You may suppose it will 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 might have made Unusual Brew even stranger.
Launched in August 1983, the film marked the primary and solely massive display screen 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 an excellent wider viewers with their 1981 album The Nice White North, which featured Rush star Geddy Lee on the hit single “Take Off.”
READ MORE: How Rush Paved the Manner for Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Hit Comedy LP
The subsequent logical step was to make a film. Unusual Brew finds the brothers considerably unwittingly preventing an evil brewmaster who goals to regulate the world via a chemical positioned in bottles of beer. You possibly can 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 1000’s 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 Manufacturing unit. Fortunately, when it is time for him to alleviate himself of all that beer there’s a big fireplace close by that must be put out.
This all sounds loads unusual already, proper?
Watch the Trailer for ‘Unusual Brew’
How ‘Unusual Brew’ Might Have Been Even Extra Unusual
Thomas was fairly clearly joking when he stated “there have been some full frontal nudity scenes that Rick and I did, only for the hell of it, that had been deleted by MGM” in a Might 2000 on-line chat with IGN, However in a separate interview with that very same outlet, he revealed that a lot of what followers have grown to like about Unusual Brew wasn’t even within the preliminary script.
Thomas and Moranis had been beneath the mistaken impression they’d get sued by the chief producer of SCTV if that they had something to do with writing the script because of the exclusivity of their contracts. However after initially hiring one other author to do the job, they realized solely they might actually deliver the characters to life correctly, and started tinkering with the script.
“We did not understand how a lot we might rewrite with out undoing the deal,” he defined. “Little did we all know that we might have completely rewritten the entire thing and so they by no means would have identified, as a result of they did not learn the script in any respect.”
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, wherein Bob searches for (that is proper) beer whereas battling a mutant performed by Doug. After the movie reel breaks and an offended 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 way more weird and conceptual at first than it ended up being on the finish,” Thomas stated within the interview. “If we had been in a position to rewrite the entire thing, we might have made the entire thing like that most likely, be we weren’t positive how far we might go along with the studio.”
Why Wasn’t There a Sequel to Bob and Doug McKenzie’s ‘Unusual Brew’?
In a 2012 interview with IGN, Thomas revealed that he, Moranis and fellow SCTV veteran Paul Flaherty had written the script for a Unusual Brew sequel named Dwelling Brew. “We did not attempt to challenge [Bob and Doug] because the youthful characters that would cease the ‘take over the world’ plot,” he defined. “This was a script a few bunch of outdated losers, of which Bob and Doug quantity two fairly prominently. We tried to position them of their proper age vary…silly however outdated…and nonetheless losers.”
Sadly, the financing for the film fell via shortly earlier than filming was set to start, leaving Thomas holding the bag. “I financed a lot of the pre-production and ended up shedding $750,000. Not solely did I not receives a commission, I misplaced cash on that one.”
When requested in that now decade-old interview if he and Moranis would nonetheless be up for making Dwelling Brew if financing may very well be secured, Thomas replied, “It depends upon how lengthy it takes! There will likely be a degree the place we’ll be too outdated to even take into consideration doing this. Once we appeared on the (late ’90s Molson Beer) commercials that got here out, we thought, ‘Okay, we’re older, however we do not actually look that unhealthy.’ It isn’t like two bald guys with canes popping out attempting to revive their outdated characters – and there was one thing perverse about ready that lengthy to reappear that we kinda appreciated too, you understand?”
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