Garth Brooks Chris Gaines Countdown, Fin

Twenty years ago today was a Saturday. As such, a new episode of Saturday Night Live was airing with Garth Brooks as the host. His musical guest? Chris Gaines; a musical persona that Brooks had adopted to release an album of pop songs called In The Life of Chris Gaines.

If you follow this blog at all, this is well tred territory for me. Along with writer Ashley Spurgeon I created Garth Brooks Chris Gaines Countdown, a website that commemorates the 20-year anniversary of this event in GIF form. I made hundreds of images from the famed SNL episode and shared them for everyone. If I ever get a DMCA takedown, they're also all on Giphy.

We even went as far as to make a podcast documenting the history of Chris Gaines, appropriately titled Chris Gaines: The Podcast. Over the course of seven episodes we did our best to exhaustively cover all the details of Brooks, Gaines and the world's reaction to it all. It was a blast to make.

And here we are on the 20-year anniversary. The next episode of SNL is this Saturday, November 16th and Garth will be playing a big show in Knoxville. The likelihood of him appearing on SNL is slim to none. We're still holding out a little hope that host Harry Styles will give it a nod or maybe when Will Ferrell hosts on the 23rd. It would be appropriate. Regardless of any official recognition of the event, I feel the whole thing has left its mark on pop culture; which I think is what Garth wanted all along.