Rick Moranis

Frederick Allan Moranis (born April 18, 1953) is a Canadian actor, comedian, musician, songwriter, writer, and producer.

His career as an entertainer began as a radio disc jockey in the mid-1970s, using the on-air name "Rick Allan" at three Toronto radio stations.

In the mid-1970s, Moranis and comedy partner Rob Cowan, also a budding young radio announcer, performed on CBC-TV.

Their spoof of Hockey Night in Canada was popular, and they periodically performed it on the road, including a charity sports dinner in Sarnia, Ontario.

In 1977, he teamed up with Winnipeg-born writer/director and performer Ken Finkleman on a series of live performances on CBC's 90 Minutes Live; comedy radio specials; and television comedy pilots, including one called Midweek and another called 1980 (produced at CBC Toronto in 1979).

Both pilots starred Finkleman and Moranis in a series of irreverent sketches, including an early mockumentary sketch featuring Moranis as a Canadian movie producer, and another featuring the dubbed-in voiceovers of Nazi war criminals as they appear to be discussing their Hollywood agents and the money one can earn being interviewed on major documentary series like The World at War.

Moranis appeared in the sketch comedy series Second City Television (SCTV) in the 1980s and several Hollywood films, including Strange Brew (1983), Streets of Fire (1984), Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II (1989), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Spaceballs (1987), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989, and its 1992 and 1997 sequels), Parenthood (1989), My Blue Heaven (1990), and The Flintstones (1994).

In 1980, Moranis was persuaded to join the third-season cast of Second City Television (SCTV) by friend and SCTV writer/performer Dave Thomas.

At the time, Moranis was the only cast member not to have come from a Second City stage troupe.

He is known for such impressions as Woody Allen, George Carlin, Merv Griffin, and David Brinkley.

With SCTV moving to CBC in 1980 (and syndicated in the United States), Moranis and Thomas were challenged to fill two additional minutes with "identifiable Canadian content", and created a sketch called The Great White North featuring the characters Bob and Doug McKenzie, a couple of Canadian buffoons.

By the time NBC ordered 90-minute programs for the U.S. in 1981 (the fourth season of SCTV overall), there had been such favourable feedback from affiliates on the McKenzies that the network requested the duo have a sketch in every show.

Bob and Doug became a pop-culture phenomenon, which led to a top-selling and Grammy-nominated album, Great White North, and the 1983 movie Strange Brew, Moranis's first major film role.

Another notable Moranis character on SCTV was Gerry Todd, a disc jockey who presented music clips on television.

The sketch aired before the debut of MTV in the United States, leading both Sound & Vision and Martin Short to dub Moranis as the creator of the video jockey.

"There had been no such thing" up until that point, recalled Short, so "the joke was that there would be such a thing."

After his SCTV work and the Strange Brew movie, Moranis had a busy career in feature films that lasted over a decade, most notably Ghostbusters; Spaceballs; Little Shop of Horrors; and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its sequels.

Moranis was also slated to appear (as the janitor) in the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club.

After a week or so of filming, Moranis was released by producer Ned Tanen because he felt Moranis's interpretation of the role as an over-the-top Russian caricature was not appropriate for the serious nature of the film.

Moranis presented the departure as a mutual decision and hoped to work with Hughes in the future.

He also did the voice-over for a short-lived cartoon series on NBC called Gravedale High (1990).

Other than the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sequels, by the mid-1990s his only appearance in that genre was a 1993 music video, "Tomorrow's Girls" by Donald Fagen, in which he played a man married to an extraterrestrial woman.

Moranis was originally cast as Phil Berquist in the 1991 film City Slickers, but later dropped out due to his wife's illness.

Moranis's last film roles were Barney Rubble in The Flintstones (1994) and the box-office flop Big Bully (1996).

In 1997, Moranis began a long break from acting to dedicate his time to his two children as a widower.

Disney's final film in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise is 1997's direct-to-video film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, in which Moranis is the final remaining original cast member.

The series Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show also launched in 1997 but without Moranis; it concluded in 2000.

In 1997, Moranis took a hiatus from working in the film industry.

He later explained, "I'm a single parent and I just found that it was too difficult to manage to raise my kids and to do the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it."

In 2001, Moranis received his first film credit since 1997 when he provided voice work in the animated film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys.

He has not appeared in a live-action film for over 25 years, although he provided voice-over work for a few animated films, including Disney's Brother Bear (2003).

He also released comedy albums and made appearances at fan conventions.

He worked for Disney twice more (with his fellow SCTV alumnus Dave Thomas), voicing Rutt the moose in the 2003 animated film Brother Bear and its direct-to-video sequel.

In a 2004 interview, Moranis talked about his favourite kinds of films:

"On the last couple of movies I made—big-budget Hollywood movies—I really missed being able to create my own material. In the early movies I did, I was brought in to basically rewrite my stuff, whether it was Ghostbusters or Spaceballs. By the time I got to the point where I was 'starring' in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn't for me. I'm really not an actor. I'm a guy who comes out of comedy, and my impetus was always to rewrite the line to make it funnier, not to try to make somebody's precious words work."

After having declined an invitation to make a cameo appearance in 2016's Ghostbusters, Moranis clarified in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that despite his hiatus he had not, in fact, retired from acting in films, but instead had become selective about future roles.

In 2020, after a hiatus of nearly 23 years from live-action films, Moranis signed to appear in a new sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, called Shrunk.

However, as of 2024, the project has yet to proceed to the filming stage.

Moranis was born in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family.

He went to elementary school with Geddy Lee, frontman of the rock band Rush.