I watched Uncle Buck the other night, and I was pleasantly reminded what an amazing actor John Candy was. His extreme facial expressions and perfect comic timing were only matched by the heart and love he expressed in his characters. We all know that John Candy died of a heart attack at the age of 43, but I didn’t know that he’d made a real push to loose weight and improve his health in the last years of his life. He would have done more had he lived, but let’s take a look at some of his best and most enduring movies:

Follow that Bird. John Candy played a small role as a goofy traffic cop in the rural Midwest in the 1985 Sesame Street movie. In it, Big Bird is trying to find his way back to Sesame Street after being adopted and running away from a bird family named The Dodos. The movie is cute and celebrity cameos, from the likes of Waylon Jennings, Sandra Bernhard and Chevy Chase, along with Candy.

Little Shop of Horrors. Little Shop of Horrors tells the story of a meek, flower shop worker named Seymour who is gifted a blood-sucking, people-eating plant named Audrey II by the universe. In the movie version from 1986, Candy plays Wink Wilkinson, a DJ who hosts a show about people who own weird stuff called “Wink Wilkinson’s Weird World.” Seymour and his new plants are guests.

Uncle Buck. Aside from his role in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Candy is probably best-known for his turn as Buck Russell in Uncle Buck. Buck, the typical adult child without a job or a family, is called to suburban Chicago when his brother and his wife are called away. The movie’s strength is its acting—Macaulay Culkin and Gaby Hoffmann as Buck’s little nephew and niece are successful and adorable foils to Buck’s unconventional parenting. I know that we all wanted giant, shovel-scooped pancakes on all of our birthdays.

Cool Runnings. In Cool Runnings, Candy plays Irv Blitzer, a former bobsled gold medalist in the Olympics who was disqualified for cheating during his second go-around. He moves to Jamaica, where he meets some Olympic-hopeful runners and wannabe bobsledders, who convince him to coach them for the upcoming Olympics. Cool Runnings is a pretty goofy movie to be sure—bobsledding doesn’t exactly pack in the viewers—but will be shown as for inspirational slack-off days in high schools for years to come.

What are your favorite John Candy movies?