MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Team Iceland became the villains of D2: The Mighty Ducks for fear of offending the initial choice of villains, Russia.
The concept of 1994's D2: The Mighty Ducks, the sequel to the hit 1992 Disney film, The Mighty Ducks, is that fresh off a knee injury that ruined his chances at a National Hockey League comeback, Gordon Bombay is given the opportunity to coach Team USA in the hockey portion of the Junior Goodwill Games in Los Angeles.
Bombay puts together a team mostly consisting of his former team, The Mighty Ducks, but he also brings in a number of new players from different parts of the United States (so that the team would be diversified a bit). The team is a hit at the Games and Bombay lets the fame get to his head a bit, endangering the team's chances at winning the championship but also just endangering the kids period, as he is overworking them far too much.
The main villains of the film (besides Bombay's ego) is Team Iceland, an imposing group of hockey players led by former NHL star Wolf "The Dentist" Stansson, who trash talk the Ducks on route to a 12-1 dismantling earlier in the tournament (before, of course, the Ducks pull out a victory in the end). Team Iceland are villains straight out of Central Casting. Just look how slimy Stansson looks!
Here's the problem, though. Iceland isn't actually a major country, in terms of hockey. As of 2021, there hasn't been a single player in the NHL who was born in Iceland. So how in the world did Iceland, a country that wasn't even part of the International Ice Hockey Federation until the 1990s (and who did not participate in an international hockey tournament until 1999), become the "big bad" international hockey team in D2?
Well, it came to simple politics, really.
In the amazing Time Magazine Oral History of The Mighty Ducks film franchise, producer Jordan Kerner described how they determined that they were going to do an international-style sequel:
At that point in time, I had a very close friend who was one of the heads of Turner, and that was Scott Sassa. In ’92 or ’93, we went with him to the Goodwill Games in Moscow. And the idea, we threw it out to Scott and to Ted Turner, was to do the Junior Goodwill Games because the Olympics would never allow that. To have the Ducks competing on a world stage seemed like something that would be a lot of fun for us. Once Turner and Turner Films said, “Okay,” and gave us the right to do that, that’s when we moved very quickly into the world of them on a sort of worldwide scale, where it was still credible, where they were playing teams their own age. And it was important they come up against formidable teams while not alienating the major hockey-playing countries.
Note the last line, "while not alienating the major hockey-playing countries."
In other words, if you wanted this picture to play internationally, you don't want to offend the countries that are big into hockey and would therefore be the most likely audiences for a movie about hockey.
Screenwriter Steve Brill (who created The Mighty Ducks) continued, "I was like, 'Well, what would be the final hockey games?' Russia would be too obvious and also geopolitically, Russia was at a stage where it wasn’t working anymore. They weren’t the Evil Empire. Glasnost had broken and it wasn’t playing that way. And the eastern European thing, I felt again it just was a little too dire or political."
In an interview with WBUR.org, Brill went into further depth about why his SECOND choice, Germany, also fell by the wayside, "So I scanned the globe in my head, and my first thought would be, of course, the villains would be the Germans. Because the Germans are just the go-to, from 'Die Hard' to everywhere. But after further review and careful consideration and I can't remember what else — except maybe because it was so obvious and I didn't want to pick on the Germans — I put them aside. And then I thought, well, what if we could create another entity that people don't know that much about? And, therefore, I could have the latitude to create them any way I wanted."
As fate would have it, Kerner was friends with an actor named Maria Ellingsen who was appearing on a soap opera at the time called Santa Barbara, where she played a naive German immigrant. However, Ellingsen was actually from Iceland and thus the idea occurred to Kerner and Brill and, as Brill noted in the Time oral history, "And so when I went in my head looking around the globe, I was like, 'Iceland, oh my God. People don’t quite know much about it. It’s got that Nordic mystique. I can make them essentially these blond-haired, blue-eyed menacing villains with funny accents and a weird culture.' It’s complete fabrication but it worked. I loved it. Iceland was just a great stock country. The one woman [Maria Ellingsen] was actually a huge star in Iceland so that was great. And a lot of the blue-eyed, blond-haired kids who played the Iceland team members were actually stunt skaters from Minnesota."
Ellingsen was then hired to be one of Team Iceland's assistant coaches and she became basically the official dialect coach on the film, as well.
Scott Whyte, who played Team Iceland's star player, Gunner Stahl, joked about how he was often lost with the accent when he didn't have Ellingsen nearby, which led to a famous scene in the movie...
He told WBUR.org, "And so it got to that moment where we had to shoot those scenes. And it was like, 'All right, Scott. Let's do this!' And so I just sorta went for it. And those lines just sound like I'm completely Russian or something else. And I'm, like, 'Good work, Captain Duck.' And it became, like, 'Wait a second. Is he Icelandic or Russian?' And I think at that time, if you'd said, 'Hey, here's a map. Just point out where Russia is and point out where Iceland is,' I think I would've thought maybe they were just right next to each other. I'm not quite sure. I'm not in any way saying that I deserve an Academy Award for that performance."
So that's the bizarre tale of how Iceland became the villains of D2: The Mighty Ducks.
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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