First off, Leslie Nielsen’s dad was a Canadian Mountie. How incredible and bizarre is that? Pretty bizarre is the answer that I was looking for. During his career, though, Nielsen’s kinda done it all. From being stranded on some alien planet with a robot by his side to fighting crime with Police Squad, the man’s appeared in an endless succession of films and television shows since the fifties. And at the tender age of eighty three, he’s still appearing in new projects. Incredible. But closest to my heart out of all the work that Nielsen’s been involved with are the Naked Gun movies.

Beginning an association with the ZAZ production team (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) in 1980’s Airplane!, the actor quickly revitalized his career thirty year’s into it. His appearance in that spoof was apparently a good enough omen for ZAZ to enlist Nielsen for the short lived television show that the Naked Gun films would eventually be based upon. Over its scant six airings, the television show’s running jokes actually get to some fever pitch as each episode ends with the characters freezing their actions, often in awkward positions usually followed by another character walking on screen and realizing that he’s broken the contrived moment of cinematic playfulness. It’s a continuation of the schtick that made Airplaine! and some of the other ZAZ films so entertaining.

It’s odd to think that a television series that failed would soon be the basis of a film franchise. But in 1988, Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad appeared. In an even more surprising turn, it did alright at the box office.

Part of the reason, though, that this flick in particular holds a good deal of meaning to me personally, though, is the fact that it was one of the first modern pieces of slapstick that I was exposed to. Although, I was about seven years old – and yes, that’s probably too young to have watched this – sitting in the theater and witnessing the dry delivery of Nielsen is indelibly etched in my mind. The parade of dick jokes is as tangible here as in any other ZAZ effort and with the rather beautiful Priscilla Presley as Niesen’s love interest, there’s not shortage of ‘beaver’ jokes.

But that’s the point. This isn’t enlightened, political comedy – and thankfully so. We all know what happened to Lenny Bruce towards the end of his career and that wasn’t really even slightly amusing. But the first installment of The Naked Gun film series has enough cleverness to distract from its middle school styled humor. And if nothing else, OJ Simpson is featured pretty prominently. He doesn’t kill anyone and even brings a few laughs about on his own even while restricted to a hospital bed. The weird time warp feeling his presence illicits isn’t a downer, it’s just kinda like watching Terminator at this point and knowing that the guy who’s charged with killing venomous robots is now overseeing a multi-billion dollar budget – which in and of itself is almost as funny as the work of ZAZ in this comedy right here.