My Grim March Through the Police Academy Series Begins with 1984's Woeful Police Academy
Why do you think I took you to see all those "Police Academy" movies, FOR FUN? I DIDN'T HEAR ANYONE LAUGHING, DID YOU?
My name is Nathan Rabin, and I am addicted to writing books. I can’t just write one book that I invest all my time, energy, and soul into. No, I need to work on at least three books passively and one or two actively.
I am deep into researching and writing The Book of Travolta and The Book of Cage, the literary spin-offs of the Travolta/Cage podcast and The Travolta/Cage Project. I am also nearly done with The Fractured Mirror, a wildly ambitious, absolutely massive exploration of the fascinating, rich world of American movies about filmmaking.
I’m working on a mystery project with my nine-year-old son Declan, and I’ve started writing a sample chapter for a book about discovering, at forty-seven that I am autistic and have ADHD and bipolar after both of my sons turned out also to have AuDHD.
I’m also writing a book about the fifty worst episodes of Saturday Night Live, a book chronicling Saturday Night Live’s first decade, and possibly four more in that vein.
But that’s not all! I’ve also semi-covertly been working on a project tentatively titled Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism. It would be the first Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas book and collect a series of deep dives I have done here into gloriously tacky pop detritus.
Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism will have my spirited defense of the Ernest P. Worrell series, the Fast and the Furious franchise, and the Saturday Night Live movies.
I genuinely dig all of these low-culture delights. I want Questionable Exercises in Vulgar Completism to be a full-throated celebration of the lowbrow, ridiculous, and ridiculously fun.
I’ve got enough material for about half a book. I hope to finish the book with additional journeys through the trashier recesses of pop culture from this newsletter.
Not too long ago, I had paid subscribers vote on whether I should next tackle the Police Academy series or the Saw movies. I was rooting for Saw to win because while those movies are mostly garbage, there is a lot going on in plot, character, morality, and camp.
The Saw movies are ridiculous and what one of my college professors would call textually rich. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Police Academy movies.
If I might indulge in some esoteric critical jargon, they just fucking suck. Holy fuck do they ever suck. Jesus Christ, it is nuts how shitty the whole franchise is. They are just worthless motion pictures except for the guy who makes the funny noises with his mouth.
I like that guy. He’s funny. How does he do all that? He’s superhuman.
I remember he was a contestant on America’s Got Talent a while ago. It was surreal. Why would Winslow, one of our most important and beloved artists, be in a talent competition? Hasn’t Winslow proved his talent more than anyone on earth? And he didn’t even win.
Ooh, I get angry just thinking about it. #JusticeforTheGuyFromthePoliceAcademyWhoMakesFunnyNoisesWithHisMouthandWasInexplicablyonAmericasGotTalentDespiteBeingSuperfamousandAccomplishedSeriouslyWhatthefuck?
I don’t want to tip my hand involving future entries in the series, but I hate them all because they’re so fucking terrible.
In Tony Hendra’s wildly self-aggrandizing 1987 comedy history Going Too Far, he singles out Saturday Night Live and Police Academy for derision.
In Hendra’s mind, true, savage, real comedy was done, man, for an audience of entranced hippies/beatniks/punks. Saturday Night Live, on the other hand, was on the freaking boob tube. They used that sell-out crap to sell laundry detergent, man!
Police Academy, meanwhile, earns Hendra’s quasi-righteous rage by being a comedy where the heroes are freaking police officers. Hendra was disgusted at the idea of audiences being asked to root for the freaking pigs to triumph instead of getting blown up by a nail bomb from 1960s radicals Weather Underground.
I’m less inclined to criticize Police Academy on moral or political than comedic grounds.
Police Academy is the work of comedy professionals. The screenwriting team of Neal Israel & Pat Proft wrote the cult classic Real Genius as well as Police Academy and Bachelor Party, which Israel also directed. Proft worked more fortuitously with Jim Abrahams and assorted Zucker Brothers on Police Squad, Naked Gun, Hot Shots, High School High, and the last two entries in the Scary Movie franchise. Police Academy helmer and co-writer Hugh Wilson created WKRP in Cincinnati, Frank’s Place, and The Famous Teddy Z.
Collectively, these veteran gagmen generate exactly zero laughs. Even Homer Simpson has more demanding taste.
The premise of Police Academy is that a lady mayor has issued an edict that anyone can enroll in the police academy and become a pig working for the man to oppress the brothers, not just white men who fit the height and weight requirement.
This leads a zany collection of oddballs, misfits, and goofs to join the police academy. However, that is not true of the protagonist, Cadet Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg). Guttenberg is hopelessly glib in the Bill Murray role of the sarcastic smartass women find sexually irresistible because he’s always sticking it to “the man, in his Reagan-era priSteve Guttenberg me, was the Bill Murray you told the kids you had at home. Mahoney was forced to enroll in the police academy or risk punishment for his criminal shenanigans and desperately wants to be kicked out.
Capt. Eugene Tackleberry Sr (David Graf) is a gun-loving fascist with a military sense of discipline. That makes him an extremely conventional, predictable candidate to join the force.
Police Academy’s two strengths are the glorious novelty of Michael Winslow making crazy noises with his mouth like a magician of sound and the eternally welcome George Gaynes’ avuncular warmth as Commandant Eric Lassard.
Mariet Ramsay is Cadet Laverne Hooks, a squeaky-voiced African-American woman who is called a Jigaboo by a racist with a very antiquated vocabulary. Bubba Smith, meanwhile, is Moses Hightower, a large black man and former florist, while Kim Cattrall makes for the most arbitrary of love interests as Karen Thompson, a fellow cadet with a shaky English accent who falls for Guttenberg for some reason.
This newfangled conception of the police force as a haven for diversity and inclusion pits slobs who seemingly don’t belong anywhere, let alone a conformist Fascist training ground like the police academy, against the snobs who run the school and want everyone kicked out, not just Mahoney.
To that end, they dispatch two kiss-ass sycophant recruits, Chad Copeland (Scott Thomson) and Kyle Blankes (Brant von Hoffman,) with crew cuts to find out about a wild party they’re throwing without authorization. The wily slobs trick them into thinking that the party, somewhat confusingly, is being held at a gay leather bar, with none of the other cadets present.
These confused and overwhelmed souls then spend a long, exhausting evening dancing with the bar’s patrons. I’m not sure why they don’t just leave, but if that happened, we’d be spared the hilarity that defines every gay panic joke.
These are the jokes, folks. It doesn’t get any better than that. The cadets enter the academic as raw recruits who seem wildly unqualified for the job, but they become a fearsome fighting force through a series of training montages.
Hightower and Mahoney are kicked out of the Academy, but when a riot grips the city, they rise to the occasion and are rewarded for their heroism by being reinstated into it.
The low-budget, lowbrow romp grossed nearly one hundred and fifty million dollars despite being an R-rated movie whose core demographic is dumb babies with terrible taste.
This surprise blockbuster would be the only R-rated entry in the series. The filmmakers understood that their audience was children, not adults, and adjusted accordingly.
Police Academy became one of the most influential bad movies of all time. The years ahead would be filled with sequels somehow worse than the original and an endless series of knockoffs that applied the film’s lazy formula to different jobs and institutions.
Proft and Israel got into self-cannibalization early when they co-wrote, and Israel directed Moving Violations, which was like Police Academy but at a driving school and a Bill Murray vehicle, except with his much lesser brother John in the lead.
Like every movie, Police Academy would benefit from a young Bobcat, Goldthwait in the prime of his radiant youth. Alas, we have to wait for the sequel for his introduction and the equally iconic introduction of Tim Kazurinsky.
So we’ve got that to look forward to, right? The path before us is not entirely barren, but it is grim, friends, it is GRIM.
This shock smash is supposed to be the gold standard of Police Academy and Police Academy-style romps, but it seemingly left nowhere to go but up for its sequels and army of cynical imitators.
I was 13 when Police Academy came out, which means I had to wait until it was on HBO, so I was probably 14 by then. It was everything a newly minted teen boy could want; it had some physical comedy, naughty jokes, bad language - not a ton, but some, easily identifiable characters, a guy who could do some wild sounds with his mouth that we all tried to imitate unsuccessfully, and most importantly, boobs.
This is the Police Academy that had boobs, and not of the blink-and-miss-it variety of part 2 (then never again). I was the perfect demographic. IFC showed it a few times recently and I caught a good chunk of it. I still enjoy it if for no other reason than nostalgia. And boobs.
I thought the first few POLICE ACADEMY movies were...okay, in a "This is how you do a comedy feature" kind of way—the heroes are the outsiders who don't conform, the villains are Fascist conformists, and somehow the barely-aware old guy running things becomes an unexpected ally to the heroes, who end up saving the day because when push comes to shove they have The Right Stuff.
Steve Guttenberg hits just enough Young William Shatner notes to pass muster, and is far more engaging than Bill Murray ever was(!), as the lead; Kim Cattrall was, once again, a sexy welcome presence (mostly because she didn't have to pretend to be besties with Sarah Jessica Parker, which seemed to take up all of her acting talent on SEX IN THE CITY!); the supporting cast are mainly a group of stand-up comics stretching out the sell-by date of their *schtick*s by making them character traits (something both Tim Kazurinksy and Bobcat Goldthwait will do in future films); and the straitlaced villains are as villainous as you'd expect.
The gay panic scenes were...dated by 1984 standards, and since then have aged like milk. Part of the "humor" of the evil straight cops being "trapped" in a gay bar was the implication that at some level, they might be into what's going on there—because Nazis Cops as Secret Homos is FUNNY! LAUGH! (It's like Red Letter Media's Mike Stoklasa's endless jokes about Jay Bauman going to "The Manhole"—because his affection for *giallo*, Eurohorror, and Asian Extreme Cinema somehow means he's gay, at least in Stoklasa's estimation.)
I'm not sure how much of your anti-police posturing is a put-on, and how much is sincere—but you sound like a guy who got stopped for speeding, and is now all "FUCK THE PIGS, MAN!" (Also known as "Me, In My Twenties When I Was Still Drinking".)
The police are certainly out of control these days, and any semblance that they're protecting or serving anybody other than the Rich, Powerful, and White is getting more tattered every time they violently stop a student protest or kill an unarmed Black person. But even somebody who opposes the current state of the police can still enjoy cop shows, because they present the police as we want them to be, Protecting and Serving All Persons in a fair and just manner.
I doubt Skip Intro's COPAGANDA series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udhDawfCLHo&list=PL2ac8vr2QyTdlWwd8OQIc1it6bAfMGPPC ) would exist if he didn't, at some level, love cop shows, even while knowing how wildly they always veered from reality if you were Black, Brown, or Gay, and how wildly they're veering from reality even for appalled White people now!
Not sure why you're doing this series given you clearly don't like it, and can't find much of anything good to say about even the early outings....