Second City Television

Second City Television, or SCTV, was a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from the Toronto troupe of The Second City that presented television and film parodies as part of its premise. The players included John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas.

SCTV first aired on Global in Canada, and later moved to the CBC. It ran in Canada from 1976 to 1984. The show also aired on NBC in the United States, under the title SCTV Network 90, from 1981 to 1983.

The basic premise of SCTV is that it is the television station for the city of Melonville. Rather than broadcast the usual TV rerun fare, the business, run by the greedy Guy Caballero (Joe Flaherty) who sits in a wheelchair only for effect, puts on a bizarre and humorously incompetent range of cheap local programming. This can range from a soap opera called "The Days of The Week", to game shows like "Shoot The Stars", in which celebrities are literally shot at like targets in a shooting gallery, to full blown movie spoofs like "Play it Again, Bob" in which Woody Allen tries to get Bob Hope to star in his next film.

Other popular sketches and characters include:

• the "Farm Film Report," in which two hicks interviewed celebrities and finally encouraged them to "blow up" (creating the catchphrase "get blow'd up real good"),
• "The Sammy Maudlin Show," whose sleazy showbiz guests and hosts usually did nothing but sit around and praise each other, and Martin Short's "Jackie Rogers, Jr." (a sort of albino Sammy Davis, Jr.)
• Ed Grimley (later featured on Saturday Night Live).
• The newscasts hosted by Floyd Robertson and Earl Camembert, modelled after Canadian news anchors Lloyd Robertson and Earl Cameron and played by Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy respectively. (Floyd Robertson was revealed in one episode as the same person as Count Floyd, host of the station's cheap late-night horror films)
• the Schmenge Brothers and their Polka band , the 'Happy Wanderers" resulted in an HBO special called "The Last Polka", a parody of Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz.
• Dave Thomas playing actor Richard Harris in a skit where "Harris" sings his most famous hit MacArthur Park, then waits in total agony during the orchestral stretch while the show moved on to other skits.
• The famous Russian Television episode in which an aging and bedridden Perry Como (obviously played by cast member Eugene Levy) "stars" in his TV special "Still Alive", only to be interrupted by an illegal signal from a Russian Television station. From there, all the skits are spoofs of Russian Television network shows.

Ironically, the most popular sketch was intended as throwaway filler. Bob & Doug McKenzie were the imaginary Canadian brothers in The Great White North sketch. The sketch was initially developed by Rick Moranis ("Bob") and Dave Thomas ("Doug") to satisfy the CBC requirement of two minutes of "identifiably Canadian content". The brothers became a popular parody of Canadian culture, spinning off albums, a movie, commercials, and cameo appearances on TV and film.