Rick Moranis

There is a pantheon of Canadian actors. I hesitate to mention this, because the last one I talked about is, I’m pretty sure, Catherine O’Hara, back in September. But you can’t talk about Rick Moranis without bringing it up. There’s the ones who fully became thought of as American, like Shatner. The ones with a whiff of Canadian to them, like Dan Aykroyd. Then there’s the “oh, yeah, they’re definitely Canadian” ones, like Rick Moranis. I don’t know if he’s at the top of the list, but he’s high on it. We have a running joke in a circle I’m in about “emotional support Canadians,” and Rick Moranis is that for a lot of people.

Frederick Allan Moranis was born in Toronto. He attended the Sir Sandford Fleming Secondary School with a kid named Gary Lee Weinrib. I think he went on to be a musician or something. Anyway, Moranis, using the name “Rick Allan,” started as a DJ while still in high school. He and a friend developed a popular parody of Hockey Night in Canada that got them some notice. He did some more comedy with Ken Finkleman, which led to Moranis being invited to join the cast of SCTV despite never having been in a Second City stage troupe.

The CBC wanted “identifiably Canadian content.” In annoyance, Moranis and Dave Thomas put together the most irritating collection of Canadian stereotypes they could think of. They wore toques, drank beer, cooked back bacon. They discussed hockey and said “eh” a lot. The sketches were mostly improvised at the end of filming days, with Moranis and Thomas and a single camera operator, and the best bits were used for those two minutes. They were staggeringly popular, however, and were spun off into a song featuring that Weinrib kid and then a movie. They were even basically made into characters in the Disney movie Brother Bear, actually featuring Moranis and Thomas themselves.

Beyond Strange Brew, Moranis made a number of well-known movies. Spaceballs, of course. Parenthood. Little Shop of Horrors—is there a more perfect Seymour? I’d hoped to use a still from his LA Story cameo as an article image, but I couldn’t find a good one. Ghostbusters; you’d all kill me (ha) for not mentioning Ghostbusters. And, of course, the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise, the first of which I might’ve seen in the theatre. So not all his films were winners—remember how he played Barney Rubble? Still, a solid presence.

He walked away, that’s what everyone remembers now. His wife died, and he walked away to actually raise his kids. Gods bless him; that’s good parenting. And then he discovered that, you know, he didn’t really miss it. Sure, he did Brother Bear and assorted media. But he turned down a cameo in one of the recent Ghostbusters movies because he didn’t see the point. He’ll be back for Spaceballs II, but ironically it’s not in search for more money. He’s living quietly in Canada, and he’s happy to be there. He was assaulted randomly on the streets of New York a few years back, and everyone was irate. You don’t do that to our emotional support Canadian, eh?