‘You never stop thinking about John Candy’: How a pair of projects keep his legacy alive | John C…

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'You never stop thinking about John Candy': How a pair of projects keep his legacy alive

If there’s a scene that best encapsulates the tragically abbreviated career of John Candy, it’s not necessarily from his time on the sketch-comedy series “SCTV” or from movies like “Stripes” or “Uncle Buck.” It’s a moment in the 1987 comedy-drama “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” when his reluctant roommate Neal Page (played by Steve Martin) has spent several minutes berating him for his relentless storytelling.

With a lump in his throat, Candy’s wounded character Del Griffith replies that he’s proud of who he is. “I like me,” he says. “My wife likes me. My customers like me. Because I’m the real article — what you see is what you get.”

How John Candy inspired a young and impressionable Conan O’Brien

The new documentary “John Candy: I Like Me” arrives Friday on Prime Video, with a number of family members, stars, and former colleagues sharing touching tributes to the late actor.

Among the many big names who appear — and there are many: Mel Brooks, Catherine O’Hara, Tom Hanks, and Bill Murray, just to name a few — Brookline native Conan O’Brien‘s memories of the comedian stand out. O’Brien explains in the film how the Canadian comic and “Second City Television” alum inspired him, eventually setting O’Brien on a path to pursue late-night TV stardom.

“I’m at that impressionable age. I’m a comedy freak, and here comes John Candy, and I’m like, ‘Who is that guy?’” O’Brien says in the documentary, later pointing to Candy’s “SCTV” Yellowbelly sketch, about a cowardly soldier in the Old West, as “the Oppenheimer blast” for his comedic inspirations. “That wiped my mind clean, that you could do a sketch where someone shoots a mother and a child in the back while a fun song plays.”

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