A Home Alone Deleted Scene Features A Future Mighty Ducks Star
Watch a "Home Alone" movie, any "Home Alone" movie, and you'll be overwhelmed by the chaos running through the family scenes. Young Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), once abandoned by his crackerjack parents ("It's becoming sort of a McCallister family travel tradition," Mom quips in the sequel) and left as the title promises, brings plenty of mayhem to the story; aggressively mediocre cat burglars Marv and Harry get two feature-length tours through the little tyke's booby-trapped house of horrors before other children and criminals face off in later sequels (for those counting, we are now on the sixth entry in the "Home Alone" franchise). In the Chris Columbus-directed original, the McCallisters land in France and, having realized that Kevin is still at home in Chicago, immediately perform triage. There are phone calls to make, flights to change, and reports to file with law enforcement.
The holiday vacation is no longer a high priority, as evidenced by a deleted scene in which the entire McCallister clan ghosts their extended family that came to pick them up. Some might do a double-take at the excised footage (titled, "Hello...Goodbye"), once they glimpse of a pint-sized Matt Doherty, the future forward of the District 5 Mighty Ducks peewee-hockey team.
Doherty, seen in the deleted "Home Alone" scene without the rounded spectacles he'd rock in later films, looks cherubic and bears little resemblance to the wise-cracking class clown Les Averman (jersey #4), a name easily remembered throughout the "Mighty Ducks" franchise because coaches are always shouting it in frustration.
Quack attack is back, Jack!
Doherty's blink-and-you'll-miss-him (and ultimately pared down) role in "Home Alone" was that of Steffan McCallister, a cousin of Kevin living in France. The two smartly dressed girls opposite Doherty in the scene are further McCallister cousins and unnamed sisters of Steffan. Their parents are Rob (Ray Toler) and Georgette (Virginia Smith), Kevin's aunt and uncle and parents to Steffan and Heather (Kristin Minter), the latter of whom was the elder McCallister who did the initial (wrong) headcount in the first movie. It all gets confusing, but if you think of the family connections the way you think about time travel in movies (not too hard, or the whole thing unravels) and just enjoy the family comedy, you'll have a good time.
Despite the scene getting the ax, Doherty is still visible in the movie, albeit briefly. A later moment in the film shows Kevin's family glumly watching TV (a French dub of "It's A Wonderful Life") in Paris. As Uncle Frank enters the living room with food he has no business touching, Rob and Georgette are in the background decorating a froufrou icy-blue Christmas tree. The little scamp Steffan is seen playing detective and giving a gift box a little shaky-shake, a forgivable and even encouraged practice among youths on holiday (it's probably a Batman action figure, this is 1990 folks).
Doherty stuck with the "Mighty Ducks" films for the entire 1992-1996 trilogy along with about half of the central cast, opting out of the animated series that ran from 1996-1997. He recently returned as Averman for the latest franchise chapter, "The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers" on Disney+.