Title origins

The Naked Gun began life as a big-screen continuation of the 1982 cult TV spoof Police Squad!, but Paramount was wary of confusion with the popular Police Academy series.

As a result, creators David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker were given a list of twenty alternative titles.

They settled on The Naked Gun because, as David Zucker later joked, it “promised so much more than it could possibly deliver”.

That sense of ironic grandeur helped set the tone for the franchise’s absurdist humour.