Michael McDonald Was Stoned the First Time He Saw Rick Moranis' Spoof of Him on SCTV: 'Thought I Was Hallucinating'

In 'Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, the Doobie Brothers frontman says Moranis later apologized to him for the parody

If we had a Hall of Fame for singular singers who can't be duplicated but often get imitated, Michael McDonald, the Doobie Brothers vocalist who powered classics like "What a Fool Believes" and "Minute by Minute," would definitely be in it.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake have had a go at him. So has Family Guy. But the prize for Most Hilarious Michael McDonald must go to Rick Moranis. Back in the early '80s, the future Honey, I Shrunk the Kids star spoofed the legendary Doobie Brother in an SCTV sketch and nailed it.

McDonald, 72, discusses the SCTV parody in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which premiered on HBO Nov. 29 and is currently streaming on Max. The documentary pays tribute to the retroactively named late '70s and early '80s blend of soft rock, jazz and R&B that made acts like Kenny Loggins, Toto and McDonald superstars.

While sitting next to his friend and fellow yacht rock legend Christopher Cross in the film, McDonald remembers the first time he saw the SCTV skit starring Moranis as McDonald.

Related: Christopher Cross Financed Grammy-Winning Debut Album by Selling Drugs: 'I Had a Very Successful Weed Business'

"We were in some hotel, just sitting there, smoking a joint, and in the middle of it, I just said, 'I think I've got to go. I'm a little too high,' and I said, 'I'm gonna go lay down,' " McDonald says in the documentary. "So I went into my room and I leave the TV on, and as I walked in, SCTV was on, and I thought maybe I was hallucinating."

"The whole time I was sitting there, I was going, 'Is this really happening, or am I just losing it?'... And years later, Rick Moranis apologized to me because I guess he wondered if I was offended by it or something. I said, 'Quite the opposite. I got a lot of mileage out of that.' "

Yacht rock wouldn't get its name until more than 20 years later, via a web series called Yacht Rock that debuted in 2005. The mockumentary's 12 episodes were spread out over five years, and various actors played yacht rock legends like Loggins, Cross and McDonald.

"My son couldn't wait to show me this thing he found on the Internet, and it was hysterical," McDonald recalls. "I couldn't deny that it was funny. I thought it was kind of uncanny at the time how they made up these personalities that more or less had some basis of truth, whether they knew it or not."

"I always thought it was kind of flattering to be made fun of because obviously it made an impression on somebody. Whether it's good or bad doesn't really matter at that point.

Loggins, who also appears in the documentary, had a different reaction — at least initially. It took him a minute to realize that Yacht Rock the web series was laughing with him, not at him.

"At first I felt a little insulted, like we were being made fun of," he admits. "But then I began to see it was kind of an ass-backwards way to honor us."

"And it was pretty funny, the whole sort of alternate-reality history that they were creating. They had taken what we were doing and defined it as a genre. We hadn't really seen it that way. To us, it was just the next logical step in making pop music."

Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary is now streaming on Max.