Police Academy

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2020

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Quite frankly, this franchise was a bit of a blur for all of us. Seven movies, a TV series, a Saturday morning cartoon... at a certain point it all starts to run together a little bit.

And yet, this original film does have a few key differences from everything else that would follow - not the least of which is its R-rating. Police Academy was initially conceived as a way to capitalize on the success of raunchy comedies like Bachelor Party and Porky's, but the director wasn't a fan of that style of humor and tried to steer this in a less vulgar direction. As it turns out, you can definitely feel that struggle in the finished product.

Topics include: the real life event that inspired the premise of the film, how the director's unfamiliarity with the genre both helps and hurts the movie, the scenes he (unsuccessfully) lobbied the producers to remove, why just sticking to the formula may have been the best course of action in this case, how this was sustained for six sequels, what a reboot might look like, and much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Police Academy?
0:07.0	Hello and welcome, Hey, do you, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.9	I'm Chris.
0:32.6	I'm Donna.
0:33.3	And I'm Carlos.
0:33.9	And today we're revisiting Police Academy.
0:53.3	Thank you. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Police Academy. On a purely surface level, it's hard to imagine two films with less in common than Police Academy and the Right Stuff.
1:00.7	One is an Academy Award-winning drama about the seven military pilots that were selected for Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight launched by the United States.
1:10.5	The other is a critically reviled slapstick comedy
1:13.6	that features a grown man being launched headfirst into a horse's asshole.
1:18.1	And yet, the latter would not exist without the former.
1:21.8	While on a break from filming the right stuff in San Francisco,
1:24.8	producer Paul Mislansky looked across the street
1:27.2	and saw a motley
1:28.0	crew of police cadets being reprimanded by an exasperated sergeant. In Ms. Lanski's own words,
1:34.4	they were an unbelievable bunch, including a lady who must have weighed over 200 pounds and a flabby
1:39.8	man of well over 50. I asked the sergeant about them, and he explained that the mayor had ordered
1:45.4	the department to accept a broad spectrum for the academy. We have to take them in, he said,
1:50.7	and the only thing we can do is wash them out. Ms. Lansky couldn't shake this image,
1:55.6	and after recounting the story for the head of the production company financing the right stuff,
2:00.1	he posed a question.
2:01.3	But what if they actually made it? And that was it. That was the entire pitch for what became
	...

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