Rick Moranis

Frederick Allan Moranis (; born April 18, 1953) is a Canadian comedian and actor, known for roles in several feature films in the 1980s. He appeared in the sketch comedy series Second City Television (SCTV) in the 1980s. He then starred in several Hollywood films, including Strange Brew, Streets of Fire (1984), Ghostbusters (1984) and its sequel 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).

Following the death of his wife in 1991, Moranis reduced his work in the entertainment industry, and beginning in 1997 he dedicated his time to their two children. During this period he performed occasionally, including a voice role in Disney's Brother Bear (2003), comedy albums, and appearances at fan conventions. In 2020, he signed to reprise his role from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, in a sequel, but the project was shelved due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has signed to reprise the role of Dark Helmet in Spaceballs: The New One, scheduled for release in 2027.

Early life Moranis was born on April 18, 1953, in Toronto, Ontario, to a Jewish family. He attended elementary school with Geddy Lee, frontman of the rock band Rush.

Career His career as an entertainer began as a radio disc jockey in the mid-1970s, using the on-air name "Rick Allan" at Toronto radio stations CFTR, CKFH, 1050 CHUM and CHUM-FM.

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.

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 became especially noted for his impressions of celebrities such as Woody Allen, Merv Griffin, David Brinkley, George Carlin, Michael McDonald, and Teri Shields (mother of Brooke).

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. He followed that up with the 1984 movie Streets of Fire.

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."

Feature films

After his SCTV work, and the Strange Brew and Streets of Fire movies, Moranis had a busy career in feature films that lasted over a decade, most notably Ghostbusters (1984) and its sequel, Ghostbusters II (1989); Brewster's Millions (1985); 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 Barney Rubble in The Flintstones (1994). He also did the voice-over for a short-lived cartoon series on NBC called Gravedale High (1990).

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.

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

Moranis's last film roles were the box-office flops Little Giants (1994) and Big Bully (1996). By the mid-1990s, his only appearance in the genre was a 1993 music video, "Tomorrow's Girls" by Donald Fagen, in which he played a man married to an extraterrestrial woman. 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. 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 2006 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 declining to make a cameo appearance in the 2016 Ghostbusters film, Moranis clarified that he had not, in fact, retired from acting in films, but instead had become selective about future roles.

Later work 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.

, Moranis was on the Advisory Committee for the comedy program at Humber College.

In 2005, Moranis released an album titled The Agoraphobic Cowboy, featuring country songs with lyrics that Moranis says follow in the comic tradition of songwriters/singers such as Roger Miller, Kinky Friedman, and Jim Stafford. The album was produced by Tony Scherr and is distributed through ArtistShare, as well as Moranis's official website. Commenting on the origins of the songs, he said that in 2003, "Out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs. For lack of a better explanation, they're more country than anything. And I actually demoed four or five of them, and I'm not sure at this point what I'm going to do with them—whether I'm going to fold them into a full-length video or a movie. But, boy, I had a good time doing that."

On December 8, 2005, The Agoraphobic Cowboy was nominated for the 2006 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. On February 3, 2006, Moranis performed "Press Pound" on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and discussed the development of his music career.

In November 2007, Moranis reunited with Dave Thomas for a 24th anniversary special of Bob and Doug McKenzie, titled Bob and Doug McKenzie's 2–4 Anniversary. The duo shot new footage for this special. Thomas subsequently created a new animated Bob and Doug McKenzie series, Bob & Doug, for his company Animax Entertainment. Moranis declined to voice the role of Bob, which was taken over by Dave Coulier, but remained involved in the series as an executive producer.

On June 18, 2013, Moranis released the comedy album titled My Mother's Brisket & Other Love Songs, his first album in eight years. Moranis said of the release, "When I first began writing jokes and sketches with various Jewish partners one of us would inevitably stop at some point and announce, 'Too Jewish!' Too Jewish for the star, the show, the network, or the audience. The songs on this album are all in that category. I grew up hearing the Allan Sherman and the You Don't Have to Be Jewish albums in the '60s. Now I am in my 60s."

In a June 2013 interview, Moranis talked about reprising his role as Louis Tully in a third Ghostbusters film and his disappointment with the sequel. Moranis said, "I haven't talked to Dan Aykroyd about it. Somebody he's associated with called me and I said, 'I wouldn't not do it, but it's got to be good.' You know, I'm not interested in doing anything I've already done, and I thought the second one was a disappointment. But I guess I'm interested in where that guy is now. I sort of see him as being Bernie Madoff's cellmate in jail. Both of them being so orderly that they race to get up and make their beds." In 2015, regarding an offer for a brief appearance in the 2016 film, he concluded, "Ghostbusters didn't appeal to me. I wish them well, but it just makes no sense to me."

On May 9, 2018, Moranis returned as the character Pannakin Crybaby / Lord Dark Helmet from Spaceballs in an episode of The Goldbergs, albeit as a voice. He also appeared in an episode of Prop Culture discussing the film.

Moranis appears in the Martin Scorsese–directed Second City TV reunion documentary, titled An Afternoon with SCTV, set to premiere on Netflix.

In 2020, Moranis signed on to reprise his role as Wayne Szalinski in Shrunk, a new sequel in the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids series. It would have marked a return to live-action films for Moranis after a hiatus of over two decades; however, it was put on indefinite hold in the 2020s due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Disney+ moving away from long-form streaming content. Later in 2020, he appeared in a commercial for Mint Mobile alongside Ryan Reynolds.

Return to on-screen acting

In June 2025, Moranis signed on to reprise the role of Dark Helmet in the sequel to Spaceballs, which is scheduled for release in 2027. Filming for Spaceballs: The New One, which includes Moranis, began in September 2025, thus confirming that the film would result in Moranis making his return to on-screen acting for the first time since 1997. Filming on Spaceballs: The New One wrapped in December 2025.

Personal life

Moranis married make-up designer Ann Belsky in 1986 and together they had two children: a son and a daughter. Belsky died of breast cancer in February 1991. Moranis then slowly left public life to become a full-time single father. On November 14, 2020, the perpetrator was arrested in New York City. In 2022, his attacker pled guilty in return for a sentence of two years in prison followed by three years of post-release supervision.

Filmography Film

Year Title Role Notes 1983 Strange Brew Bob McKenzie Also co-writer and co-director 1984 Streets of Fire Billy Fish Ghostbusters Louis Tully Harry 1985 Brewster's Millions Morty King Head Office Howard Gross 1986 Club Paradise Barry Nye Little Shop of Horrors Seymour Krelborn 1987 Spaceballs Dark Helmet 1989 Ghostbusters II Louis Tully Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Wayne Szalinski Parenthood Nathan Huffner 1990 My Blue Heaven Barney Coopersmith 1991 L.A. Story Gravedigger Uncredited cameo 1992 Honey, I Blew Up the Kid Wayne Szalinski 1993 Splitting Heirs Henry Bullock 1994 Barney Rubble Honey, I Shrunk the Audience! Wayne Szalinski Little Giants Danny O'Shea 1996 Big Bully David Leary 1997 Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves Wayne Szalinski Direct-to-video 2001 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys The Toy Taker / Mr. Cuddles (voices) 2003 Brother Bear Rutt (voice) 2006 Brother Bear 2 Direct-to-video 2027 Spaceballs: The New One Dark Helmet Post-production

Television

Year Title Role Notes 1979 1980 Various roles Television pilot 1980–1981 SCTV 25 episodes 1981–1982 SCTV Network 26 episodes 1982 Twilight Theater Television film 1983, 1989 Saturday Night Live Himself 2 episodes 1984 Hockey Night Coach Television film 1985 The Last Polka Linsk Minyk 1988 The Best of SCTV Various roles Television special; also writer 1989 The Rocket Boy Automatic Safety System Television film 1990 Gravedale High Max Schneider (voice) 13 episodes The Earth Day Special Vic's Buddy Television special 1992 Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories Narrator Episode: "Little Toot & the Loch Ness Monster/ Choo Choo" 1997 Muppets Tonight Himself Guest; 1 Episode 2003 Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Kids Holley (voice) Television special 2007 Bob & Doug McKenzie's Two-Four Anniversary Bob McKenzie 2009–11 Bob & Doug Co-creator and executive producer 2018 The Goldbergs Pannakin Crybaby / Lord Dark Helmet (voice) Episode: "Spaceballs" 2020 Prop Culture Himself Episode: "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" Television special; filmed in 2018

Video games Year Title Role Notes 1994 The Flintstones Barney Rubble Arcade game 2003 Brother Bear Rutt Platform game

Discography

Albums 1989: You, Me, the Music and Me 2005: The Agoraphobic Cowboy 2013: My Mother's Brisket & Other Love Songs

Bob and Doug McKenzie 1981: The Great White North 1983: Strange Brew soundtrack

Other soundtrack appearances Year Film Songs Artist(s)/Writer(s) Role 1986 Little Shop of Horrors "Skid Row Downtown"; "Da-Doo"; "Grow For Me"; "Feed Me (Git It!)"; "Suddenly, Seymour"; "The Meek Shall Inherit" Howard Ashman, Alan Menken Seymour Krelborn 1997 Muppets Tonight "High Hopes""Salute to the late fifties crooners, obscure British bands and Bill Withers" Various artists Himself

Audio/video 1973: "Rock Radio Scrapbook" (as Rick Allan)

Awards and nominations Year Association Category Work Result 1982 Primetime Emmy Awards Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program SCTV (shared with other writers) 1990 American Comedy Awards Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Parenthood 1995 Gemini Awards Earle Grey Award for Best Cast SCTV 2006 Grammy Awards Best Comedy Album The Agoraphobic Cowboy