Bob and Doug McKenzie’s ‘Strange Brew’ Was Almost Even Stranger

You would possibly assume it might be troublesome for a film that already featured a flying canine and mind-controlling beer to get any weirder, however Dave Thomas says he and Rick Moranis may have made Strange Brew even stranger.

Released in August 1983, the film marked the primary and solely huge display look of the duo’s fashionable Bob and Doug McKenzie characters. After the beer-loving brothers turned the breakout stars of the Canadian sketch comedy present SCTV, the McKenzie characters reached a fair wider viewers with their 1981 album The Great White North, which featured Rush star Geddy Lee on the hit single “Take Off.”

READ MORE: How Rush Paved the Way for Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Hit Comedy LP

The subsequent logical step was to make a film. Strange Brew finds the brothers considerably unwittingly combating an evil brewmaster who goals to regulate the world by a chemical positioned in bottles of beer. You may argue that beer is definitely the star of the movie. At one level the brothers survive having their van submerged on the backside of a lake… by consuming beer. At one other, Bob McKenzie saves a lady’s life by – you guessed it – consuming hundreds of gallons of beer. This courageous act causes him to swell as much as many instances his regular measurement, like Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Luckily, when it is time for him to alleviate himself of all that beer there’s a big hearth close by that must be put out.

This all sounds lots unusual already, proper?

Watch the Trailer for ‘Strange Brew’

How ‘Strange Brew’ Could Have Been Even More Strange

Thomas was fairly clearly joking when he mentioned “there were some full frontal nudity scenes that Rick and I did, just for the hell of it, that were deleted by MGM” in a May 2000 on-line chat with IGN, But in a separate interview with that very same outlet, he revealed that a lot of what followers have grown to like about Strange Brew wasn’t even within the preliminary script.

Thomas and Moranis have been below the mistaken impression they’d get sued by the manager producer of SCTV if that they had something to do with writing the script as a result of exclusivity of their contracts. But after initially hiring one other author to do the job, they realized solely they may really convey the characters to life correctly, and started tinkering with the script.

“We didn’t know how much we could rewrite without undoing the deal,” he defined. “Little did we know that we could have totally rewritten the whole thing and they never would have known, because they didn’t read the script at all.”

Thomas and Moranis ended up rewriting the primary half of the film, which begins on the problem-plagued premiere of the McKenzie brothers’ cheaply made post-apocalyptic film Mutants of 2051 AD, during which Bob searches for (that is proper) beer whereas battling a mutant performed by Doug. After the movie reel breaks and an indignant crowd calls for refunds, the brothers give away their father’s beer cash, forcing them to hunt jobs at Elsinore Brewing, the place Max von Sydow’s Brewmaster Smith is formulating his evil plan.

“The script was far more bizarre and conceptual in the beginning than it ended up being at the end,” Thomas mentioned within the interview. “If we had been able to rewrite the whole thing, we would have made the whole thing like that probably, be we weren’t sure how far we could go with the studio.”

Why Wasn’t There a Sequel to Bob and Doug McKenzie’s ‘Strange Brew’?

In a 2012 interview with IGN, Thomas revealed that he, Moranis and fellow SCTV veteran Paul Flaherty had written the script for a Strange Brew sequel named Home Brew. “We didn’t try to project [Bob and Doug] as the youthful characters that could stop the ‘take over the world’ plot,” he defined. “This was a script about a bunch of old losers, of which Bob and Doug number two quite prominently. We tried to place them in their right age range…stupid but old…and still losers.”

Unfortunately, the financing for the film fell by shortly earlier than filming was set to start, leaving Thomas holding the bag. “I financed most of the pre-production and ended up losing $750,000. Not only did I not get paid, I lost money on that one.”

When requested in that now decade-old interview if he and Moranis would nonetheless be up for making Home Brew if financing may very well be secured, Thomas replied, “It depends on how long it takes! There will be a point where we’ll be too old to even think about doing this. When we looked at the (late ’90s Molson Beer) commercials that came out, we thought, ‘Okay, we’re older, but we don’t really look that bad.’ It’s not like two bald guys with canes coming out trying to revive their old characters – and there was something perverse about waiting that long to reappear that we kinda liked too, you know?”