Thirty years after they first chanted their way into pop culture history, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri’s Spartan Cheerleaders remain one of Saturday Night Live’s most iconic – and delightfully unhinged — sketches.
Ferrell, 58, and Oteri, 63, were five weeks into their SNL careers when they burst onto a November 11, 1995, episode dressed as the relentlessly upbeat Spartans. As outsiders who didn’t make the official high school squad, Craig (Ferrell) and Arianna (Oteri) still wore the uniform as they cheered proudly at chess matches, bake sales, even at a theater showing Titanic — wherever spirit was in short supply.
Written and performed by Oteri and Ferrell (with writer Paula Pell joining later), the nearly 20 sketches ran through 1999, giving Us timeless chants like “Who’s that Spartan in my teepee?” (“It’s me! It’s me!”) and characters we still dress up for on Halloween, even today.
Ready? OK! Keep scrolling for Oteri and Pell’s look back at the unforgettable legacy of the Spartan Cheerleaders:
Who Was Involved?
Oteri and Ferrell dreamed up the Spartans their first week on SNL while stomping on rehearsal floorboards. Oteri had been a high school cheerleader who admittedly had “no team spirit,” inspiring her to imagine kids who didn’t make the squad but “still cheered because it was in them, they were born to it.”
“I never cared about if we won or lost,” Oteri recalls exclusively to Us Weekly of her own lack of teenage pep. “It was just a way for me to perform and be loud and feel like I was good at something because I wasn’t a great athlete or student. I was across the board mediocre at everything. And [back then], you didn’t have to be a gymnast or a dancer, so I was like, ‘Oh, I can do these moves!’ You’re on stage in a way, you got a cute little uniform. And if our team would lose, I would just be like, ‘There’s still going to be a party, though, right?’”
Pell, however, instantly connected to the sketch for different reasons, telling Us that she “never” made her own high school squad despite auditioning every year.
“I was a person who tried out for cheerleading every single year. Every summer, I worked on my backhand spring every year,” she says. “But I was a little fat girl, so I never, ever, made cheerleading. Never once. I was the one that held the gum in the mints and the purses, and was up in the stands. Everyone in cheerleading were all my best friends, so I would sit, being like their mama up there, like a dance mom. I’d know every cheer. So when they asked me to [write for the Spartans], I just remember being like, ‘Oh, my God, you have no idea how [much] this is up my alley.’”
Why We Remember It
The Spartans were the ultimate lovable losers — sweet, sincere and bursting with misplaced confidence — putting a hilarious spin on the teenage experience.
“High school is all about drama and that’s what cracked me up,” Oteri explains. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, are you saying I split ends?!’ Everything was so dramatic and the problems are so big, you’re just gonna die if it doesn’t happen. I think everybody can relate to that.”
Key Details
Every Spartans sketch had its signature elements: spirit fingers, Arianna clashing with her offscreen frenemy, Alexis, and the “perfect cheer.” Of course, Craig and Arianna’s sensibilities were a little… off, as with their tournament riff on “Proud Mary”: They sang “Bowling, bowling, bowling down the river” while he mock-choked her and then ended with a breathless plea to “Stop spousal abuse!”
Ferrell, Oteri and Pell were admittedly having a blast behind the scenes.
“We’d be in that little tiny office crying laughing,” Pell warmly recalls, confessing that sometimes, they’d stretch out the creating process to avoid moving on to a more stressful sketch. “You’re supposed to write a number of things that night, all of you. And we’d be in there laughing so hard and doing cheers … And then the other people that want to write with us, actors or writers, would, like, knock and say, ‘Are you almost done?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh my God, we’re getting there!’”
The hosts also loved to join in the fun, from Tom Hanks (as the angelic Spartan Spirit) and Jim Carrey (an exchange student cheerleader) to Pamela Anderson (in Baywatch mode) and Rosie O’Donnell (above). It was the type of sketch that came with a sense of security once it became a recurring series.
“We really wanted to milk the joy, because we just knew that if we had to go into the writing the unknown. It was always more nerve wracking,” Pell says. “And [Spartans] was just pure joy.”
The Aftermath
The Spartan Cheerleaders didn’t just land laughs — they became a phenomenon, boosting SNL after a handful of lackluster seasons.
Pell remembers things feeling fairly “maligned” when she, Oteri and Ferrell first joined the cast and writer’s room. “When I got hired, Kat Pettibone Lorne [Michaels] was saying, ‘The show has had to be a Phoenix many times, where it falls and then it comes back up. And this is one of those eras. That’s why we’ve gotten rid of so many people, and now we’re starting fresh.”
Adds Oteri, “Everybody was so excited, nervous, grateful. We were like kids. We were all like excited kids, and to get us to go anywhere all they had to do was feed us food. Because we were all just coming off, not being poor, but struggling.”
Pell admits that while the newbies initially had “no idea what we were doing,” they leaned into the character writing and pulling inspiration from their own lives – something that quickly paid off.
When Oteri and Ferrell made the cover of Rolling Stone in 1997 alongside Molly Shannon as Mary Katherine Gallagher and Chris Kattan as one of The Night at the Roxbury’s Butabi brothers, it was clear that their infectious spirit had spread beyond Studio 8H.
“It was just like, ‘Wow, SNL is back. We’re bringing it back!’” Pell exclaims.
Oteri, meanwhile, realized the success much later: “I remember going to a kids’ swim party. They were doing the whole ‘Taco, burrito, what’s coming out of your Speedo?’ cheer!” she says.
There was also an out-of-body experience at a Bed Bath & Beyond.
“I was in L.A. and I’m waiting in line, and they have those little round displays with magnets. And I look over and there was a magnet of me and Will as the cheerleaders! I wanted so bad to tell the people in line, like, ‘Listen to me: That’s me! That’s me!’”
The legacy of the Spartans continues on today. As recently as 2022, SNL host Miles Teller shared a childhood video of himself and his sister playing Spartan Cheerleaders.
“All those Halloweens that people dressed up as us,” Oteri comments, “it really is the sweetest tribute I could ever imagine.”
A New Perspective
The trio got “a lot back” from their labors, Oteri says. “I’ve always loved playing people who don’t know how bad they have it.”
While Oteri officially departed SNL in 2000, the comedian says she would have “loved to stay longer” and continue to create characters.
“That was my dream job, and I always felt like it was the perfect fit for me and I had more to give,” she tells Us. She adds that looking back, she wishes she had known she wouldn’t be returning for another season so she could have had a proper farewell.
“It’s very important to say goodbye and but I was so shocked that I had made that decision [to exit the show], and I really wish I would have said a goodbye,” she tells Us. “Because there’s a difference between leaving and running away. And I think saying goodbye is leaving. That’s my regret.”
As for why she left, Oteri says it’s a “hard” thing to answer, “It can be a rough place. That’s no secret. And I felt like I had to take care of myself. I just felt like I had to do it,” she adds.
Saturday Night Live has catapulted the careers of many of today’s most popular comedians, including Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey and Adam Sandler. Murphy, for his part, appeared as a cast member from 1980 to 1984. He went on to become a lucrative movie star, but tension between him and the show arose after […]
Pell remained a writer on SNL until 2013. And while she, Oteri and Ferrell were all present at the show’s 50th Anniversary special earlier this year, a Spartan cheer was nowhere to be seen — or heard. Pell says it was a “hard” decision figuring out what past sketches would be honored as who was attending remained up in the air until the very end.
“I was involved in [SNL 50], because I wrote stuff, but I wasn’t really in the meetings of them discussing [what to do],” she says. “They didn’t know [who was coming] for a while, so it was all unsure. … It would have been fun if we did it.”
Where Are They Now?
Since their SNL days, Ferrell has become one of Hollywood’s biggest comedy stars, appearing in hit blockbusters like Anchorman, Elf and January’s You’re Cordially Invited. Oteri popped up on And Just Like That and has Scary Movie 6 and a guest spot on season 2 of NBC’s Happy’s Place upcoming. Pell created and starred in Girls5eva and The Mapleworth Murders, and is set for a 2026 remake of The Burbs with Keke Palmer. “I play a military lesbian that helps solve the murders [in town],” she teases. Consider Us tuned in!
