Finn Wolfhard’s recent Saturday Night Live episode nearly resurrected a failed sketch from Colin Jost that refuses to die.
When the Stranger Things star made his SNL hosting debut on January 17, Jost dug up for the occasion a 16-year-old sketch: a Spider-Man-inspired superhero debacle called “Manny Manimal.”
Seth Meyers recapped the long, unfortunate history of said sketch on the latest episode of his Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, revealing it has been attempted three (!) different times since December 2009.
The sketch depicts a janitor named Manny Emanuel who, as revealed in a cartoon intro, was bitten by a series of radioactive critters. Just as Spider-Man’s origin story began with a radioactive spider, Manny’s powers hail from a spider bite… that was followed by several other bites—among them, an octopus, a scorpion, and a falcon. The result: Manny Emanuel became Manny Manimal, the “man of many animals.”
After the intro, the sketch cuts to the superhero attempting to thwart a bank robbery, only to come up short. “It was all about how he just felt really sick all the time,” Meyers recalled, “because there was just too much stuff going on.”
Jost first penned the sketch for Taylor Lautner’s SNL debut in 2009, with the Twilight star portraying the titular superhero. The sketch didn’t survive past dress rehearsal.
Nine years later, Jost dug up “Manny Manimal” when Meyers himself hosted SNL, writing a new draft with Bowen Yang. This time, Meyers played the lead role.
“Enough time [had] passed that everybody forgets, myself included, why it didn’t work,” Meyers explained on his pod.
But once again, dress rehearsal gave the team a harsh realization. The sketch “f*cking ate sh*t at dress,” Meyers admitted. “Not even considered.”
With that, “Manny Manimal” went into hibernation for another seven years. When Wolfhard hosted, Jost resubmitted the sketch with the Stranger Things star as the lead, co-writing yet another new draft with Tucker Flodman and Maxwell Gay.
Wolfhard, for his part, was excited about the sketch—though Meyers nearly robbed the actor of that enthusiasm. As Meyers tells it, he dropped by Wolfhard’s dressing room the Thursday before the show to meet the actor. In front of Wolfhard’s family, Meyers began to mention that “Manny Manimal” had croaked twice before. Afraid that Wolfhard would be spooked out of doing the sketch, Jost swooped in to hug Meyers mid-sentence, stopping the host from blurting out the sketch’s infamous history of failure.
‘Twas for naught, though. The sketch didn’t survive Wolfhard’s dress rehearsal.
“At, like, 9:45 on that Saturday,” Meyers recalled, “I started getting texts from people who were watching the show being like, ‘It’s not gonna make it.’”
But Manny “Manimal” Emanuel isn’t completely dead yet. On his podcast, Meyers shared audio of the sketch’s intro, voiced by Steve Higgins, for the first time. That newly unearthed audio of the sketch that never was (from its 2018 staging with Meyers) can be heard below:
