This dreary time of year in the the Northern Hemisphere so many are talking about “Blue Monday,” but I’ve been taken by such happy things that this day isn’t even registering for me. I’ve been reading and watching recent projects that highlighted the man and actor John Candy. I read the outstanding hardcover John Candy: A Life In Comedy and it brought me back to many of his greatest projects. In the mornings, I would watch episodes of SCTV while perching my son next to me; him a little too young to know what he’s seeing, but laughing along with me as I almost involuntarily roared with chest-bouncing laughter. Somewhere in the middle of this, I managed to also catch the stellar documentary John Candy: I Like Me.

John Candy: I Like Me was, in fact, my entry-point to this flush of John Candy Projects. Given that Ryan Reynolds and Colin Hanks were involved, I knew this movie was going to be good. Shit, you’re not ready for how moving this is. There are so many stories, interviews and details about the man, it’s touching. Here too, you’ll get a ton more details about John’s humanity and his love with with his wife, Rose. You’ll also see heartbreaking interviews where he’s asked about his weight and is visibly shaken. He hid his hurt and anxiety well and these interviews, which by today’s standards, seem so insensitive. It’s tough to watch.

You can catch this on Prime Video, if you haven’t see it.

In John Candy: A Life In Comedy I had no idea that John hated working on his last movie Wagons East. It wasn’t one that I saw personally at the time. but it seemed to have been reviewed badly. It’s a shame that Candy’s final work was not so well-received. There was his company Frostback Productions, where Candy would keep his Plane, Trains, and Automobiles luggage trunk at the foot of his office table. New to me was the word frostback cleverly refers to a Canadian that makes their way to the U.S. for work. Indeed John did that in spades.

There are so many interesting details about his work and life in this book. Thankfully too, Dan Aykroyd’s eulogy is printed here word-for-word. Aykroyd’s use of the word Donlands is wonderful and specific (I’m from the Donlands too, and never really thought of it that way). It’s no small thing that the last chapter of this books is simply entitled “The Legacy,” because Candy had such an expansive and impactful one.

I have my own John Candy story of sorts too. My father had something of a kinship with this man. It’s a slight memory and perhaps one told too many times to actually be true. But, my father meet him in a bar in Newmarket (I was in tow, a child at the time). They’d sit down for a drink while I kept myself amused upstairs (could this have been a place called Copperfields?) . How well they knew each other, I would never know. That I’d even get that close to meeting this man astounds me, even today. My father was blessed to have shared a drink with him. John Candy’s work will live on forever and it’s such a shame we lost him so young.

Why have all these projects converged on the year 2025? This is not clear, but it has been a welcome development. And Let me say, if you are among the handful of people on earth that has never seen John Candy perform, I suggest you immediately fix that and watch one of his projects. This is surely the cure for January, winter wherever you are, and quite possibly other problems of humanity. That’s some kind of legacy.