Trailer Park Boys is a mockumentary mixed with ad-libbed lines and sympathetic but wacky antiheroes, inspired by the struggles of everyday life. Julian might be the character that brought in the cameras, but it’s Ricky who’s the star of the show. When we first meet Ricky, he’s just getting out of jail for something involving guns and dogs.
The audience learns about the details of the crime later, and our knowledge of Ricky gets filled in the same way. We don’t know much about him at first except what we hear about him from other people. Then we see the rumors come to life with hilarious and cringeworthy results. Even the most popular guy in the trailer park has his secrets. Here are ten things that you never knew about Ricky from Trailer Park Boys.
He Has Two Talents
One of these is a secret. Everyone knows that Ricky grows some awesome dope. In the first episode, Cyrus is able to move into Sunnyvale Trailer Park easily because the park lost its dope supply when Ricky had to go to jail. During Season 1 most of the storyline involving Ricky is about getting his grow operation running again. The other skill is his prowess as a lover, which Lucy’s friend Sarah strongly hints at during one of her conversations with Julain’s camera crew. Jim Lahey has decided that Ricky is a total loser, but maybe he’s just jealous.
His Car Has A Name
Jim Lahey, the Trailor Park Boys main antagonist, was the one who gave this car its name, so you already know it has something to do with his favorite word. It’s called the Sh*tmobile. It’s not only Ricky’s home. It’s a grow op, a supermarket, a bedroom, or whatever Ricky needs at the time.
The great thing about this car is that Ricky never gets rid of it. He lives in it for several seasons, even when he has the means to move into a real trailer, and finally builds a porch over it eventually to signify it as his permanent residence.
Ricky and Physical Comedy
Considering the trouble the Boys get into, it’s amazing nobody gets killed. In fact, you might notice nobody even gets injured except for one person. One character always bears the brunt of the show’s physical comedy, and that’s Ricky. This isn’t an accident. It’s a running joke the writers have deliberately added to the script. In that sense, Ricky is like a cartoon. He’s been shot with arrows, guns, and darts, falls down or off things all the time, and gets into crazy car accidents. He’s always back in one piece for the next show.
The Boys of Summer 2005
Rob Wells is the actor who plays Ricky. He got into character along with his friends, Bubbles (Mike Smith) and Julian (John Paul Tremblay), and threw out the first pitch at the Blue Jay’s home opener in 2005. The “home opener” is the first game a baseball team plays in their own stadium at the start of the official season. Naturally, it was the fan-favorite Bubbles that actually threw the first pitch but Julian and Ricky were there to back him up.
Has Been to Jail 18 Times
Ricky holds the record for the most crimes committed by a resident of Sunnyvale Trailer Park, and considering his neighbors also tend to be unsavory that’s actually quite an accomplishment. He also holds the record for the sheer variety of crimes broken and time spent in jail. We’re not just talking about the obvious ones, like growing pot or passing out in the street. Ricky has bootlegged liquor, run an illegal gas station, operated a massage parlor, and robbed a variety of retail outlets. Once, he even held up a bank.
One Shirt, One Season
Another running gag among the cast and crew is that Ricky has to wear the same shirt for an entire season. If you didn’t see that before, check out a few episodes with that in mind just to confirm this is true. For those of you that noticed, that’s not a wardrobe malfunction. It’s actually a deliberate feature of the show. Like Ricky’s car, it never changes even when he’s better off economically. We’re not sure if the same rule applies to the track pants.
Squirrel!
Ricky generally likes animals, although he hates noisy dogs. One critter he won’t tolerate is squirrels. He hates them and will shoot them on sight. This is connected to his marijuana crops. He borrows cats from Bubbles to keep all kinds of vermin, but mostly squirrels, away from his plants. A single squirrel can do a lot of damage, so Ricky’s reaction to these small fuzzy rodents is understandable even if it’s overly dramatic.
Reveen the Impossiblist
An early form of what we now refer to as an Illusionist, Peter Raveen was a popular entertainer in 1980s Canada. His specialty was hypnosis, which also ended up overlapping into self-help books that focused on guiding people to quit bad habits and solve personal problems.
The clothes he wore and general style have an iconic 1970s flair that the Boys would know from their childhood. You have to admit there is a resemblance there, but it’s mostly the big hair, which Ricky always has perfectly coiffed even though he can’t change his shirt.
His Surname is LaFleur
Although this surprised absolutely no-one, Ricky’s surname wasn’t revealed until Season 12, and even then, you would have missed it if you weren’t paying attention. This reference can have more than one connotation, especially if you’re Canadian. The first and most obvious is the French translation. “La fleur” means “flower” in English. Pot smokers like Ricky know that when you grow cannabis, it’s the bud, to “flower” of the plant that you smoke. Canadians will recognize that Ricky has the same name as the famous hockey player, Guy LaFleur. He was the first player in the National Hockey League to score 50 goals and 100 points in six seasons in a row.
The Cop Whisperer
This is something Lucy says about Ricky very early in the show, in the first episode of season 1. Even though the general consensus is that Ricky is stupid, he always manages to think of a clever way to thwart law enforcement. Once he used Julian’s camera crew to pretend he was a supervisor evaluating a cop’s performance to thwart a traffic stop. In the course of his adventures, we tend to forget about it, but it’s one of the defining traits of Ricky’s character, providing some of the show’s most satisfying moments.