Rick Moranis - Feature Films

Feature Films

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, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its sequels. He also did the voice-over for a short lived cartoon series on NBC called Gravedale High (1990).

In a 2004 interview, Moranis talked about the kinds of films he enjoyed the most:

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.

Rick's last big-screen film roles were The Flintstones (1994) and the box-office flop Big Bully (1996). In the former, as Barney Rubble, Rick was barely visually recognizable because he had a blonde wig and never wore his trademark glasses. Although a successful comedy, the Flintstones film was a far departure from the sci-fi comic fare he was best known for. Other than the Honey... sequels, by the mid-90's 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. Disney ended their Shrunk franchise in 1997 with the direct-to-video film Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, in which Rick was the last remaining original cast member. He worked for Disney twice more (with his fellow SCTV alumnus Dave Thomas), voicing a moose in the 2002 animated film Brother Bear and its direct-to-video sequel.