{"id":37576,"date":"2025-07-31T19:30:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T19:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37576\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T19:30:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T19:30:09","slug":"the-naked-gun-aims-to-revive-the-spoof-movie-what-killed-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/37576\/","title":{"rendered":"The Naked Gun aims to revive the spoof movie. What killed it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Surely<\/a> it\u2019s been a moment since you last checked in on Airplane!, the progenitor of the relentless film genre known as the spoof comedy. I know I was surprised, on a recent rewatch, to be reminded of how unusually patient it is in building its fictional world before turning on its fire hose of jokes. Yes, it starts with a Jaws homage<\/a>, as an airliner\u2019s tail fin weaves in and out of the clouds. But the next several minutes are all about establishing the chaotic energy of the airport<\/a>, the cast of luckless passengers unaware of the imminent disaster awaiting them, and the personalities of our protagonists, Ted Striker and Elaine Dickinson. Oh, and then an errant ground crew member sends a passenger plane crashing through a giant glass window.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget, 45 years later, how Airplane! hit the cultural consciousness in the same way. It knocked down comedic conventions as well as box-office records, going on to become one of the five highest-grossing films of 1980. While it didn\u2019t quite invent the spoof-comedy category, it set up decades\u2019 worth of movies that existed to make fun of popular movies and all their well-worn tropes\u2014the crime-drama parodies of the Naked Gun<\/a> series of the late \u201980s and early \u201990s, the Scary Movie<\/a> franchise that sliced up horror films of the late \u201990s and early 2000s.<\/p>\n

And then something happened: nothing. The spoofs went poof, as the few remaining satirical comedies got relegated to streaming platforms and true movie parodies disappeared from theaters altogether for nearly a decade. Of the 106 spoofs listed on Box Office Mojo, none are more recent than 2016<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But like a femme fatale who strides into a detective satire to be gratuitously ogled by the gumshoe hero, maybe the spoof genre still has legs<\/a>. On Friday, Paramount will release The Naked Gun<\/a>, the first new entry in the cop-comedy series in more than 30 years, one that hopes to succeed the deadpan style of Leslie Nielsen with Liam Neeson as his hard-boiled but equally inept son, Frank Drebin Jr. September will see the release of Spinal Tap\u00a0II: The End Continues<\/a>, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1984 mockumentary about a hapless heavy-metal band that isn\u2019t quite in on the joke. Next year will see a reboot of Scary Movie<\/a>, with the Wayanses returning as writers. And spoof master Mel Brooks is moving forward at plaid speed<\/a> with a 38-years-later sequel to Spaceballs<\/a>, his everything-and-the-vacuum-cleaner parody of the Star Wars blockbusters.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been long enough since a spoof hit theaters that the zoomers who see Naked Gun will likely have no idea what to make of its joke-a-minute rhythms and unconventional story logic. But these movies continue to loom large in the minds of contemporary comedians who want to see the genre endure. Akiva Schaffer, the Lonely Island troupe member and Saturday Night Live alumnus who directed the new Naked Gun film, told me that movies like Spaceballs and Top Secret! influenced him \u201cthe most anything can influence anybody. It\u2019s hard to put the words to it, honestly. How would you even put a number on it when it was so much?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet he isn\u2019t expecting that his Naked Gun movie will kick off another cycle in the ebb and flow of spoof comedies and show the resilience of a genre that\u2019s always ready to eviscerate the latest trends in mainstream moviegoing. \u201cForget that comedies overall haven\u2019t really been a presence in theaters,\u201d Schaffer said. \u201cThe spoof movie specifically is the one that died out well before comedies died out.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked David Zucker, one-third of the venerated Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker creative team behind Airplane! and the original Naked Gun films, if the spoof category was on the verge of a comeback, he just laughed at me (and not in the good way).<\/p>\n

So who killed it? Zucker fingered Hollywood and its timid, numbers-obsessed executives as the culprits. \u201cIf they\u2019re the pilots of an airliner, they\u2019re not looking out the window,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey\u2019re just reading instruments when they should see that there\u2019s a mountain in front of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Airplane!, there were, of course, antecedents like Our Man Flint<\/a>, which lampooned the James Bond films; Brooks\u2019 Blazing Saddles<\/a> and Young Frankenstein<\/a>; and Monty Python\u2019s Holy Grail<\/a> and Life of Brian<\/a>. But Zucker told me that he and his partners Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker were more influenced by the run-amok satirical spirits of the Marx Brothers, Mad magazine, and early Woody Allen when they took the stone-faced 1957 thriller Zero Hour!<\/a>\u2014about an airline crew brought down by bad fish, and the haunted war veteran who saves them\u2014and rewrote it as a comedy.<\/p>\n

Zucker told me he and his collaborators were lucky to have the support of studio bosses like Michael Eisner (then the president of Paramount Pictures), who allowed them to make Airplane!, as well as their flop TV series Police Squad!<\/a>, whose demanding onslaught of verbal and visual gags worked better when the show was upcycled to become the Naked Gun movies. (As Zucker recalls another executive telling him at the time, \u201cPolice Squad! didn\u2019t work because you had to watch it.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But just as crucially, the Z-A-Z trio learned about comedic discipline. Despite the group\u2019s reputation for nonstop joke-telling, Zucker said, \u201cit\u2019s not just \u2018Anything goes.\u2019 It\u2019s not just \u2018Throw shit up against the wall and see what sticks.\u2019\u00a0\u201d The collaborators\u2019 collective sensibility, which they eventually codified into a set of 15 rules<\/a>, emphasized unexpected doctrines, like being truthful to the source material of the satire and never letting its characters wink at their own reality\u2014hence all that careful effort to establish the setting and tone at the start of Airplane!<\/p>\n

Zucker said they also knew when to walk away from a joke, as with the Naked Gun trilogy, which they closed out with 1994\u2019s Naked Gun 33\u2153: The Final Insult. \u201cWe did three of those until it wasn\u2019t fresh anymore,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Brooks, too, was winding down in this era with goofier and less pointed parodies like Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. But a new generation of filmmakers stepped in to fill the void, like Keenen Ivory Wayans, whose 1988 Blaxploitation satire I\u2019m Gonna Git You Sucka<\/a> paved the way for his sketch series In Living Color; the all-encompassing 1996 lampoon (pause for a deep breath) Don\u2019t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood<\/a>, from his brothers Shawn and Marlon; and the Scary Movie series, which the three Wayanses launched together in 2000.<\/p>\n

Other young comedy prospects were being nurtured on the catalog of spoofs they were watching less often in theaters than on cable TV and home video, often at friends\u2019 slumber parties. \u201cThose movies change your personality at a moment when you\u2019re searching for your identity,\u201d said Schaffer, who would channel this in dozens of SNL digital shorts and movies like his 2016 rockumentary sendup, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s some people who watch and go, \u2018Eh, funny,\u2019 and move on with their life,\u201d Schaffer said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, \u2018No, no, no, I can\u2019t move on from that. I just saw an entire world that cemented how I feel about how life is silly, and why can\u2019t we have fun?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

As if to prove that too much of a good thing was possible, a glut of Movie movies followed: Not Another Teen Movie (2001), Date Movie (2006), Epic Movie (2007), Superhero Movie (2008), and Disaster Movie (2008), all of which riffed on viral pop-culture moments as much as the genres they were named for.<\/p>\n

Though these films\u2014many of them written and directed by the team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer\u2014were bacterially persistent and largely forgettable, they were also commercially successful, until Friedberg and Seltzer\u2019s The Starving Games (which parodied The Hunger Games) and Superfast! (ditto for The Fast and the Furious) flopped in quick succession.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Photo illustration by Slate. Images via 20th Century Studios, 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate.<\/p>\n

In the long-running<\/a> debate<\/a> over who killed the spoof movie, Friedberg and Seltzer are usually the prime suspects<\/a>. While movies like Airplane!, Naked Gun, and Young Frankenstein were critically<\/a> acclaimed<\/a> and have since been canonized<\/a>, no Friedberg and Seltzer movie ever scored higher than 7\u00a0percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and both critics and audiences<\/a> have regularly voted their movies among the worst of all time<\/a>. In a 2008 article headlined \u201cMeet the Charlatans,\u201d Slate\u2019s Josh Levin called Meet the Spartans \u201cthe worst movie I\u2019ve ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a \u2018movie\u2019 and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film<\/a>,\u201d predicting that the pair would soon gain infamy. By 2013, Nathan Rabin, writing for the AV Club, called them \u201cthe most reviled duo this side of Leopold and Loeb<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Friedberg and Seltzer were \u201ccomic terrorists\u201d who were \u201cdegrading the art of film and the art of comedy in one fell swoop,\u201d they didn\u2019t act alone. In fact, Rabin\u2019s criticism of Friedberg and Seltzer came from a review of 2011\u2019s Not Another Not Another Movie, by a whole separate set of parodists.<\/p>\n

In the past, Zucker has been harsh about Friedberg and Seltzer. In 2009 he told the Guardian, \u201cThey don\u2019t spoof scenes from other movies so much as repeat them<\/a>.\u201d But he told me he had no lingering ill will for any of these Z-A-Z wannabes: \u201cI don\u2019t want to bash those guys too much, because at least they weren\u2019t trying to do Naked Gun,\u201d he said. But by Not Another Not Another Movie, no one wanted to be associated any longer with spoof movies\u2014not even the makers of spoof movies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the spoof-comedy talent pool wasn\u2019t being replenished. Had you asked him in 2005 who was likely to make the next Airplane! or Blazing Saddles, Schaffer said, \u201cwe all could have named that group: It\u2019s Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson. It\u2019s Judd Apatow, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen.\u201d But comedy styles changed. When those stars were on the rise, Apatow\u2019s more naturalistic, more improv-based style of comedy was ascendant. Twenty years later, those same people are making movies and TV shows for streaming and have moved on to more-prestigious projects. \u201cBen Stiller would give us a Tropic Thunder every once in a while, and he doesn\u2019t do that anymore,\u201d Schaffer said. \u201cHe gives us Severance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, the screenwriting duo who wrote the new Naked Gun film with Schaffer, said that if any spoof-type comedy was happening on theatrical movie screens these days, it was sneaking in, Trojan horse\u2013style, with other genres: the horror films of Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger or the Marvel movies of Taika Waititi (all filmmakers, by the way, who built their foundations in sketch and spoof comedy). A movie like last year\u2019s superhero blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine<\/a>, Gregor said, \u201cis closer to The Naked Gun than it is to Batman, in a wonderful way.\u201d<\/p>\n

To get established in the spoof-comedy film category, Mand and Gregor had to smuggle themselves in too\u2014via an action-packed (and well-received) reboot of Chip \u2019n Dale: Rescue Rangers<\/a>, also directed by Schaffer, that was released on Disney+ in 2022.<\/p>\n

Though everyone may have fond memories of spoof comedies from years past, the studios have largely lost commercial interest in them. \u201cThe business model seems to have shifted towards big-budget movies made for $150 to $200 million,\u201d Gregor told me, \u201cwhich means they have to make $500\u00a0million.\u201d And no spoof movie has ever made that.<\/p>\n

The improbable fact that the current Naked Gun got made \u201cbegins and ends with Liam Neeson wanting to do this,\u201d Mand said. \u201cHe\u2019s done over 100 movies. He has earned all this goodwill as this dramatic actor and now, in the last 15 or 20 years, as this action vigilante. The fact that he wanted to do it shapes the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zucker (who directed Scary Movie\u00a03 and 4 and was a writer and producer on 5), said he sees the Z-A-Z influence in fewer and fewer places these days\u2014in movies like Mike Myers\u2019 Austin Powers series, which ended in 2002, and on TV shows like South Park and Impractical Jokers. The comedians he said he admires are people who \u201cdon\u2019t try to copy what we do. They do original ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Jesse David Fox
\n How the Lonely Island Changed the Internet, Comedy, and Especially Internet Comedy
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Though he would have liked to have written the new Naked Gun\u2014Zucker said he and his own collaborators came up with a script that riffed on Mission: Impossible, James Bond, and Jason Bourne and was intended for an actor in his 30s\u2014he said he had a sufficiently pleasant phone conversation with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who is a producer of the Naked Gun reboot.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t get mad at anyone who keeps telling me what a genius I am,\u201d Zucker said. \u201cBut it\u2019s not enough to be a fan. The guy at my dry cleaners is a big fan, but I don\u2019t think he could do Naked Gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bigger problem, as he sees it, is that Hollywood has basically lost its will, and that attitude is starving out the spoof genre he helped legitimize. \u201cI don\u2019t think things are rosy at all,\u201d said Zucker, who is still mourning the loss of his creative partner Jim Abrahams, who died of leukemia in November<\/a>. (Recalling one of the last times he and his brother Jerry saw Abrahams, Zucker said, \u201cWe told him how much we loved him and we were heartbroken, but at least he doesn\u2019t have to see Naked Gun\u00a04.\u201d)<\/p>\n

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But for spoof comedies to endure, they don\u2019t necessarily have to be added to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress<\/a>, as Airplane! was, or honored with celebratory retrospectives on their major anniversaries. Thinking back to his directorial debut, the spooflike 2007 comedy Hot Rod, which flopped at the box office but became a cult hit, Schaffer said that he and his collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone \u201cwould talk about how our dream audience was the person watching it on a Sunday afternoon on USA or Comedy Central with commercial breaks, panned and scanned, all ugly, the same way you would watch, like, Tommy Boy over and over.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new Naked Gun already has glowing<\/a> reviews<\/a> from critics, but that alone won\u2019t be enough to ensure a big opening weekend or the resurrection of the spoof category\u2014whether in theaters, on cable, or maybe during a 2\u00a0a.m. viewing on Netflix or YouTube. Still, if the genre has taught us anything, it\u2019s that for something to die, it sometimes takes a lot more<\/a> than a great fall<\/a>. The spoof movie may be on life support, but doctors say it\u2019s got a 50\/50 chance of living\u2014though there\u2019s only a 10\u00a0percent chance of that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Surely it\u2019s been a moment since you last checked in on Airplane!, the progenitor of the relentless film…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,5864,75,4048,337],"class_list":["post-37576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-comedy","tag-entertainment","tag-history","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}