PLUME: Did you see a difference in style when you went into that writing room?
MORANIS: I didn’t see the difference in style relating to the improv aspect because writing is improvisational. And also there were limits to how much improv they were doing. They were doing some experimentation, but they would stick to a lot of material that they had created. I did see a difference in the technical aspect of how they were approaching television, which is why I think the third season of Second City looks a little bit different and feels a little bit different than the earlier seasons. I think I brought a much more specific broadcast and telecast feel to things. As Joe Flaherty once said to me, “Why does every sketch of yours have a bank of monitors in it?” I was very much playing with the medium on the medium.
PLUME: Well, as the show progressed, it seemed to realize that it was a television show. There’s a very clear sense in the early seasons of SCTV that it’s something you could have seen performed on a stage.
MORANIS: That’s right. Very proscenium based, very theatrical in its blocking and presentation. Dave (Thomas), coming out of advertising, had a good sense of the rhythm and the meter and the clock. But I… again – and that goes back to that tightness and that production quality that I always responded to – I believe that if you’re parodying a 30 second commercial, it should be 30 seconds. It should be that tight. It should deliver in that same kind of tempo. And up until that I don’t know that there was anybody there that hammered that kind of discipline home.
PLUME: Would you say that you work differently, or better, writing with a partner?
MORANIS: It totally depends what it is that you’re writing. I don’t believe anybody can do anything completely in a vacuum. Even if I write a short essay intended for the Op/Ed page of a newspaper, I’ve still got to run it by somebody. And I just don’t mean the editor at the Op/Ed page. I’ll email it over to a friend I trust to get a look at it. There are certain things that come to you that you can develop and finish and polish on your own and there are certain things that simply have to come out of collaboration.
PLUME: What was it about Dave Thomas that made that collaboration work so well?
MORANIS: I think we had a… a real common sense of absurdity, of musicality. We enjoyed trying to figure out the way the other guy was thinking. Dave has the same feeling of competitiveness that I do. He likes to trip me up the way I like to trip him up just to see if he can get himself out of it. We just played well together.
PLUME: Based on the conversations that I’ve had with Dave, and even the Brother Bear material that you guys did a few years back, there’s certainly a spark that hasn’t been lost in any way.
MORANIS: I would agree with that. I think we’re always able to pick up where we left off. I think it’s a very, very long and wonderful conversation we’re having.
PLUME: How do you view Dave’s continued attempts to keep Bob & Doug going?
MORANIS: Um…
PLUME: There was a view that it wasn’t something you were comfortable doing on camera anymore as years progressed. Is that still a going concern?
MORANIS: Well, it had more to do with not wanting to get involved in an extended production shoot. I was willing to do commercials because there was a real easy time limit on them, which is why I was willing to do the Molson campaign and a couple other things that we did. I was also willing to do the voice stuff, because that was very manageable. It had more to do with not wanting to commit to a long shoot than anything else. But that might change as my kids go off to college and I have a little more free time.
PLUME: Does it surprise you how evergreen those characters have turned out to be?
MORANIS: I’m not completely sure that the reason that they are what’s called evergreen is simply related to the fact that we haven’t overdone it. I think that there might be a continued demand for them just because there isn’t the endless supply.
PLUME: Is there still an affinity that you have for those characters?
MORANIS: An affinity. Can you…
PLUME: Well, when characters reach an iconic status like that, it tends to wear down a performer, as far as their desire to play that character again or to keep that character going. Can you still go back into that character and enjoy it?
MORANIS: I wonder whether it’s that they become iconic, or that they’ve been played too much by the actor. I think we had an intuitive sense that we needed to walk away from them. And I think the amount that we’ve been away from them has kept them constantly fresh for us whenever we’ve had to go back to them.
PLUME: For all intents and purposes, the Brother Bear material basically was Bob & Doug. Do you perceive it that way?
MORANIS: Oh, of course. We just didn’t call it that because Disney was not gonna own those characters. So they took on other names, and they were moose.
PLUME: But the act was definitely Bob & Doug.
MORANIS: Uh, the act… for legal purposes, the act resembles Bob & Doug.
PLUME: Is there ever any hesitation for you going back to these characters? You seem to be someone who likes to push the boundaries rather than stay in one spot too long. Do you agree with that assessment?
MORANIS: It might be perceived like that – just the same way that it might be perceived that there’s some sort of calculation of how the market or how the audience might react. But that’s not the way we work. We try to do things that engage us. We try to do things that keep it fresh and exciting for us. And if we stumble into something that the audience likes, then we’re lucky. And if we miss, then we try again with something else. So to not repeat the McKenzies doing stuff that they had done before is simply because we don’t want to be bored by it. And if we were to go back to doing it, we would just do… we would have to do something fresh, otherwise we would become bored. Now, in the case of the McKenzies, they stay fresh for us because they’re almost completely improvised all the time. And I’ve never had a boring conversation with Dave Thomas as himself or any character he’s ever played.
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