A dynamic year for Eddie Murphy culminates this weekend as the comic legend returns to “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in 35 years.

Earlier this month, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his outrageous performance as blaxploitation-era comedian Rudy Ray Moore in “Dolemite Is My Name.” He’s also signed up for a lucrative series of stand-up specials for Netflix.

Hosting “SNL” couldn’t have come at a better time, Murphy told the “Today” show’s Al Roker this week. “You almost think we planned it,” he said, mischievously.

In his not quite four-year run on the show, from 1980 to 1984, Murphy convulsed audiences with a galaxy of characters and skits unlike any that had been seen before: Buckwheat, Gumby, Velvet Jones and “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood.” It’s hard to imagine now that he wasn’t the first choice to join the Not Ready for Prime Time Players: Jean Doumanian, then the show’s executive producer, wanted Robert Townsend instead.

But sheer persistence won 18-year-old Murphy a spot. Casting director Neil Levy tells The Post how Murphy made him laugh with tales such as the one where “he had 19 brothers and sisters and he was the only one who was looking for work; he was supporting everybody.”

Levy thought that he could use Murphy as an extra and invited him in for a proper audition — believed to be the only audition of his career. The Roosevelt, LI, teenager, who spent part of his early childhood in foster care, did a four-minute skit in which he played four characters arguing with each other. “It was a tour de force and showed all the talent he had in one piece,” Levy says. “It just blew me away. He was hypertalented.”

Levy went to bat for Murphy, but Doumanian, who (briefly) succeeded Lorne Michaels in 1980, “didn’t want him. She wanted Townsend.”

She’d already offered Townsend a regular role on “SNL”, but he hadn’t yet signed his contract. “I was really surly and got very angry and changed her mind,” Levy says. “She decided to use Eddie as a featured player.” Murphy debuted in November 1980 and was paid just $600 per show.

“That doesn’t matter, man,” Murphy told Levy. “I’m going to be a millionaire before I’m 21.” Murphy didn’t know how prophetic that statement was. Judging by the string of hit movies that followed, “SNL” was just a stepping stone.

“I think it’s a huge deal that he’s returning,” says James Andrew Miller, co-author of “Live From New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live.” He says Murphy was sorely missed at the show’s 25th anniversary special. “I can’t think of anybody else hosting where it would be a bigger deal. Not only was he terrific in terms of dominating the stage and being this oversize, hilarious personality, [but] in Eddie, you had someone who was stellar on all counts.”

When Murphy joined “SNL,” the show was in a sorry state. “If it weren’t for him, that show may have died around 1982,” Levy says.

With his versatile characters and impersonations of James Brown and Stevie Wonder, Murphy blossomed on live television. “Week in, week out, he was bringing terrific stuff to the show,” Miller says.

“I remember the sound in the room and the feeling in the room when [the skit] really worked and I couldn’t wait for the kids I went to high school with to see it,” Murphy told Roker.

Murphy became so hot so quickly that Paramount signed him to a long-term deal, based on the dailies for his first film, the buddy-cop comedy “48 Hrs.”  His film and TV lives overlapped when Murphy, still an “SNL” cast member, subbed for his “48 Hrs.” co-star, Nick Nolte, when Nolte was too sick to host the show’s 1982 Christmas episode. His opening line? “Live from New York, It’s the Eddie Murphy Show!”

It was not an exaggeration. By the 1982-83 season, Doumanian’s successor, Dick Ebersol, says that Murphy was in one-third of the “SNL” skits. Being a good collaborator helped. “Eddie was up for everything. That was just one of the reasons for his success,” “SNL” writer Barry Blaustein told Miller in “Live From New York.”

That Murphy stayed with “SNL” through the filming of “48 Hrs.” and 1983’s “Trading Places,” both box-office smashes, seems unthinkable today. “When you think about those early movies, it’s just unbelievable the level of success,” Miller says. “The fact that he stayed on the show after having a hit movie, I think says a lot.”

Murphy was shooting “Trading Places” in New York and Philadelphia through the winter of 1983. Ebersol knew it was going to be hard to hold onto his star, who was under contract to NBC for one more year. He persuaded Murphy to do 10 more shows, half of the usual season’s work.

“We would be done with him in March,” Ebersol told Miller. “We also had the right to tape 15 [additional] sketches to put in the other shows. We kept ourselves from losing him, which would have hit us pretty hard.”

“SNL” did lose the star, for 35 years, after David Spade made a derogatory crack about Murphy’s career on a 1995 broadcast. The two patched things up by the show’s 40th anniversary special.

Murphy’s 10 children are flying in to see their dad host “SNL” on Saturday in the place where his career started: at NBC’s studio 8H in Midtown. “It was in an incredible place and the most incredible place for someone like me to be,” Murphy told Roker. “To cut your teeth here. This is like the Harvard for comic actors.”