Watch the amazing mashup opening montage from Questlove’s great ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music’ documentary

Saturday Night Live is in the midst of its big 50th anniversary celebration, and earlier this week NBC premiered Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music, a two-hour documentary directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez. Summing up 50 seasons of music, with nearly 1000 episodes that feature live performances as well as musical skits, into a two-hour film is a daunting task; you can’t fit in everything, but they managed to create a documentary that feels cohesive and comprehensive, hitting most of the series’ most memorable performances and biggest controversies (Nirvana, Sinead O’Connor, Elvis Costello, “Dick in a Box,” Rage Against the Machine, Fear, Ashlee Simpson, Kanye, a Hal Willner tribute, etc) and giving time to it all without giving the viewer whiplash.

In taking on this task, Questlove watched every single episode of SNL. He told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, “In the beginning, I think I was just going to compile like maybe the 50 best performances on the show, but around ’87, I realized there was way more iconic comedic moments musically on the show, like surpassing just the legendary performances. Music plays a major part on that show.”

50 Years of SNL Music opens with an absolute wow, a dazzling, amazing montage of musical performances from the show. It starts as all SNL musical performances do, with a quick succession of “Ladies and gentlemen…” intros from Tom Hanks, Emma Stone, Daniel Craig, and more, but as it goes a beat is laid down under it all, and they start showing interview clips and making quotes from Justin Timberlake, Paul Shaffer, Jimmy Fallon, Dave Grohl and more rhyme. Are we in Autotune the News territory? Things really kick in with Billy Preston on the first episode, which then gets spliced into the Funky Four Plus One (the first rap group on SNL, 1981) that is mashed up with Usher performing “Yeah” into Nelly doing “Hot in Herre” and Franz Ferdinand playing “Take Me Out,” mashing up the visuals too with dizzying split screens and smash cuts. Then we get Run DMC‘s performance of “Walk This Way” alongside Hall & Oates doing “I Can’t Go For That,” before Cher crashes in with her 1987 performance of “I Found Someone” that is then mashed up with Hanson‘s “Mmmbop,” which then mixes seamlessly into Queen performing “Under Pressure” in 1982…which is mixed with Dave Matthews Band doing “Ants Marching” and, of course, Vanilla Ice‘s “Ice Ice Baby,” but also Fine Young Cannibals‘ “She Drives Me Crazy” and Michael Bolton‘s “Love is a Wonderful Thing.” It keeps going from there for seven minutes, with too many amazing musical juxtapositions to mention (but one more: REM and Morris Day & The Time? It works.) It’s showstopper way to open this very entertaining documentary and you’ll have to watch it more than once to catch everything that’s in it.

Questlove, who told Deadline the montage took a year to make, was nice enough to share the entire seven-minute “cold open” montage on his Instagram, calling it “a musical world in which EVERYONE fits in.” Watch that below.

You can stream Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music on Peacock, where they also have an hour-long documentary on the “More Cowbell” sketch and more SNL50 content.

There’s also SNL50: The Homecoming Concert on February 14 at Radio City Music hall which will stream live on Peacock with performances by Lady Gaga, David Byrne, Eddie Vedder, Bad Bunny, Jack White, DEVO, and many, many more.

The big SNL50 special airs live on NBC on Sunday, February 16.

Questlove also has a Sly & The Family Stone documentary that will premiere on Hulu on February 13 and you can watch the trailer for that below as well