Saturday Night Live

• Jim Cummings who does voicework in such children's cartoons as The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, and Animaniacs, was credited in the "Smurfette Show" TV Funhouse (Cummings voiced Gargamel and Papa Smurf).
• Ben Affleck was originally supposed to appear in the sketch where Matt Damon meets a doctor (played by Chris Parnell) who is also named Matt Damon, but backed out.^{[citation needed]}
• Darrell Hammond played George W. Bush in the cold opening at dress rehearsal, but it was cut due to a poor response from the audience.
• According to a post-show interview^[specify], Bruce Springsteen was asked to participate in sketches but he declined.
• Will Forte and Fred Armisen's first episode as cast members

• John McCain was originally booked to host this episode, but was rescheduled to October 19 prior to the season premiere.
• Chris Parnell takes over as George W. Bush from Will Ferrell. Parnell will play Bush five more times throughout the year and then be replaced by Darrell Hammond next season.^{[citation needed]}
• NBC never reran this episode.

• This episode was pre-empted in many areas, including Washington DC, due to a sniper shooting earlier in the evening.^{[citation needed]}
• With this episode, John McCain becomes the first (and only) active U.S. Senator to host SNL.
• This episode contains a "Meet the Press" sketch where John McCain denies that he'll run for President of the United States in 2004.

• NBC never reran this episode.^{[citation needed]}
• Even though this episode has three musical guests, only Jay-Z is credited.

• Anthony Hopkins was scheduled to host this show, but backed out the month before.^{[citation needed]}
• Some members of Tina Fey's Greek Family appeared in the opening monologue.

• Nelly was originally planned to musical guest for the episode hosted by Sen. John McCain, but due to schedule conflicts, he backed out, and was booked for this episode instead.
• Kelly Rowland performs with Nelly on the first song.
• Cameos for this episode include former SNL castmembers Garrett Morris, Rob Schneider, and Adam Sandler.
• Garrett Morris' cameo was his second appearance on SNL after his tenure as cast member, also appearing in the 25th Anniversary special in 1999.

• Harvey Keitel makes a cameo appearance during the Versace sketch.
• Jimmy Fallon makes a joke about Phish during Weekend Update. He then ad-libs, "See you next week Trey" as Phish was the musical guest the following week.
• Director Beth McCarthy-Miller later stated^{[citation needed]} that Robert DeNiro was "the worst host ever" due to his blatant disregard for direction. However, this did not keep DeNiro from hosting a Christmas episode of this show in season 30.

• Al Franken reprises his recurring character Stuart Smalley.
• Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, John Spencer, Martin Sheen (who last hosted SNL in its fifth season), and Richard Schiff make appearances in the filmed sketch, "Al Gore Goes on The West Wing Set".
• In the monologue after "The Bachelor" parody, Gore says John Kerry and John Edwards would make someone a wonderful Vice President someday. Edwards would become Kerry's running mate in the 2004 Presidential election (and both would lose to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who were running for re-election).

• According to a post-show interview^{[citation needed]}, Jeff Gordon rejected many sketch ideas, and didn't want to participate in a lot of sketches.
• A DeMarco Brothers sketch was cut after dress rehearsal because Avril Lavigne had a sore throat.^{[citation needed]}

• Weekend Update Halftime Special, timed to compete with the Super Bowl XXXVII halftime show.

• During the goodnights, Matthew McConaughey is seen wearing only a towel around his waist.
• Matthew McConaughey grabbed Rachel Dratch's breasts during rehearsals of their blind date sketch. Dratch was not amused and showed footage of the incident when she appeared on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" a few months later.^{[citation needed]}

• During the credits, Beck and his band parody the "Clappin" commercial from earlier in the show.
• In the NBC rerun (and E! one-hour syndicated rerun) of this episode, the "Lights Out" sketch is edited to remove Jimmy Fallon muttering, "Goddamn!" after seeing Fred Armisen in drag [1]

• Steve Martin, Will Ferrell, and Britney Spears all make cameo appearances in the Weekend Update segment.
• Jim Carrey appeared during the Foo Fighters' second performance, using his leg as an air guitar on stage.
• Two sketches from this episode are included in the DVD version of the SNL clip show special "The Best of Christopher Walken": one is a dress rehearsal version of this episode's "The Continental", which can be found under the title "The Making of 'The Continental'", in the extras section and a sketch where Walken plays a crazy ship captain who apologizes to his life raft mates (played by Seth Meyers, Will Forte, and Fred Armisen) for sinking the ship.
• Christopher Walken receives over a minute of applause when he enters for his monologue, forcing him to repeatedly shush the audience so he can begin to deliver his lines.

• Former cast member Dan Aykroyd appears as Bob Dole in the cold opening.
• Voice artists Jeff Bergman (who is one of many actors to voice Warner Brothers character Bugs Bunny following the death of Mel Blanc) and Tom Kenny (who voices Nickelodeon character SpongeBob SquarePants) provide voicework on the X-President's TV Funhouse.

• Edward Norton makes a cameo appearance in the monologue, at the time he was dating Salma Hayek.^{[citation needed]}

• The George W. Bush cold opening was a last-minute replacement for a sketch about TV news anchors gabbing about the Iraq War.

• The "Uday Hussein for President" fake commercial was cut when NBC reran this episode in July 2003 because the real Uday Hussein had been killed during the Iraq war.^{[citation needed]} The fake commercial is also removed from the 60-minute syndicated version.

• Ashton Kutcher and Will Forte previously worked together on "That 70's Show," where Forte was a writer and story editor.

Wayne Wonder

• The musical segment featuring Wayne Wonder is not shown (or mentioned in the opening credits) in syndication.
• Adrien Brody was banned from hosting again following his long and improvised introduction of musical guest Sean Paul.^{[citation needed]}
• In a Howard Stern interview with cast member Tina Fey^[specify], Tina said that during a writer's meeting, Adrien Brody constantly dished out bad sketch ideas which were ignored by the writers, causing Brody to get upset.
• Renée Zellweger was the producers' first choice to host, but she backed out due to personal reasons.

• According to the book, Live from New York: The Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live^{[page needed]}, Dan Aykroyd actually was reluctant to host SNL after a long absence from the program.
• Aykroyd brought in Tom Davis, one of the show's original writers, to help write this episode.^[1]
• As part of his monologue, Dan Aykroyd performs alongside John Belushi's brother, Jim Belushi, as a Blues Brothers-esque singing group called "The Dancing Refrigerators".
• Rapper Jay-Z joined Beyoncé for her performance of "Crazy In Love."
• Former host John Goodman has cameo appearances in three sketches; he hasn't made any appearances since.
• Dan Akyroyd didn't resurrect any former characters or impressions for the live show, though there was a Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute sketch that never made it past dress rehearsal^{[citation needed]}.
• The Astronaut Jones sketch becomes one of the few recent recurring sketches to feature guest appearances from Original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" (Aykroyd in this episode and Garret Morris in the Thanksgiving episode).
• Dean Edwards, Chris Kattan and Tracy Morgan's final episode as cast members.