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.