My favorite show of all time is SCTV, and I’ve been rewatching a lot of the old episodes since Joe Flaherty passed in April. (How about a 25 days of Joe Flaherty countdown next? Hmm…)
It’s always been wild to me that one of the most famous SCTV sketches was almost malicious compliance. When the show moved to the CBC, the network told them each episode had to be two minutes longer than what they usually produced for syndication, and that the extra two minutes should be specifically Canadian content. The SCTV crew was almost entirely Canadian and had always made the show in Canada, so they had Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas drink beer and improvise two-minute bits as Bob and Doug McKenzie, the most stereotypically Canadian brothers ever. “It was all very low key and stupid,” Thomas said in an interview later,
“and we thought, ‘Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it.’”
Of course it was the McKenzies who then became breakout stars for the show, in America as well as in Canada. They would eventually star in the feature film “Strange Brew” and made a comedy album with the Top 40 hit “Take Off,” featuring Moranis’s childhood classmate Geddy Lee on vocals. (“Take Off,” in fact, made it higher on the US charts than any song from Lee’s band Rush ever did.) This album is also where Bob and Doug rattle off a Canadian version of the 12 Days of Christmas. My kids request this one every year and crack up every time the brothers sing “a beer… in a tree.” And they haven’t even seen any SCTV yet!
By the way, there are several other great SCTV Christmas songs that will end up in future holiday music countdowns. If I can wait that long, anyway.
