Like, moose are funny? Take off, eh… ya hoser!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/10/2003 (8201 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BELIEVE it or not, Disney’s new animated movie Brother Bear started out with a King Lear storyline.

Then it turned into the tale of a human-turned bear who befriends an adult Grizzly named Griz. And finally, it became a story of a human hunter named Kenai who learns new respect for bears when he is magically transformed into one, and becomes a guardian for a cub named Koda.

But as animators and producers and executives toyed and fiddled with the concept, there has always been one constant… eh?

They are a pair of moose brothers named Rutt and Tuke, who serve to expand the fraternal relationship between Kenai and his little bear pal Koda. They are goofy, funny, and their voices are eerily familiar to anyone who watched television in the ’80s.

That’s because they are voiced by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, the two SCTV compadres who created Canadian hoser icons Bob and Doug McKenzie. And any resemblance between Rutt & Tuke and Bob & Doug, be assured, is purely not coincidental.

“We nailed that one right from the beginning,” says Brother Bear co-director Aaron Blaise. “We always knew we wanted two dumb Canadian moose in our movie. We thought of different animals having different dialects and then the first thing we thought of was: We have to get some Canadians in there! We’ve got to get Bob and Doug! It happened in like five minutes.”

Producer Chuck Williams agreed that the antlers fit. After all, Bob and Doug are Canadian. Moose are (mostly) Canadian. Bob and Doug are funny. Moose are funny. (It’s a proven fact. See Bullwinkle.)

“So you just take the connection of a funny looking character, native to Canada,” Williams says. “What if we did two Canadian-accented moose? And who better to play two dimwitted Canadians than two dimwitted Canadians?”

OK, Thomas and Moranis aren’t themselves dimwitted, but they’ve played it really well on TV since 1980, when they were obliged to create Bob and Doug to fulfil a CBC mandate requiring two minutes of specifically Canadian content for SCTV. That bureaucratic sensibility yielded the show’s most popular characters. The fact that they happened to be brothers was a bonus for Brother Bear, as was their ability to improvise.

“They said, ‘Part of what we do and how we create comedy is doing (improvisation),'” Williams says. “So we hired them as voice actors but also to partially write their characters.”

Of course, since Canadians are mostly funny to Americans, producer Williams acknowledges that the moose characters will change nationalities in foreign markets.

“Every culture has another culture they like to make fun of,” he says. “I understand in Spain, it’s the Portuguese, so you may find they’ll have Portuguese accents in the Spanish version.”