Animated Bob & Doug McKenzie
Global Television Show Reunites SCTV's Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis
Jun 17, 2008
Lock up your moose and hide the Molson Canadian: those hosers Bob & Doug McKenzie are back.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Fox Network has hooked up with Global Television to produce The Animated Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie, a primetime TV cartoon series that reunites Second City TV veterans Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas.
Thomas' company Maple Palms Productions, announced on Monday that Fox joined Global to produce the pilot episode of the series, based on the characters he and Rick Moranis created for the comedy sketch series SCTV in the early 1980's. He and Patricia Burns are producing and developing the show, with himself and Moranis as executive producers.
The Animated Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie will place the beer-swilling brothers in the fictional town of Bordertown ("Cause it's on the border between Canada and the US, eh?"), which will serve as the backdrop for their comedic adventures. Dave Coulier (Full House), Colin Mochrie (Kit Kettridge: An American Girl), Pat McKenna, Derek McGrath, Ron Pardo, Jayne Eastwood and Ho Chow have already signed on to voice characters in the show.
Two Presidents Productions will animate the series, with pre-production design and storyboarding from House of Cool Studios.
Bob & Doug McKenzie: A hoser's history
Moranis and Thomas originally conceived of the fictional brothers as a way of making fun of CRTC regulations, and bureaucratic nitwits in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. When their primetime series SCTV moved to the CBC in 1980, senior network executives demanded that the Second City comedy troupe add two extra minutes of "specifically and identifiably Canadian content" to the show.
Offended by the network's request – since the show was already taped in Canada with a mostly Canadian cast and crew – Moranis and Thomas devised "Kanadian Korner," a two-minute show-within-a-show that skewered Canadian stereotypes. They created, and portrayed, a pair dim-witted brothers named Bob & Doug McKenzie, who embodied every possible Canadian stereotype. They wore heavy winter clothing and tuques, swilled beer, derided each other with insults like "Take off" and "hoser," and threw the word "eh" into nearly every sentence.
Filmed at the end of the day with only a single camera operator, Moranis and Thomas would ad-lib several segments and then select the best ones for broadcast.
To their shock, "Great White North" (the new name for the segment) became the most watched part of SCTV, and Moranis and Thomas rode a wave of popularity that led to them to record two comedy albums (the first one featured an appearance from vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee of the Canadian prog-rock band Rush), and commercials for Pizza Hut and Molson Breweries. Moranis and Thomas even developed, and starred in, the 1983 cult comedy Strange Brew, which played better in Canada than in the United States.
In 2005 Moranis and Thomas revived a variant of their Bob & Doug McKenzie characters – now renamed Tuke and Rutt the Moose – for the Disney animated film Brother Bear, and its direct-to-DVD sequel.
Global has already ordered 13 episodes of The Animated Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie for its 2009 schedule. To check out a teaser short for the show, click here.
