POLICE SQUAD (IN COLOR), THE NAKED GUN and other Zucker / Neilsen joy

[famethrowa]

"I haven't laughed since my wife died"
"Why did you laugh when your wife died?"

That's a good one.

[neveragain]

It's an odd tonal mix between whimsical ZAZ gags and Brooker crudity/nastiness.

[mobias]

Indeed. If they'd just done one feature-length episode, or did it as a film, it would have been a lot tighter and better. Writing a trilogy of films as your first go at this kind of comedy was a bit too much.

I guess the British crime dramas the show was satirising are an hour long so that was the template. Police Squad was half an hour long though and was far tighter.

[BeardFaceMan]

I guess the British crime dramas the show was satirising are an hour long so that was the template. Police Squad was half an hour long though and was far tighter.

Yeah but I meant that if you took the content from the 3 episodes and condensed those scripts down to one feature length episode it would have been a lot better and tighter, higher gag rate and less filler bits. Even as a massive fan of this genre, which Brooker & co. obviously are, it must be a bit of a shock when you actually sit down to write and discover just how many gags you're going to need. Those films are so dense (well, the good ones are), so much going on, spoken gags, sight gags, foreground gag, background gags, prop gags, they're fucking everywhere. I think they even wrote all 3 scripts at time same time, they were certainly filmed long before they aired, they just spread themselves a tad too thin.

[studpuppet]

AToC is definitely an homage to ZAZ, but it has got this Jeremy Vine lookalike stealing everything with his small glance down as he delivers the "I mopped myself down" line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4RKGels8Wo

Edit - not to mention the two background guys: the standby with the police line tape over his mouth and the forensic guy who looks like he's taking a slash behind Jeremy's head at the end.

[Thursday]

Yeah but I meant that if you took the content from the 3 episodes and condensed those scripts down to one feature length episode it would have been a lot better and tighter, higher gag rate and less filler bits. Even as a massive fan of this genre, which Brooker & co. obviously are, it must be a bit of a shock when you actually sit down to write and discover just how many gags you're going to need. Those films are so dense (well, the good ones are), so much going on, spoken gags, sight gags, foreground gag, background gags, prop gags, they're fucking everywhere. I think they even wrote all 3 scripts at time same time, they were certainly filmed long before they aired, they just spread themselves a tad too thin.

Yeah, wasn't there some odd structure, because it seems it was 3 series of 2, but they were all split up even though they'd already been made? And they had the thing of showing them on subsequent days. Just a bit odd. Can't remember exactly what was going on, but yeah the format added to it's problems.

[BeardFaceMan]

Yeah, wasn't there some odd structure, because it seems it was 3 series of 2, but they were all split up even though they'd already been made? And they had the thing of showing them on subsequent days. Just a bit odd. Can't remember exactly what was going on, but yeah the format added to it's problems.

That might be right, I seem to remember that series 3 was ready to be shown right after series 2 but it was held back for a year, so they may well have been filmed at the same time.

Edit - apparently all 3 series were ready to go at once but for some reason Sky decided to show them 1 series per year.

[Thursday]

I suppose the logic was you get more a "promotion cycle" if you stretch it out to 3 years, as opposed to putting out all 6 and being done, but it wasn't to be that format, and having only 2 episodes means it builds up absolutely no momentum.

[mhmhmh]

Worth crediting The Big Bus from 1976. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmPAiaBnNU

[famethrowa]

It's occurred to me that the only "funny" person in all these movies is Johnny from Airplane. Am I correct? Everyone else is deadly serious, surely

[Egyptian Feast]

Yeah, he's the only person who realises he's in a comedy.

[studpuppet]

Worth crediting The Big Bus from 1976. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmPAiaBnNU

Worth crediting Murph from the Magictones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLU-RuXC9Ls

[DrGreggles]

It's occurred to me that the only "funny" person in all these movies is Johnny from Airplane. Am I correct? Everyone else is deadly serious, surely

"And Leon's getting laaarger!"

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

Worth crediting The Big Bus from 1976. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmPAiaBnNU

Fucking love The Big Bus. 

This is a great little joke.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC92wx86z84