Sydney Sweeney hosted the latest episode of Saturday Night Live and the 1997-born actress paid homage to one of 1997’s most iconic and enduring film franchises, starring in a sketch lampooning the Air Bud franchise.
In the sketch, Sweeney appears as a high school cheerleader who returns from vacation to realize that there’s a new star player on the basketball squad: a golden retriever named Air Bud. Sweeney’s character is way more concerned with dating the most popular boy in school than she is with the fact that Bud is a dog, so she puts the full-court flirting press on him.
“You’re so hairy. Are you Italian?” she says while the dog just sits there.
Later on, when the dog starts intensely mowing down a sandwich, she says “Someone is hungry. You’re eating so fast and just with your mouth.”
Two other players sitting with them try to get Sweeney to see that Bud is literally a dog but she refuses to relent, instead blaming them for not being taller or richer.
Eventually, it’s revealed that Bud has a girlfriend, also an actual dog, waiting for him outside, and Sweeney’s character gives up, though not before noting that Bud’s girlfriend “eats grass, barfs, and then eats her own barf” and that she has “never done any of those things.”
It wasn’t SNL’s best work, but they’ve done far worse. And if we’re being honest, it was really good acting by that dog.
[SNL]
