Remembering the Police Academy Movies

When catching up with Bobcat Goldthwait recently (he's doing stand-up these days) the Guardian made reference to the legacy of the Police Academy films--which, seen now, appear very much of another age. This is not least because of how very, very lightly they take the subject of policing. The makers of the movies certainly laughed at the cops--but took the most conventional view of their function, seeing no social question, no moral ambiguity, in what the police do as an institution or individually out on the street, with corruption unheard of, if not inconceivable in any organization that had kindly old Eric Lassard as its academy's commandant. (Indeed, I remember the final act of the original film saw the cadets called out to quell a riot that breaks out over a tossed apple--because apparently that's how riots happen.)

The franchise, which after the original 1984 hit cranked out a sequel a year from 1985 to 1989, was already well along the path of diminishing returns commercially as well as "artistically" by the '90s. (According to Box Office Mojo the first Police Academy movie, which grossed $81 million domestically, was the sixth-biggest earner of 1984, after only Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and The Karate Kid; the sixth movie, with not quite $12 million grossed in 1989, was only #78 on that year's list.*) Yet I suspect that even if that had not been the case it would not have been so easy to keep the franchise going in the wake of the Rodney King affair and the subsequent real-life riot (in every detail of causes and consequences, not like the one in the movie), the more in as (in line with the general L.A.-ness of American movie production then) the force in question was the Los Angeles Police Department. Unsurprisingly there was just one more movie, far removed from L.A. and its troubles, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (ironically, as Moscow had its own troubles--the political side of which was the 1993 constitutional crisis that saw Boris Yeltsin let slip the tanks of war against the Russian parliament forcing a halt to production, and the damaged Duma building seen in the actual movie, the camera lingering on it for a moment after the action passed it by, if memory serves).

That film got a mere token release (which brought in about 1 percent of what the badly flopping Police Academy 6 did in the box office) and was not followed by another.* And if anything the Police Academy films' tone grew only more implausible still. Even in so light a comedy as 1998's Rush Hour Chris Tucker's character still offered some acknowledgment of the reality, quipping that he "is LAPD, the most hated cops in the free world." ("Own mama ashamed of me. She tell everybody I'm a drug dealer," he added for good measure.) In its own small way it was a reminder that neither supporters nor critics of the police could take the matter as lightly as they had just a few years earlier--and in the decades since the polarization and its implications (Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, etc.) have gone far, far beyond that.

* Looking at the list it is striking that only one of the six movies was a sequel or a remake (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). By contrast every one of the top ten movies of 2023 was a sequel or remake or sequel to a remake (like Jurassic World: Dominion).
** The franchise's sole post-Police Academy 7 issue was a syndicated sitcom that lasted one season (1997-1998), with an original cast though with appearances by the actors from the films in their familiar roles (as with Leslie Easterbrook's cameo as Debbie Callahan, who was no longer a police officer but now District Attorney).