New Viz: SNL Five-Timers Club and a Journey into Midjourney AI Image Generation

 

If you read our Favorite Vizzes of 2024 blog post, you know that I'm pretty obsessed with Saturday Night Live. We grew up in a "Saturday Night Live" family. Our parents "taped" every episode on VHS. Some of our earliest memories are from this show.  And yeah, we probably saw a few skits that we shouldn't have watched at such a young age. When we were 8 or 9, we watched a nearly R-rated skit with some friends up the street. They asked their parents what a specific word meant...and well, they weren't allowed to watch SNL any longer. Ken and I still watch it every week and there is usually at least one nugget every episode. If you haven't seen the George Washington skits starring Nate Bargatze, go watch them now!  

Just a few weeks ago, I watched the episode hosted by Martin Short. It was his fifth time hosting the show and, if you're a fan, you know what that meant. It meant that he would be inducted into the Five-Timers club by numerous other Five-Timers (some of my favorite skits).

If you are not familiar, the SNL Five-Timers Club is a humorous, exclusive "club" celebrated on Saturday Night Live for hosts who have hosted the show five or more times. Although numerous people had already hosted 5+ times, the Five-Timers Club was introduced in December 1990 when Tom Hanks was hosting his 8th time. This exclusive club includes huge stars like the aforementioned Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Drew Barrymore, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, Scarlett Johansson, and 22 more (27 total).  I've always had this subject in the back of my head as something I wanted to visualize, but never quite knew what angle to take it.

While developing our Favorite Vizzes of 2024, I was reminded of two vizzes. The first was an incredibly creative viz called Saturday Night Live by Zsofia Nika. In this viz, she used a chord diagram to visualize people who have hosted SNL 6 or more times. It never mentioned the five-timers club and by only including people that had hosted at least 6 times, it included just about half of the folks that are in the club. (It's an incredible viz, check it out). I was also reminded of another viz that ultimately landed in our 3rd spot:  Biggest RomCom Actresses by Jessica Moon. Yes, this viz has nothing to do with Saturday Night Live, but its design made me fall in love with it. And those caricatures of actors...dang, they are sooooo good. Below is a snapshot of a couple of them from her viz:

With those two vizzes in mind, I decided on an angle for the SNL Five-Timers club. 

My next step was to figure out how to create such amazing caricatures of the SNL hosts. I tried every free AI image generator that I could find and even a few paid tools. Most of them simply told me that it was against their policies to create an image based on another image and that I needed to describe the person's characteristics. A couple of them allowed me to upload an image to recreate, but did a very poor job. That's when I enlisted the help of Jessica Moon. I simply asked her how the heck she did it so well and she told me the paid version of Midjourney. In fact, she developed an incredible version of Steve Martin in just a few minutes! (Thanks so much, Jessica!).  

So I got me a subscription to Midjourney and started playing around. Over a couple of hours, I honed in on the look and feel that I wanted and started getting some images that actually looked like the hosts. A couple of the first ones good ones were Tom Hanks and Alec Baldwin, as shown below: 

So, after about 20 hours of prompts, iterating, requesting subtle changes, etc., I was able to create images of all 27 SNL Five-Timers. Here is the prompt that I most often used while linking to 4 or 5 images of each host: "Create a realistic, modern pop art cartoon image with an orange background that looks nearly identical to Alec Baldwin like in these images" (then pasted links to 4 or 5 images). When it failed to look like the person, I often added specific characteristics into the prompt such as this one for Kristin Wiig: "Create a pop art yet realistic cartoon image with short blonde hair, small smile with just a bit of teeth showing with a solid light green background that looks nearly identical to Kristen Wiig like in these images."

In the end, I was able to create, what I think is a really fun viz showing all the five-timers, when they hosted, and an anticipation of who might be next to join the club. You can check the viz out here: SNL Five Timers Club #DataPlusTV or click on the image below:

I just wanted to give another shoutout to Jessica Moon as without her help, I may have never figured this out.  Thanks, Jessica!

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Kevin & Ken Flerlage, January 21, 2025

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