WILL IT BE ANY COP?

IT’S BEEN THREE DECADES SINCE A BUMBLING DREBIN ATTEMPTED TO CRACK A CASE. BUT NOW THE NAKED GUN IS BACK, SWAPPING LESLIE NIELSEN FOR LIAM NEESON.

WORDS NICK DE SEMLYEN

ONE OBJECT STRUCK fear into the hearts of interviewers around the world throughout the 1980s and ’90s. It was a contraption built by a golf pro in Oklahoma City for one purpose, and one purpose only. And whether you were David Letterman or Lorraine Kelly, it could be unleashed at any moment, derailing your careful line of questioning with a single well-timed parp. Yes, Leslie Nielsen’s Pooter Tooter, a handheld fart machine made of plastic and rubber, was a powerful force of chaos. And the late star played the wind instrument like a maestro, maintaining a poker face as he reduced audiences to roars of laughter and left talk-show hosts speechless.

“I do not travel anywhere alone,” he told Conan O’Brien on live TV one night, after revealing the offending item. “That goes with me all over... It always comes in handy.”

Nielsen’s relentless dedication to the bit — below his name on his gravestone in Florida are the words, “Let ’er rip” — boosted his transformation into a gigantic comedy star in the ’80s. Airplane! used him as an ace card; nobody expected the dignified captain from The Poseidon Adventure to be so damn silly. And although the great TV cop-show spoof, Police Squad!, was swiftly cancelled, its follow-up movie, 1988’s The Naked Gun, sealed the deal, Nielsen’s hapless but ever-self-assured LAPD officer Frank Drebin becoming a big-screen phenomenon. Two sequels followed, with Nielsen claiming at one point that he was signing over a thousand autographs a day (as with everything he said, there’s a high probability this is nonsense). When the series wound down in the mid-’90s, no serious attempt was made to replace him.

Yet three decades on, a fresh Drebin is picking up the badge, in a new Naked Gun. And there was one moment on set that would seem to confirm the correct successor to Nielsen had been found. “He was actually the most game for the most silly stuff,” says director Akiva Schaffer of his star. “I was constantly surprised. He would be on set adding fart jokes, and I’d have to be like, ‘Remember, three scenes earlier we have that fart joke. So if you do it here, it might be too early.’”

Frank Drebin Jr (Liam Neeson) brings a whole new set of skills.

Director Akiva Schaffer on set with Neeson and Paul Walter Hauser, who plays Captain Ed Hocken — son of, yes, Captain Ed Hocken;