Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead

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The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general lexicon.

Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television newscasters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was a headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks prior to his death on November 20.

After Franco's death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live's comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced the dictator's death and read a quotation from Richard Nixon: "General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness."[1]; as an ironic counterpoint to this, a picture was displayed behind Chase, showing Franco standing alongside Adolf Hitler, both of them giving the "Nazi salute", a photo similar to this one: [2].

From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco's expense. "This breaking news just in", Chase would announce-- "Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that Generalísimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment, aided by Garrett Morris, "head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing", whose "aid" in repeating the story involved cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting the headline. The line was also a perceived slap at then-NBC Nightly News main anchor John Chancellor, who due to his background as a foreign correspondent, felt the network should weigh its news more heavily toward world events, keeping Franco's deathwatch at the top of the headlines. Chancellor reportedly was miffed at both Chase and SNL over the running gag.

Thirty years later, the phrase is still in use. The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal uses the phrase as a tag for newspaper headlines that indicate something is still happening when it should be obvious, such as "Hunt for Bin Laden Still On" by Fox News. It has used the tag more than 60 times.

The phrase may owe something to "General Grant Still Dead", one of the examples of undesirable newspaper headlines in Headlines and Deadlines, a handbook for newspaper copy editors by Robert Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein. Another possible precedent is in an issue of National Lampoon from 1973 that began with a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower waving, with the caption "Hi kids, I'm still dead!"

The phrase may also come from The Today Show, which at that time was live in New York from 7 to 9 a.m., but in Chicago they ran the 8 a.m. hour live, then repeated the 7 a.m. (NY) hour in Chicago at 8 a.m. In New York during the first hour the show reported that he was near death, and during that hour learned that he died, so started the 8 a.m. hour off with that news. That meant Chicago viewers saw first that he was dead at 7 a.m., and "near death" at 8 a.m. Realizing the problem, the network scrambled to get a live feed to Chicago making it clear that Franco was, in fact, still very much dead.