Rick Moranis - Retirement

Retirement

Rick officially left the film industry in 1997, six years after the 1991 loss of his wife, Ann, to breast cancer which had metastasized to her liver. He later explained that he began to "pull out" of making movies in about '96 or '97. "I'm a single parent and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the travelling 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."

As of 2004, 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 which 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 web site. 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 announced as a nominee for the 2006 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. (A 1989 album by Moranis was entitled You, Me, The Music, and Me). 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 24, 2008, Moranis declined to come out of retirement to join the other cast members of Ghostbusters in the production of a new video game based on the films. The following year, Ghostbusters' Harold Ramis told Entertainment Weekly of a proposed Ghostbusters 3 that, "Everybody said they'd do it". But Ramis later stated to Student Life, "Rick won’t do it. Rick has retired from show business. But everyone else says they’ll do it." In January 2010, a Moviefone columnist suggested, without attribution, that Moranis may come out of retirement to reprise his role as Louis Tully.