Top row, left to right: Eugene Levy as Bobby Bittman, John Candy as Johnny LaRue, Andrea Martin as Edith Prickley. Bottom row, left to right: Catherine O'Hara as Dusty Towne, Joe Flaherty as Guy Caballero, Rick Moranis as Bob McKenzie and Dave Thomas as his brother Doug.
"There were six people who loved to watch television, but they didn't like what they saw—so they decided to do something about it..."
Proof that Canadians are attempting to control America through comedy.
In 1976, there was a small group of comedians from Toronto's Second City Theatre troupe. Several of them were simultaneously working together for a season on the much-more-hyped-at-the-time-but-now-forgotten The David Steinberg Show (a variety/sketch/sitcom hybrid they appeared on, but did not write). While working on Steinberg's show, they got together, and wrote and starred in their own sketch comedy show around the premise that the sketches were episodes of local shows (or commercials for local businesses) being produced and aired by a television station in the mythical city of Melonville. It debuted the same week as The David Steinberg Show...
Their ragtag, no-budget show, SCTV (Second City Television), went on to have probably more impact on American comedy than virtually any other North American show you can name.
How is that? Well, let's run down the original cast: John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis (for seasons one and two), and Dave Thomasnote . Add in latecomers Rick Moranis and Martin Short (and the perennially forgotten feature players Robin Duke and Tony Rosato, who are now mostly remembered for being overshadowed by Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo during Saturday Night Live's shaky years between 1980 and 1983), and you have a veritable who's who of '70s-'80s Canadian comedynote . Due to the connections between the Chicago and Toronto branches of the Second City comedy troupe, there was considerable constructive feedback between this show and Saturday Night Live.
The show started with a thirty-minute format on the Global Television Network, which ran from 1976-1979. After that, the show was picked up by CBC and expanded to an hour. During this era, the show's most popular characters, Bob and Doug McKenzie, debuted. It also aired in US syndication. The show was expanded to ninety minutes in 1981 when NBC picked it up as late-night programming (this version was known as SCTV Network 90). During this stretch of the run, coupled with the fact that it was neither live nor taped before a live audience, it was able to push the boundaries of traditional sketch comedy. It won 15 Emmys over its network lifespan. A final season of 45-minute episodes aired on Superchannel in Canada and Cinemax in the U.S. (as SCTV Channel) over 1983-84.
Strange Brew was the sole film based on any of the skits from the show.
SCTV provides examples of:
- Affectionate Parody: And how! The show generally went this route instead of focusing on satire or mean-spirited put-downs. Even sketches which had a specific target (say the extended Fantasy Island sketch which was mostly an endearing riff on Ricardo Montalbán's hammy persona, or the Perry Como "Still Alive" concert promo) were way too goofy and ridiculous to actually offend. This made the times when the show did go for satire all the more incisive and subversive (for example the Kids Say the Darndest Things parody or The Brooke Shields Show).
- The Alcoholic: Floyd Robertson became this in the final couple of seasons, forcing Earl into the role of straight man.
- In the final season, children's show host Happy Marsden, whose show "Happy Hour" actually takes place at a bar (and who drinks heavily throughout); he treats the bartender as a member of the cast (who always reminds him of last call). A promo shot shows Happy with his eyes closed, seemingly blacked out.
- And Starring: "And Dave Thomas as The Beaver." Doubly deconstructed: Dave Thomas wasn't any more famous than anybody else in the cast, he was just alphabetically last; also, he did not, in fact, play The Beaver when SCTV did its Leave It to Beaver sketch, John Candy did. In real life, Thomas was actually doing the announcing himself and did the "as the Beaver" thing as a joke.
- And You Were There: The Fantasy Island episode, and later with Lola Heatherton in the "Bouncin' Back To You" sequence.
- Artistic License – Film Production: SCTV is stated to be broadcasting on channel 109. Broadcast television has no channel 109; UHF stations only go as high as channel 83. (This is, of course, part of the joke.)
- Ascended Extra: Juul Haalmeyer, SCTV's costume designer, became a character as the leader of the Juul Haalmeyer Dancers. They were a group of backup dancers made up of whoever on the cast and crew was available. They did very simple steps (lots of finger pointing and back and forward motions). As the show went on, he got more involved in sketches, and wound up dating Lola Heatherton. To this day, Haalmeyer — who has worked as a costume designer for decades, and never acted (or danced) outside of his half-a-dozen SCTV appearances and a couple of quick cameos in post-SCTV projects by former cast members — gets recognized for his role as a dancer.
- Berserk Button: Mayor Tommy Shanks seems to live in his own loopy world. He even shrugs off accusations that he's corrupt. Then, a drunk Floyd Robertson makes comments about his mother. Shanks is NOT amused AT ALL.
- Bill Needle DOES NOT like to be corrected.
- Breakout Character: When SCTV moved to CBC, the network requested that the program add two minutes of identifiably Canadian content to pad the show due to its shorter commercial breaks. When faced with what they considered to be a bizarre request (given that the show had always been produced by a Canadian cast and crew), the crew created the stereotypically Canadian characters of Bob and Doug to lampoon it. While intended as mere filler, they became the most popular characters of the series. In fact, the show itself lampshades this in "The Great White North Palace." In that episode, Guy Caballero realizes how popular Bob and Doug are, and gives them their own Variety Show to shore up the flagging network. This is completely outside the brothers' comfort zone, however, and the show is an instant failure that is so bad that Guy Caballero orders the broadcast halted in the middle of an atrocious sketch with Bob and Doug as the Festrunk Brothers (Two Wild and Crazy Guys).
- Briefer Than They Think: Cast members came and went throughout the show's run. The lineup usually credited in syndication (Candy, Flaherty, Levy, Martin, Moranis, O'Hara, Short, and Thomas) lasted for just three episodes at the end of the show's fourth season. Moranis was only on the show in its third and fourth seasons before leaving (with Thomas) to film Strange Brew (and then onto his hugely successful film career), Candy and O'Hara both left after the first two seasons only to come back for the fourth (when the show moved to NBC) only for O'Hara to leave again at the end of that season (with Candy following at the end of the fifth), and Short joined at the end of the fourth season in anticipation of Moranis and Thomas leaving, though he did stay until the end. Only Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, and Joe Flaherty can boast all six seasons in their acting credentials, though even Flaherty left production early during season 3, apparently to film his brief appearance as a Soviet border guard in Stripes.
- Celebrity Star: Performers like Robin Williams and Bill Murray did guest spots as sketch characters. Most guest performers were musicians appearing as themselves on the Show Within a Show The Fishin' Musician and thus engaging in outdoorsy activities with its host. Within recurring sketches like The Sammy Maudlin Show and Farm Film Report, this concept was frequently spoofed with cast members playing various celebrities or Expies thereof.
- Character Catch Phrase:
- Bob and Doug:Good day, eh.
- Bobby Bittman:[shouting] HOW ARE YA!
- Bob and Doug:
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Tommy Shanks is corrupt because he's up in Cuckooland, and Earl Camembert is a poor journalist because he's so spacey.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Guy Caballero ranks up with Mr. Burns in all-around venality.
- Corrupt Politician: Melonville Mayor Tommy Shanks, who was involved in bribery, though his corruption is more along the lines of him being too stupid to know any better than any inherent vice.
- Dark Reprise: Parodied in Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice. The early scenes in The Maritimes are set to the sprightly "To It and At It" by Stompin' Tom Connors ("There's a rainbow in Toronto, where the Maritimers are bold"). Once they get to Toronto, it's replaced by a slower, grittier Hard Rock Cover Version.
- Dead Air: During an episode about an up-and-coming boxer who was slated to fight the champ on their station. The entire episode is spent hyping up the underdog, even making a short film about him. At the end, when the fight begins, the underdog is knocked out by a single punch, leaving SCTV with nothing but dead air for the remainder of the program as they desperately looked for something, anything they could fill it with.
- Deadline News: Earl Camembert is so bad a reporter that during an interview with Mayor Tommy Shanks, he enraged the Mayor so much that he stormed the SCTV news studio and attacked Earl Camembert on air.
- Death Trap: Used in the Talking Projector sketch and the Six Gun Justice sketches.
- Deconstructive Parody: Everything from Ingmar Bergman classics to old Canadian movies.
- Downer Ending: Subverted in "CCCP 1", where Edith Prickley assures the audience that nobody died when the Russians retaliated against SCTV, but since the Cold War was going on at the time, the future between North America and Russia is uncertain at that point.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season is remarkably different from the later seasons:
- Actors occasionally appear as themselves instead of their characters (one episode has a special disclaimer from Harold Ramis, Dave Thomas, and Eugene Levy, another has Dave Thomas, as himself, interviewing Moe Green, played by Harold Ramis, in the sketch "Extreme Close-Ups")
- Dr. Tongue was a children's show host instead of an actor in a movie.
- Johnny LaRue was a part of the SCTV News and was a children's show host.
- Also, Joe Flaherty is credited under his birth name O'Flaherty in the first few episodes.
- The first "Farm Film Report" sketch has just Big Jim McBob and is basically just a farm report.
- Excited Kids' Show Host: Mr. Messenger from "Mrs. Falbo's Tiny Town".
- Fake Band: Yosh and Stan Schmenge and "The Happy Wanderers", the Lemon Twins, 5 Neat Guys (vocal group parody), The Queen Haters, preteen band- The Recess Monkeys.
- Follow the Bouncing Ball: Used on Mel's Rock Pile by hardcore punk band The Queen Haters for their song "I Hate the Bloody Queen".
- Food Porn: Used in "Emergency Caterers".
- Formula-Breaking Episode:
- The Fantasy Island parody took up an entire half-hour episode in its original season 2 airing (it later got incorporated as part of a 90-minute NBC episode).
- The Ben Hur parody took up a 30 minute episode with a framing sequence of Moe Green doing a "Dialing for Dollars" spoof.
- The Cisco Kid from season 3. A Gag Dub of an actual episode of The Cisco Kid done by Second City members who weren't in the show's cast, although one of them, Martin Short, would join later. It was actually a failed pilot for a Second City Gag Dub show, reused when SCTV apparently ran short of material to fulfill their episode order.
- While many of the parodies were straightforward, others placed already established recurring characters in the key roles; Ocean's 11 became Maudlin's 11 by incorporating the Sammy Maudlin Show gang, for instance.
- It's a Wonderful Film, from the final season, which takes up almost the whole 45-minute episode, has a character actor (Charles Palmer) in one of the main roles instead of a cast member or a celebrity guest, and generally has a tone that's more Dramedy than satire or pop-culture parody.
- Game Show Goofballs: One of the show's game show parodies was "Half Wits" which, as the title indicated, featured contestants who plumbed the depths of human stupidity to such a degree that the host (played by Eugene Levy) would explode in anger at the show's end. Similar shenanigans happened on the Reach for the Top spoof,note High Q, and a night school version.
- Glorious Mother Russia: The entirety of the CCCP1 episode.
- Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, and some of the "movies" featured thereon, such as the oft-promised-but-never-screened Bloodsucking Monkeys from West Mifflin, Pennsylvannia and Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Meat.
- Greatest Hits Album: parodied with 5 Neat Guys' Neatest Hits
, for a group of incredibly dorky pop crooners from The '50s. - Hellhole Prison: The Midnight Express Special, which somehow manages to mash-up The Midnight Special, Midnight Express and even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, based around the likes of John Denver, Randy Newman and Anne Murray performing songs as inmates in a Turkish prison.
- Hollywood Tone-Deaf: The Pre-Teen World band The Recess Monkeys and their rendition of "My Girl (Gone Gone Gone)" (originally by Canadian band Chilliwack).
- Horror Host: Count Floyd.
- Humor Dissonance: In-universe in Neil Simon's Nutcracker Suite ("SCTV Staff Christmas Party"). In The Sammy Maudlin Show leading up to the film's debut, Simon makes a quip about something being "an uplifting experience, not unlike Jane Russell's Cross-Your-Heart Bra" that has trouble getting laughs from the host and sidekick, much less the audience. In the film itself, the main character — a Simon Expy — makes much the same quip while trying to check into an overbooked hotel, and the staff thinks it's so funny that they find a room for him and his wife on the spot.
- The Igor: Recurring character Woody Tobias, Jr. is an actual hunchback who aspires to be a serious actor but usually plays this character type to Mad Scientist Dr. Tongue in his 3-D epics. Not only that, but he is far more capable then he would seem.
- It's a Wonderful Plot: It's a Wonderful Film crosses this with Yet Another Christmas Carol in the story of an arrogant Hollywood producer (played by Levy) who decides to turn a Christmas movie into a Sex Comedy, then has an Opinion-Changing Dream after getting knocked unconscious.
- Juggling Loaded Guns: In a parody of Captain Kangaroo called "Captain Combat", Gunny Rabbit is shot by an accidental discharge. (Captain Combat's lesson to the kiddies at the end of the sketch: "Never be in a room with a loaded gun unless you're holding it.")
- Kaiju: Grogan on The Tim Ishimuni Show and Johnny Nucleo (and Godzilla (!)) on "Towering Inferno."
- Kitschy Local Commercial: Frequently spoofed, most famously with Tex & Edna Boil's Prairie Warehouse and Curio Emporium and their organs and the sex shop owned by Harry, The Man with the Snake on His Face, as well as a specialty of Eugene Levy (Al Peck, Crazy Hy's, Phil's Nails, The Driftwood Inn).
- Laugh Track: The show was originally intended to air without a laugh track or studio audience but, according to Eugene Levy, everyone realized that the first episode seemed odd without any accompanying laughter. They then tried shooting it with an audience but discovered that the audience laughter was throwing off their timing and they were having to heighten their performances to play to the crowd, which was something they didn't want so they resorted to using canned laughter. According to Dave Thomas, the man responsible for adding the laugh track was a sound technician notable for his lack of any discernible sense of humor, so not only was the existence of the laugh track annoying in itself, it was also poorly executed, with big laughs happening in seemingly random places in the sketches.
- Marijuana Is LSD: Averted when Earl Camembert got stoned while anchoring as part of an editorial. He's spacey, mellow and has the munchies; he's not hallucinating anything (at least as far as we know) and is overly distracted by a Slinky.
- Mattress-Tag Gag: Do not remove a mattress tag, or else you will explode.
- Mind Screw: "Walter Cronkite's Brain".
- The Movie: Strange Brew, which continues the stories of Bob and Doug McKenzie.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Lin Ye Tang, as he demonstrates, not only on Doorway To Hell, but even on Chinese Fairy Tales ("Happy endings! I don' believe in them!").
- Nightmare Retardant: Count Floyd is often frustrated by the tendency of the movies featured on Monster Chiller Horror Theatre to have this... if the films are even horror films at all; among his presentations were a Rat Pack movie, an "Ingmar Burgman" film, and even, on one occasion, an episode of The Dick Cavett Show.
- No Fourth Wall
- Not Allowed to Grow Up: Bittersweet parody in the sketch about the show Oh That Rusty!
- Obfuscating Disability: Used by Guy Caballero, the owner of the TV station, who used a wheelchair even though he could walk, apparently "for respect".
- Only Sane Man: The male secretary in "The Millionaire". Floyd Robertson served as this for Earl Camembert for most of the run, but the roles were swapped once he fell off the wagon.
- Overly Narrow Superlative: Count Floyd claims that The Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania won the "Western Pennsylvania Fright Award" in 1978.
- Parody Commercial
- Parody Episode: They first went this route with the lengthy Ben Hur parody in Season 1, then did their first episode-length parody with Fantasy Island in Season 2, but once the longer formats came into play, long wraparound storylines centered on a film parody became standard.
- "Zontar" (Zontar: The Thing from Venus, Larry Buchanan's remake of It Conquered the World)
- "The Godfather" (Though it only takes up about 2/3rds of the episode)
- "Towering Inferno" (The Towering Inferno)
- "Sweeps Week" (Poltergeist)
- The CBC episode, dominated by "Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice" (Goin' Down the Road)
- "Maudlin's 11" (Ocean's 11)
- Postmodernism
- Pronouncing My Name for You: Reporter Tawny Beaver (played by Andrea Martin) insists her surname is pronounced “bea-VAY”.
- Psychopathic Man Child: Pepi Longsocks (played by Candy).
- Punny Name: Many of the character names were puns:
- Floyd Robertson and Earl Camembert after Canadian newsreaders Lloyd Robertson and Earl Cameron.
- Guy Caballero after the movie The Gay Caballero.
- Groundbreaking proto-VJ Gerry Todd's name came from two radio DJs Rick Moranis once worked with, whose first names were Gerry and Todd.
- "Neil Jung, Psychiatrist".
- Billy Sol Hurok is a double pun, referencing Billie Sol Estes and Sol Hurok.
- "The Days of the Week"'s Mojo Gortner for Marjoe Gortner.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The cast wrote a few episodes based on what's happening behind the scenes. One example is "The Great White North Palace" which reflects how popular Bob and Doug had become, despite being a sketch originally done as a throw away due Executive Meddling. So in-universe the station stages a big spectacle Christmas Special. Unfortunately for the McKenzie brothers it flops in-universe harder than anything, including Johnny LaRue's infamous "Polynesian Town" with its over-budget crane shot.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Earl Camembert delivers a couple of these to Floyd Robertson. They never teach Floyd anything, but they do serve as proof that Earl isn't always a complete pushover.
- In a sketch based around O'Henry's short stories, O'Henry's character contemplates suicide in his private booth. The waiter is furious at his decision and lambasts him about how he has so much to live for, while talking about his own horrible life, including having a wooden leg.
- Reincarnated as a Non-Humanoid: When the show parodied My Mother the Car with a segment called "Tibor's Tractor", a supposed Soviet sitcom in which former First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and ringleader of agricultural reform, Nikita Khrushchev, is reincarnated as a tractor.
- Re-Release Soundtrack: SCTV had to hold a number of sketches from video release (or modify some) because of music issues — one being an ad for "Stairways to Heaven", a record full of covers of the song from various unlikely artists.
- Retraux: What's My Shoe Size? is shot in black and white and has "artifacts" such as dirt on the film added in.
- Ridiculous Future Sequelisation: "Jaws 23"
- Ripped from the Headlines:
- "The People's Global Golden Choice Awards"'s wraparound story is based on the Golden Globes/Pia Zadora scandal.
- The titular segment of "3D Stake from the Heart" sends up Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart debacle.
- The episode where Guy writes a bad check to Fred Willard is based on the David Begelman/Cliff Robertson incident, which had been the subject of the recent nonfiction bestseller Indecent Exposure.
- The CBC episode was inspired by NBC's decision to show Canadian Football League games during the 1982 NFL players' strike.
- "The People's Global Golden Choice Awards"'s wraparound story is based on the Golden Globes/Pia Zadora scandal
- Running Gag: Ads for upcoming TV programs, movies, and other events always have Thursday at 9:00 p.m. as the show time.
- Set Behind the Scenes: A part of every season but more common in the NBC seasons and the first season.
- Shave And A Haircut: A lot of the Schmenge Brothers' polkas ended with one. The "Cabbage Rolls and Coffee Polka" ended with variants on the theme that went on for half a minute.
- Shown Their Work: The writers generally display a lot of knowledge about what they're parodying, but the "Three-C-P-One" parodies of Soviet television (where CCCP-1 takes over the SCTV satellite) are particularly spot-on and informed by good research.
- Especially evident in the 30 minute episodes, which would often do a full day's worth of shows in 30 minutes (and in the proper order, at that). See here for a list of the most common programs.
- Especially evident in the 30 minute episodes, which would often do a full day's worth of shows in 30 minutes (and in the proper order, at that). See here
- Show Within a Show: The show's central concept is that SCTV is a local TV station and that each episode represents a day of programming for that station with the sketches being the shows SCTV broadcasts throughout the day.
- Single Tear: David Brinkley sheds one as he watches over the infant Walter Cronkite on the planet Krypton in "Walter Cronkite's Brain".
- Soap Within a Show: The Days of the Week, which pretty much squeezes in every possible 80s soap cliche, with terminal illness, infidelity and depression, and characters that include a rock star, a small-time hood, corrupt doctors and gullible, wealthy women.
- Space Whale Aesop: A Short Story Playhouse segment features a story by O. Henry that ends with the main character being eaten by a lion, which the host, Hugh Bethca, thinks is a stupid ending and decides to research what led to the story. What follows is a dramatization of everybody criticising O. Henry for how stupid the ending is, and at the very end, O. Henry himself gets eaten by a lion. Afterwards, Hugh Betcha provides the moral "Make your stories believable, or else you will be eaten by a lion."
- Springtime for Hitler: Bob and Doug McKenzie were a Take That! (see below) that backfired, creating the most popular characters in the show's history.
- Straw Feminist: "I'm Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, And No Guy's Gonna Tell Me It Ain't", a short-lived play created by the feminist character Libby Wolfson, pushes the envelope on this trope.
- Stoners Are Funny: At least once, Earl Camembert got stoned on the air (as prep for an editorial he was planning about drugs).
- Stuff Blowing Up: The Farm Film Report critics like movies with this trope the best. ("Blowed up real good!") — even when reviewing art-house fare. They love Zabriskie Point (where everything blows up at the end), but are sadly and ironically disappointed by Blowup — in which nothing blows up! Naturally, they loved Scanners.
- Subverted Kids' Show: Mrs. Falbo's Tiny Town, Pre-Teen World, Happy Hour, and Muley's Roundhouse. And Mister Science with Johnny La Rue.
- Officer Friendly's segment was a very specific one, a parody of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Like the other show, it featured interviews with special guests and cartoon segments. Unlike Mr. Rogers, however, Officer Friendly was a real police officer, and his guests were in jail. When they didn't want to talk to him right away, he'd smile, and introduce the cartoon. After the cartoon ended, the guest had bruises and cut lips, and whimpered, but were much more forthcoming.
- Take That!: Bob and Doug McKenzie were created to mock a CBC requirement that the show contain at least two minutes of "distinctively Canadian content." And yes, the Stylistic Suck was also intentional, the thinking being that this is what the CBC deserved for making such a demand. To use the absolute minimum effort and resources, all the bits for a season were improvised and recorded late in a single night with only a camera operator for a crew. The segments were always exactly 2 minutes long, the minimum required by CBC.
- In an episode of the "Sammy Maudlin Show" a sullen girl punk rocker blasts the regular guests as Hollywood phonies. After an awkward silence , Sammy steps in , praising her honesty. The other guests chime in, and in two minutes have channeled the show back into their usual late-night smarm.
- The Tetris Effect: Gerry can only see his reality as it relates to video.
- Tuckerization: In the "SCTV Boogie" sketch in Season 1 (Rockin' Mel Slirrup's first appearance on the show), Catherine O'Hara plays a character named Robin Duke, named for her close friend who would eventually join the cast in Season 3 (and would take O'Hara's place on Saturday Night Live in 1981 when O'Hara elected to return to SCTV before the season started).
- Unbuilt Trope: The Gerry Todd Show seems like a parody of early MTV, but it actually debuted on the show a few months before MTV. The common thread between the two is that Rick Moranis had worked as a DJ before he got into comedy, so he had similar ideas about presenting music video in the style of radio that the former radio programmers who created MTV did.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Andrea Martin's Perini Scleroso and Mojo each had bizarre and unplaceable foreign accents (but different ones!)
- Supposedly Perini Scleroso was Turkish according to one sketch, but who knows?
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The show is set in a town called Melonville, with a location only ever pinned down to the country: the United States of America. American currency is regularly featured when currency is used (despite the show being filmed in Canada for its entire run) and a number of P.O. boxes are located in various American towns. Various gags and lines in the show seem to place Melonville in southern California, somewhere around Los Angeles: Encino is close enough to Melonville for Moe Green to commute from his apartment, the first season news sketches occasionally included a look at celebrity gossip in Hollywood, and Sammy Maudlin's guests repeatedly refer to Hollywood as "this town" (and it's confirmed that Maudlin tapes at SCTV). Bobby Bittman also mentions owning a house in Bel Air.
- The fact that they piped in content from the CBC in one episode and Earl Camembert goes down to San Francisco in another seems to point to Melonville being somewhere in the far northern U.S., near the Canadian border, but this doesn't really narrow it down much (anywhere from New England to the far northern Midwest to the northern reaches of the Rockies to The Other Rainforest). Much like the trope namer, Melonville is everywhere and nowhere.
- One SCTV News skit had Mayor Shanks being quoted as "moving the 10,000 (unemployed residents) to Plattsburgh, let them worry about it." Plattsburgh is in real life a town on the border between New York and Vermont, and is relatively close to the Canadian border, so it might be somewhere near there, too.
- Melonville is also in a climate that's cold enough for them to get substantial amounts of snow during the Christmas season, which makes it unlikely that Melonville is anywhere in the southwestern U.S. (including Los Angeles), unless there's a freak snowstorm or they're situated very high up in the Rockies. The most likely candidate for Melonville's location is somewhere in New England or the upper Midwest... but that still leaves the issue of the references that put it in L.A., which also complicate the fact that it's stressed that San Francisco is south of Melonville and the fact that they receive snow in the winter.
- In the episode where Johnny LaRue runs for a seat on the Melonville city council, the election coverage makes use of Canadian election terminology, further muddying the waters.
- Melonville was sometimes described as being in the Tri-State area.
- You Say Tomato: John Candy and Eugene Levy as Yosh and Stan Schmenge each pronounced their last name slightly different (which was part of the joke). Candy pronounced it "Shmen-gee", while Levy's pronunciation sounded more like "Schman-gee."
- Earl Camembert always pronounced his last name "Cannonbear", the subtle joke being that he's so dense he doesn't know how to say his own name!
- However, Floyd Robertson also pronounced Camembert as "cannonbear," so either that's how it's really pronounced or they are both just that dense!
- Earl's name is actually mentioned in a season 1 news sketch. Floyd asks why "Camembert" is not pronounced like the cheese but like "Cannonbear," and Earl replies with "That's just how I say it, Floyd."
- Earl Camembert always pronounced his last name "Cannonbear", the subtle joke being that he's so dense he doesn't know how to say his own name!
