David L. Snyder, the film and television production designer raised in Buffalo, N.Y., went on a tour of Canadian breweries. It was for his work on “Strange Brew,” a film based on the fictional beer-drinking heroism of Bob and Doug McKenzie, and for a while, it felt like he signed onto a documentary.



“Every time we’d go to a brewery,” he said, “I’d noticed the people who worked there would drink beer during the day like water.”



Rick Moranis (Bob) and Dave Thomas (Doug) created the McKenzie brothers as characters on SCTV, a tongue-in-cheek protest of regulatory rules governing Canadian content. They wore toques and guzzled beer, called each other hosers and rhapsodized about back bacon.



They cemented their status as a North American phenomenon with the release of their comedy album in 1981 (“The Great White North”), and filming began on their movie a year later. The studio sent Snyder and a colleague...