Opinion: “You’re dead, Tom.” “Fair enough, Sir!”

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I wasn’t much of fan of the late Tom Snyder, but I mourn his passing because it exacerbates a problem that has perturbed me for several years: the dying off of the targets of the great television satirists of the 1970s and ‘80s. Did you notice that most of the obituaries for Snyder mentioned Dan Aykroyd’s Snyder impersonation?

It’s bad enough that some of the satirists themselves are no longer with us — John Candy and Gilda Radner, among others — but what really turns those old Saturday Night Live and SCTV episodes into period pieces is the passing of the people they parodied.

I am something of an inter-generational evangelist for those old shows, available now on DVD, but my teenage nephews are tough sells. The missionary work is made harder by the fact that so many of the sketches I found and still find hilarious skewered people who have died.

Take the SCTV Christmas special hosted by Orson Welles (impersonated by Candy) and featuring a piano duet by Elton John (Rick Moranis) and Liberace (Dave Thomas). Sir Elton is still standing but “Lee” and Citizen Welles are no more. Ditto Pierre Trudeau, Martin Short’s impersonation of whom was my favorite bit of SCTV’s Canadian content. Jack Klugman (channeled by Joe Flaherty in “Quincy, Cartoon Coroner” is still with us, but his very imitable voice is even raspier now because of throat surgery.

It’s hard to recommend a DVD to people born in the 1990s when you have to provide a viewer’s guide to the targets of the satire, complete with obituaries. My nephews likely would view Aykroyd-as-Snyder with the same incomprehension that old cartoons satirizing Bogart and Kate Hepburn produced in TV-watching kids of my generation.

As for Aykroyd, at least the man who inspired his other SNL star turn is still alive.