“Saturday Night Live ”Turns 50! PEOPLE Celebrates the Sketch Show's Storied History with Special Edition Issue

Fresh from PEOPLE's presses, it's the Saturday Night Live special edition issue!

In honor of the iconic sketch show's 50th anniversary, the special issue, titled SNL's Greatest Moments and the Stories Behind Them, celebrates how Saturday Night Live became a cultural institution of comedy, gives fans an inside look into how their favorite sketches came to be and more.

Available now on Amazon and newsstands around the country, the 96-page magazine will take readers down memory lane as it explores some of the show's most groundbreaking moments and other behind-the-scenes occurrences.

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In addition to rare photos, snapshots of iconic sketches and exclusive quotes, the issue also features an oral history from show creators Lorne Michaels, Dick Ebersol and other early players like Laraine Newman, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris and more.

Michaels' life changed in 1975 when he received a message to meet Ebersol and two NBC executives at the Beverly Hills Hotel to chat about a new series.

"I was given six months to put it together and was guaranteed a year, 17 shows," he told PEOPLE in the 1989 oral history included in this issue. "The performers all got paid $750 a show. Everybody lived at the offices at Rockefeller Center, and they were generally much nicer than the places people were living in."

"It was a little dinky late-night show. It wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t seminal," he added, admitting that the team was "making it up as we went along, but people seem to have the impression that it sprang full-blown from Zeus’s thigh."

Related: NBC Looks Back at Saturday Night Live History in First Trailer for Peacock's SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night

Newman also noted that the cast had "really no way to know what the impact of the show was," except when people would "pass us on the street and yell out something that we’d done the night before."

"We were up all night all the time, always working, always on a high, always feeling that we had something new and that people couldn’t wait to see it," Chase added. "We didn’t really know if it was good or not, just that we had plenty of ideas."

Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a special three-hour broadcast, SNL50: The Anniversary Show, live from Studio 8H on Sunday, Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock.

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PEOPLE's special issue is now available on newsstands and Amazon.

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