In the lead up to Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary special, the SNL YouTube channel put out this video highlighting the auditions of some of the all-time great cast members from SNL history, including the likes of Dan Aykroyd, Dana Carvey, Kristen Wigg, and Kate McKinnon.

In watching the promo, I noticed a significant number of the highlighted cast members were from the early 2000s to early 2010s era(s), which happens to align with my era of SNL (the years when I was in grade school and first became familiar with SNL) and what Seth Meyers has frequently called “an [sic] golden era” throughout The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast (a thoroughly enjoyable podcast for any fan of Seth or the Lonely Island). I wanted to confirm my suspicions and what better way than to visualize it with a chart. 🙂

Of the 50 years of SNL history and 167 cast members to date, it seems like the SNL promo team seems to agree that the best era for great and iconic cast members is from what Seth calls “an golden era” and what I call my favorite era.

One could obviously argue SNL50 is wanting to promote the greats that the current generation will remember, i.e., those that were great not that long ago, but I’ll just ignore that idea and say this is confirmation that the best SNL cast was when I was in high school.