Trivia / SCTV

• Acting for Two: The whole cast, of course, but some of the recurring characters also played more than one role for the station:
  • Newsman Floyd Robertson also portrayed "Count Floyd" on Monster Chiller Horror Theater (a not-uncommon practice at Real Life stations in the heyday of locally-produced kiddie shows and Horror Hosts.)
  • Cleaning woman Perini Scleroso had several star turns in SCTV productions including My Fair Lady, earning her the coveted People's Global Golden Choice Award for "Best Foreign Personality."
  • Bill Needle not only hosted a variety of "critic" shows, but turned up once or twice as an actor in SCTV productions.
  • Goes beyond even that- the cast would sometimes play impressionists playing famous actors in movies (think Frank Caliendo's bit as Robin Williams as all the characters in The Wizard of Oz).
• Approval of God: Alex Trebek approved of Eugene Levy's portrayals of him in the High Q skits.
• Breakup Breakout: In-Universe: Linsk Minyk after he left The Happy Wanderers.
• California Doubling: The show was made in Canada (Toronto for most of it, Edmonton in season 3 and part of 4), but they did a good job making it not too obvious in location shoots (except for oddities like downtown Edmonton being asked to double for Manhattan in Play it Again, Bob^note a Woody Allen movie parody), and of course the show averted Canada Does Not Exist pretty hard with the McKenzies and other sketches.
• Corpsing:
  • In a sketch where a Scotsman and a rabbi exchange stereotypical insults at each other, Rick Moranis, who plays Rabbi Karlov, is clearly stifling his laughter directed at the insults he comes up with for the Scotsman.
  • Harold Ramis, in his sketches from season 1, corpses constantly. See, for example, Do-It-Yourself Dentistry, in which he constantly looks off screen and smiles at the crew, because that's real rum in that bottle, which he didn't know until he took a drink. He ended up legitimately plastered after this sketch. and this scene from Ben-Hur, where he again grins and glances off camera while John Candy barks at him.
• Creator Backlash: Everyone hated "The Great White North" segments, because of the Executive Meddling. It wasn't even scripted; it was just an excuse to have Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas dress in winter gear and ramble on about stereotypically Canadian things for a few minutes. When it became the most popular part of the show, many in the cast accused the head writer, Dave Thomas (who played Doug McKenzie in the sketch), of abusing his authority to grab the spotlight, despite it being largely improv. This didn’t stop them making a movie (Strange Brew) and an album (The Great White North), as the McKenzie Brothers.
  • The "Vikings and Beekeeper" sketch qualifies. It seemed much funnier on paper, but nobody liked doing it, especially as the taping stretched later and later, and the cast imbibed between takes. See Troubled Production below.
• Defictionalization: The idea of an album called Stairways To Heaven featuring a variety of renditions of "Stairway To Heaven'' eventually became a reality.
• Executive Meddling: The level of influence NBC tried — and generally failed — to impose upon the show during its run on the American network is the stuff of legend.
  • They sent executives up to Edmonton to provide input into the show's development...which the cast and crew often ignored because it was stupid. The network was completely flummoxed — the network's list of 'demands' was treated as a list of minimally-important suggestions, with the SCTV cast and crew completely unwilling to cede any sort of creative control. (It should be noted that at this point, they'd been doing the show their way for 5 years). The network responded by giving them minimal budgets for each episode, and aired the show at odd hours (how odd? Try 11:30pm on Sunday night, a deader timeslot than Friday nights). It's a wonder the show survived, and even thrived, despite these setbacks.
  • When the CBC picked up the show, they demanded a segment of "identifiably Canadian content," despite the fact that the show was already a fully Canadian production. So, they created a sarcastic reply in the form of "The Great White North", with Bob and Doug McKenzie, who became the Breakout Character sensations of the series.
  • In another instance, after the cast spent most of the production budget in "Doorway To Hell" on a several-minute long crane shot, the network cut their budget to almost nothing for another episode, "SCTV Staff Christmas Party". The end result is half an episode mixed with fifteen minutes of John Candy (as washed-up star Johnny LaRue) speaking about his memories of Christmas and lamenting his career on a street corner in the middle of winter. This is also one of Candy's finest acting moments.
  • A few instances of Executive Meddling in the creation of the NBC Network 90 series worked out OK, such as the idea of "wraparounds," or thematic station-based storylines connecting the various sketches, and the inclusion of musical guests. Basically, though, these ideas were only acted upon because the cast thought they'd work and be fun, NOT because of any desire to please (or defer to) the network.
• Fake American: Although it's usually assumed that everyone in the cast was Canadian, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin and Harold Ramis were American, so whenever any of the others played Americans this trope applies. (Martin had been living and working in Canada for several years prior to SCTV, though, while Flaherty and Ramis had been sent from Chicago to oversee the Toronto branch of Second City).
• He Also Did: Candy, Levy and O'Hara were part of the chorus of "Tears Are Not Enough", the Canadian Charity Motivation Song done in the wake of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We Are the World".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Most of the episodes from the show's first three seasons (which were filmed in Canada) and the sixth season (which aired on Cinemax State-side) are unavailable on DVD, possibly due to rights or music issues.
  • Likewise, the television special The Best of SCTV (which aired on ABC, and acted as an epilogue to the series) hasn't been seen since its initial television airing. It can be found through torrents, though.
  • The Cisco Kid Gag Dub episode hasn't been seen since the show's original run, reportedly due to the estate of Duncan Renaldo (Cisco himself) forbidding then-syndicator Rhodes Productions from re-airing it.
• Parody Assistance:
  • SCTV's Movie of the Week version of The Godfather has Leonard Bernstein as its equivalent of Jack Woltz, and John Marley, who played Woltz in the original, plays Bernstein.
  • Reportedly, Douglas Rain did the voice of HAL in The Merv Griffin Show: The Special Edition.
• The Pete Best: Harold Ramis was a cast member for the first season along with serving as head writer, but decided to focus on writing for the next season, before leaving the show entirely to help write the screenplay for Animal House.
  • Robin Duke and Tony Rosato joined the cast for season three, but were hired by Dick Ebersol to help salvage Saturday Night Live (Catherine O'Hara was also hired, but she quit before she could even star in an SNL episode. A lot of people claim it's because she was afraid of then SNL head writer Michael O'Donoghue, who called everyone out for ruining SNL and spray-painted the word "DANGER" on her dressing room door, but, according to O'Hara, it was because she liked working on SCTV more) and left before SCTV made the move to NBC.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Battle of the PBS Stars" features "In the Stone" by Earth, Wind & Fire (with added synths at the end of the segment). Notably, it's been untouched by the DVDs' Bowdlerization or Re-Release Soundtrack.
• Stunt Casting: Several musicians also acted in skits, including Natalie Cole, Tony Bennett, Hall & Oates, and The Boomtown Rats. John Mellencamp appeared as the result of a mad scientist experiment. Ed Grimley transformed into John Mellencamp, and then back into Ed Grimley during a song. Several actors also appeared, including Sir John Gielgud, Al Jarreau (who starred in a parody of The Jazz Singer) and John Marley (Jack Woltz from The Godfather, playing the exact same character as the one from the film).
• Throw It In!: Dave Thomas says that in the Merv Griffith Show sketch, he was supposed to be straight-up playing Gomer Pyle, but his impression was so bad (especially compared to the others) that Rick Moranis decided to cover him by ad-libbing the line about it actually being Fred Travalena doing a Jim Nabors impression, with John Candy adding a Call-Back when he made his re-entrance.
• Troubled Production:
  • Season 3. After the second season their Canadian network, Global Television Network, dropped it because it was too expensive to produce. But syndicated reruns were getting good ratings in the US, so Second City didn't want to throw the towel in on the show just yet. They finally worked out a deal with CBC. The catch was that, due to a separate deal that happened, the show would have be taped at the studios of CITV (ironically now a Global station) in Edmonton, Alberta, which is over 2,000 miles (3,000 km) from their home base of Toronto. Catherine O'Hara and John Candy elected not to participate (Candy left to headline his own short-lived sketch show Big City Comedy). Then they had to break-in three new cast members: Robin Duke, Rick Moranis, and Tony Rosato. And the CBC insisted that each episode feature two minutes of "identifiable Canadian" material (which led to the "Great White North" sketches). The situation was frustrating enough that Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin only worked part-time (shooting all their sketches over a matter of a few weeks); and Flaherty abruptly left towards the end of the season (but eventually returned after several days). However, it all ended up working out: being away from home allowed the cast and writers to focus on their work, the newcomers (especially Moranis) rose to the occasion, and the Edmonton TV facility had much better production values than they'd worked with at Global. And the Canadian content mandate led to the creation of the show's most popular characters, Bob and Doug McKenzie. By the end of the year SCTV was getting better ratings than the infamous 6th season of Saturday Night Live, and NBC was impressed enough to pick up the show. Nevertheless, SCTV moved production back to Toronto as soon as it was practical (midway through season 4), once they found better Toronto production facilities then they'd had at Global. They DID take some of the Edmonton crew back to Toronto with them, including director John Blanchard who the SCTV cast all felt was a major upgrade from their previous directors.
  • "The Vikings and The Beekeepers". For starters, they spent $40,000 to build the Viking ship for the sketch, which was connected to a hydraulic device that could make it rock and tilt. But the studio was small and there wasn't much room for the actors to maneuver around the ship. Plus the studio had no air conditioning. And taping ran several hours over schedule. Also, for Catherine O'Hara's goddess character to descend onto the ship she had to dangle from her ceiling harness between takes. John Candy (who didn't much care for the sketch anyway) got so stressed out he had a fully-stocked portable bar delivered to the studio.
• What Could Have Been: It's been suggested that NBC picked up the show mainly as a contingency plan. If the Dick Ebersol reboot plan for season 7 of Saturday Night Live didn't work, SCTV would've replaced it.
  • The Cisco Kid Gag Dub that randomly appeared in the third season was put in when the show itself didn't have enough material to fulfill their episode order; it was part of a failed series called Laugh Track that the Second City crew had created around the same time. It featured Martin Short as one of the voices, prior to him actually joining the SCTV cast later.
• Write Who You Know: "Charlie's Kitchen" was a bizarre case, since it was Dave Thomas playing a character based on Martin Short's father Charlie. Short had told Thomas that he reminded him of his father. Since he'd never met Short's father, Thomas was basically doing his impression of Short's impression of Charlie, and Thomas said he mainly did the sketch as a private inside joke, but since the show needed a lot of Padding to fill the 90-minute timeslot during the NBC era, it actually ended up in the show.
• Written by Cast Member: While the show had a dedicated writing staff, the cast still did much of the writing.