“SCTV is on the air!” Well, not actually on the air in this case, but many of the stars of the beloved sketch comedy series that ran off-and-on from 1976-84 will be reuniting for a one-night-only benefit in Toronto on Tuesday, July 18.
SCTV cast members Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Martin Short and Joe Flaherty are all on the Take Off, Eh! bill, with Moranis and Thomas set to reprise their famed “Bob and Doug McKenzie” characters, and they’ll be joined by other Canadian comedy legends, including Dave Foley, Scott Thompson and Kevin McDonald from The Kids In The Hall and Ghostbusters and Blues Brothers star Dan Aykroyd.
Musical guests include Paul Shaffer, Ian Thomas, and Murray McLauchlan, and as the release relates, the whole thing is for a good cause, one that’s close to Thomas:
Dave Thomas and The Second City are proud to present TAKE OFF, EH!, a star-studded intimate evening featuring performances from some of Canada’s biggest names in comedy and music on Tuesday, July 18, 2017 on The Second City Toronto’s Mainstage, with proceeds going to ‘Jake Thomas’s Road to Recovery’ and Spinal Cord Injury Ontario.
On January 7, 2017, Jake Thomas, nephew of SCTV’s Dave Thomas, sustained a complete spinal cord injury while snowmobiling, which has left this active community member from Muskoka Region paralyzed from the waist down. Funds raised at TAKE OFF, EH! will go directly to Jake Thomas and his family, as well as to Spinal Cord Injury Ontario, providing services and advocacy to the injured as they face significant challenges they could have never prepared for — and should not endure alone.
Just in time for Canada's birthday, eh?
We're hosting a benefit. It's a big one.
Read more here: https://t.co/XzCg5dffi4 pic.twitter.com/JXO3yZKL6F— Second City Toronto (@SecondCityTO) June 1, 2017
Moranis’ participation here is perhaps particularly notable, as he’s largely stayed out of the limelight for the past couple of decades. He took an 18-year hiatus from acting after his wife Ann died from breast cancer in 1997, focusing on raising his kids (albeit while doing some writing and voice work), and while he’s been more open to new projects recently, he’s remained extremely selective. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, “Yes, I am picky, and I’ll continue to be picky. Picky has worked for me.” So it’s fascinating to see him involved in something like this, especially with the Bob and Doug characters.
Bob and Doug, the two beloved stereotypical Canadian hosers with their toques, beer and back bacon, might have been the part of SCTV that spread the widest. The act went on to spawn a movie (1983’s Strange Brew, which is pretty much Hamlet with beer), a platinum comedy album, TV and radio commercials, a variation on the act in Disney’s 2003 animated film Brother Bear, a 24th-anniversary TV/DVD special and a 2009 animated series (with Dave Coulier voicing Bob instead of Moranis, something that feels a little ironic). Yet, it only came to be thanks to the weirdness of Canadian broadcasting rules and executives.
SCTV started on Canada’s Global TV (then a small network in Ontario) in 1976, with some syndication throughout Canada and the United States. The show then moved to the CBC in Canada in 1980 for Season 3, and that created a problem, as CBC’s lessened ad load at that point meant there were two extra minutes to fill versus what American stations would show. CBC executives asked for “identifiably Canadian content” for those extra minutes, and Thomas and Moranis, upset that a show filmed in Canada with a mostly-Canadian cast and group of writers wasn’t considered Canadian enough already, decided to deliver something as stereotypically Canadian as possible. Here’s what Thomas told IGN’s Kenneth Plume in 2000 about why they did it:
Now we found this irritating. I never thought entertainment was an issue of nationalism, and it really pissed me off that the CBC was trying to bully us into doing some kind of Canadian content. So…mockingly…when the producer [Andrew Alexander] came in to give us this news, Rick and I suggested, “Well what do you want us to do, put up a map of Canada and sit in front of it wearing toques [Canadian ski caps] and parkas and cook back-bacon and ‘Talk like dis, eh’?”
And Andrew said, “Yeah, and if you could have a Mountie in there, that’d be even better.” So that’s what we did. Ironically, it ended up catching on and we ended up making a fair bit of money from the record and the movie. But it was done really as a mean-spirited joke to mock the incessant demands for Canadian content programming.
Here’s an example of what they came up with:
The Bob and Doug bits wound up being a huge hit, though, and they even started to take off Stateside. SCTV’s third season was shown on NBC owned-and-operated affiliates, and at times during that season — thanks to cast availability issues and other challenges — the Bob and Doug parts were put into the U.S. show as well. They got even more attention in the U.S. than they did in Canada, and were specifically requested for regular segments when NBC fully picked the show up for 90-minute Network 90 segments the following year. Which is pretty amazing when you consider Thomas’ story (from that same interview with Plume) about how these were constructed:
The tapings for these segments went like this: at the end of the production day, when we were finished doing our more ambitious television parody pieces…that required multiple sets and sometimes exteriors and things like that…everyone would go home except the switcher, one cameraman, and the floor director & even the director left & and Rick and I would improvise the McKenzie Brothers sketches.
What would happen is that we would improvise for about an hour and some of them would be shitty and some of them would be funny, but the bottom line is that within that hour, the producers could get maybe four or five two minute pieces from the McKenzie’s that were funny & that they could air. That became a very cost-effective production ratio of shooting time to usable content & the producers loved it. They wanted to do more. Rick and I used to sit in the studio, by ourselves & almost like happy hour & drink real beers, cook back-bacon, literally make hot snack food for ourselves while we improvised and just talked. It was all very low key and stupid and we thought, “Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it.”
They sure did, and so did everyone else. The characters even hosted a on-SCTV variety show at one point, one which actually led to a career resurgence for guest Tony Bennett. But their Kanadian Korner segments were the most popular, and practical. Who doesn’t like advice on how to get a free case of beer (something that would later come up in Strange Brew)?
It’s tremendous to hear that Thomas and Moranis will bring Bob and Doug to the stage again, and it sounds like there will be plenty of other SCTV references. That’s awesome, as everyone involved did a lot of amazing stuff. Consider Thomas and Moranis as Bob Hope and Woody Allen, or Flaherty and Levy as newscasters Floyd Robertson and Earl Camembert (Robertson also hosted SCTV‘s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre as “Count Floyd“).
Other standout sketches included Short, Flaherty and Levy in the Happy Hour show-within-a-show (you can’t go wrong with a kids’ show hosted from a bar) or O’Hara as pop star Lola Heatherton or Short as Ed Grimley (which he’d later take to Saturday Night Live and beyond).
SCTV itself had a huge impact on the comedy world, as Cassandra Szklarski of The Canadian Press explored this week:
Echoes of “SCTV” would reverberate decades later — it’s hard not to see Levy’s take on a mustachioed, frustrated game show host Alex Trebel in Will Ferrell’s similarly themed version of Alex Trebek for “SNL”’s “Celebrity Jeopardy!” or view the surreal antics of modern-day reality TV as unwitting re-enactments of scraps between “SCTV”’s over-blown and over-exposed personalities.
Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” is said to have drawn inspiration for the loony residents of Springfield from “SCTV”’s Melonville and Conan O’Brien has said it was the biggest influence on his comedy career.
Without it, there arguably would have been no “The Kids in the Hall,” “The Ben Stiller Show,” nor “Mr. Show With Bob and David.”
…Yuk Yuk’s founder Mark Breslin says the series emerged during a magical time for Canada’s burgeoning comedy scene.
“It’s lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways, that era, isn’t it? But that’s also because people didn’t really know what they had in a sense,” says the standup patron.
…I think most artistic endeavours work best when it’s approached from a point of innocence — and there was a great innocence about what the business was then. There almost wasn’t a business. People were just doing things because they seemed funny and they were happy to be working.”
The people involved here are all much bigger stars today, but it’s great to see so many of them come together to raise some money, and to be joined by other Canadian comedy legends. And this is all for an important cause, and one that clearly is close to Thomas. It’s very cool to see everyone come to support him this way.
Donations can be made to ‘Jake Thomas’s Road to Recovery’ and Spinal Cord Injury Ontario now at gofundme.com/jakethomasmuskoka and sciontario.org/donate. More information on the show and how to buy tickets can be found here.
