Those of us who are of a certain age fondly remember Saturday Night Live’s Super Fans, the sausage-eating, beer-drinking Chicago Bears’ fans played at one time or another by George Wendt, Joe Mantegna, Robert Smigel, Chris Farley, Mike Myers and John Goodman, whose answer to just about everything was, Da Bears! or Ditka.
Yes, they were Chicago Bears’ fans, but the Super Fans skits were funny because they made fun of Chicago Bears’ fans by portraying them as gluttonous morons with blind devotion to the Bears and Bulls, which, in my mind, is pretty much how all Chicago Bears’ fans are.
Word out of Chicago is several of actors who played the Super Fans will reunite — Wendt, Mantegna, and Smigel will be joined by Bob Odenkirk, as well as one Coach Ditka — to revive the hilarity this summer at the Just For Laughs Festival. This is interesting to me not because of the performance, but because Wendt, Mantegna, Smigel and Odenkirk will be reading live from a never-produced screenplay.
Amazing that It’s Pat and Night At the Roxbury could get made into films, but this couldn’t.
The story: Da’ Bears have been sold, and the beloved Soldier Field is to be converted into all luxury boxes for the rich. And here’s the thing: This really was a screenplay, written back in the mid-1990s by Smigel and Odenkirk for Paramount based on characters from the “Saturday Night Live” sketch, said Smigel. It never got made.
“It’s an expansion of the world of the Super Fans,” Smigel said. “We get to meet their families, their kids, their wives, go to church with them.”
I think one thing Packers’ fans and Bears’ fans can agree on, is that would have been awesome.
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