THE NAKED BUN 2 1/2: THE SMELL OF BEER

THE NAKED GUN 2½: THE SMELL OF FEAR (1991)
dir: David Zucker

THE NAKED BUN 2 ½: THE SMELL OF BEER
Cracked #269, January 1992
a: Walter Brogan

It's weird they'd do a spoof of a spoof. They managed to make it less funny. And if you weren't familiar with the original source, you wouldn't even know it was a comedy from this.

The prologue begins with Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) at a dinner for President Bush Sr. and his cabinet, with the misogynistic hijinks of Drebin accidentally abusing Barbara Bush. The dinner is to celebrate an energy conference that is to happen the next day withAlbert Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths) to give a lecture about renewable energy. Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet) is the head of an oil company.

At the table are energy secretary John Sununu, Vice President Dan Quayle and his wife, Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and senator Edward Kennedy. Sununu's caption is a reference to how he flew around the country to expose forgeries of George Bush baseball cards from Bush's days as a college player.

There was an explosion at Meinheimer's lab which Frank Drebin, along with Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) and Nordberg (O. J. Simpson, before he was O. J. Simpson) helping to investigate. Jane (Priscilla Presley), who is now dating Hapsburg, was once a fiance of Frank's who broke off their engagement and is now a potential witness.

Life Stinks was Mel Brooks' attempt at doing a movie that wasn't a parody of anything. The sight gag in the third panel is a reference to one where the body outlines at the scene of the crime were shaped like Egyptian paintings.

Hapsburg and his henchmen plan to replace Meinheimer with a double (Earl Hacker) so Meinhemer's speech at the conference will now be about oil as a renewable energy source.

At the conference, someone manages to find the real Meinheimer who will give the speech, but Frank doesn't know that. He knows the real Meinheimer has a birthmark on his butt, so he will pull down the pants of the man he thinks is an impostor to show he's fake.

The next few pages show what it would be like if other movies used the Naked Gun formula, which is basically “What if these movies were parodied by Cracked?”

Airplane!, the first Zucker movie, used the “What is it?” gag a few times, and the Panic parody did the 'damn/dam' pun.

The more successful Naked Gun franchise evolved from the far superior TV series Police Squad!, which was more of a parody of 70s detective shows like Columbo or Cannon than a series of comedies about a clumsy cop. The latter flopped because the ways of watching television were much different forty years ago, and without paying attention, viewers didn't know that with the deadpan delivery and lack of laughtrack it was still a comedy using the Airplane! formula.

When the team of The Zucker Brothers and Jim Abrahams made Airplane!, it worked because such a way of parodying hadn't been done before, absurd lines delivered completely straight by actors who would've been in the very movies being parodied, and plots and background music that weren't comedic at all. By the time the Naked Gun movies were released, it wasn't surprising serious actors would do comedies and even though conventions were still being parodied, actors were mugging for the camera and there were “funny” situations.

POLICE SQUAD: O.J. ON THE ROCKS
MAD #344, April 1996
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Angelo Torres

MAD parodied them too, or rather the movies and not the series. Again, treating it as if it weren't a comedy, but probably using it because O. J. Simpson played Nordberg.

O.J. Simpson, declared innocent, vowed to find “the real killers”. Behind him is lawyer Johnnie Cochran. Under the desk is Lisa Marie Presley, who was married to Michael Jackson.

In the first panel is a caricature of Rodney King, the victim of a police beating after trying to get both sides to make peace in the Los Angeles riots a few years earlier. The third panel has Leslie Nielsen narrating as Dracula from the Mel Brooks movie Dracula Sucks. The glove was supposedly planted as evidence. The running gag in the Naked Gun movies is that When Frank Drebin parks he drives into trees and hydrants.

Mark Fuhrman was famous for his racism.