Saturday Night Live Recognizes Luke Cage's 50th Anniversary

Marvel's Luke Cage celebrates a major milestone this year with the character marking his 50th anniversary and Saturday Night Live is celebrating that anniversary. On Saturday, the character's 50th was mentioned as part of the show's Weekend Update segment, with Michael Che noting the occasion, but not without a little commentary about some of the more stereotypical aspects of the character's early stories.

During Weekend Update (at around 4:48 in the video that you can check out for yourself below), Che notes the anniversary of one of Marvel's first Black superheroes and then jokes about how the character took on "Black people's most powerful enemy of the 1970s, lead paint."

Luke Cage first debuted in Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #1 in June 1972, created by Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, Roy Thomas, and John Romita Sr. The character was created during the popularity of the blaxpoloitation genre in media, something that impacted not only his origin as a man imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, but some of his earlier adventures as well. In the years since, the character has been associated the Avengers, New Avengers, Heroes for Hire, the Thunderbolts, and more. The character also appeared in Netflix's Jessica Jones and The Defenders as well as had his own series, Luke Cage, where the character was played by Mike Colter.

The acknowledgement of Luke Cage's 50th anniversary wasn't the only Marvel moment in the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live, either. The episode was surprisingly Marvel-heavy, with an appearance by Marvel Studios' Ant-Man star Paul Rudd, a cameo by the Infinite Gauntlet, and a sketch about the origins of Nickelodeon's Slime Time in the 1980s that saw John Mulaney's character slimed while reading a Spider-Man comic book that appeared, based on the cover, to be The Amazing Spider-Man #194, the first appearance of Black Cat. However, the interior of the comic book appears to belong to a different issue — one presumably far less valuable than Amazing Spider-Man #194, which can fetch around $2000 on the collector's market.

As for Luke Cage, fans wanting to enjoy the character on the small screen have just a short period of time in which to do so. Marvel's slate of Netflix shows, including Luke Cage, will leave the streaming platform on March 1st. Plans for the shows and the character beyond that remain unclear, but series creator Cheo Hodari Coker recently wrote on Twitter his thoughts.

"Rewatching Luke Cage while I can on Netflix," he wrote. "They're going to do what they do. It's theirs. I just hope they don't sit on it for years to allow for an easier reboot, or re-air it with a different mix, or the N-Word muted I'd love to do commentary tracks, or the original credits."