Comparing Police Squad to the Naked Gun movies

[horsemen4ever]

Besides the obvious stuff with the casting, and one is a movie, the other is a tv series, how does Police Squad differ from the Naked Gun movie?

I notice one thing that stands out, the main character, Frank Drebin from Police Squad is very different from the Frank Drebin from the Naked Gun movies.

Police Squad Frank is way more competent than Naked Gun Frank. Frank in the movies he screws up a lot, he always wins in the end, still the way he gets there a lot of set backs. While on the show, he is on the noise, he might get fooled by the villain once and a while, but that is not fault of his own. The tv series Frank is not going to set someone's apartment on fire, or kill 5 actors.

I wonder why they had to dumb down his character. One of the reasons I prefer series to the movies, besides the fact that Peter Lupus is a nice man who to my knowledge never commited any crimes.

[BorneAgain]

Police Squad is generally dryer than the more slapstick nature of the Naked Gun films. Given that the former has an episode where the plot and several lines lifted directly from an episode of M Squad, I think it could be said that Police Squad more closely resembles Airplane (specifically the first half of it) than Naked Gun in a lot of ways.

[HMARK Center]

Plus, when you've got a weekly half hour TV format you don't need to set up as many comedy set pieces as you do in a 90 minute film; you basically need Frank to be more of a walking disaster area for the movie because you can only get so much mileage out of "leading straight-man from a classic police noir has an infinite amount of demented things happening around him all the time", at a certain point he needs to get in on the act, too.

[Clash, Never a Meter Maid]

Sept 24, 2021 11:35:20 GMT -5 HMARK Center said:

Plus, when you've got a weekly half hour TV format you don't need to set up as many comedy set pieces as you do in a 90 minute film; you basically need Frank to be more of a walking disaster area for the movie because you can only get so much mileage out of "leading straight-man from a classic police noir has an infinite amount of demented things happening around him all the time", at a certain point he needs to get in on the act, too.

It needed to be more over the top and crazier because it was “The Movie”, which is common when a show goes to the big screen. Like how X-Files went deeper into the conspiracy and the shipping in Fight The Future, and the Simpsons had a giant dome built over Springfield.

[MolotovMocktail]

Also, Police Squad was more intent on replicating and spoofing the tone of the cop dramas that were popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

[Cranjis McBasketball]

I showed the movie to a date once. She didn’t get it.

“Why is he vacuuming a baseball field?”

“Well, normally they just use a little brush to get the dirt off. That’s what makes it so humorous”.