oz breezes by, leading a worker played by Wilson to blurt out adorably, “Th"t was the Tin Woodsman? I should have gotten his autograph!” 

"oster made history here with her youth, but she would never host again, even as she became one of the biggest adult stars of her era. 

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