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: Adam Sandler Breaks Character With Chris Rock in Surprise 'SNL' Cameo 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 Edie Baskin / (C)NBC / courtesy Everett Collection 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 NBC. Courtesy: Everett Collection 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, [creator] Lorne