Trivia / Police Squad!

• The Artifact: Parodied with "IN COLOR". As TV broadcasting transitioned from black-and-white to color in the 1960s, TV shows made in color would promote that fact as a selling point. By 1982, when Police Squad! was made, all network TV shows had been made in color for a good 15 years, making the boast superfluous. That's the entire point.
• Blooper: The joke where Frank and Norberg barely react to a drive-by shooting is briefly ruined by Norberg's actor, (Peter Lupus), flinching at one of the squibs going off.
• Creator Cameo: An unusual version, as Georg Stanford Brown directed an episode and also appeared in one of the "special guest star" segments, but the segment appeared in a different episode to the one he directed.
• Distanced from Current Events: John Belushi filmed a scene as one of the Dead Star Walking, but he died before the show was aired. They quickly shot a replacement scene with Georg Stanford Brown, who they happened to have hired to direct one of the episodes.
• The Pete Best: Actors Alan North and Peter Lupus, whose characters went on to be played by George Kennedy and O. J. Simpson in the better known Naked Gun movies.
• Recycled Script:
  • The pilot is a spoof remake of an episode of M Squad ("More Deadly"), with jokes and non sequiturs added to the original plot and dialogue.
  • Inverted with David Misch's teleplay for the unproduced seventh episode, "'Testimony of Terror', or: 'A Kitten for Amy'"; the "Chief Ironblock" premise — where a hard-nosed cop is crushed inside a car compactor and fused into a metal cube, yet somehow survives with only his face, hands and feet protruding — and many of its associated visual gags would later turn up in Top Secret!.
• Screwed by the Network: One way or the other. Either their stated reason for cancelling the show was true — in which case it was simply a dumb reason — or, as fans have theorised for years, they were afraid that the series would destroy the reputation of police shows in much the same way that Airplane! made disaster movies a punchline.
• Short-Runner: Lasted for just six episodes before the network cancelled it. As noted in the DVD commentary, the producers and writers actually saw it as a relief because already with just half a dozen episodes, they felt they were stretching the jokes too thin (particularly the Once an Episode gags), and had no idea how or if they would be able to handle full seasons of twenty-plus episodes.
• What Could Have Been: ZAZ wanted Robert Stack for Frank Drebin — which makes sense, as his most famous role was Eliot Ness on The Untouchables, one of the many Police Procedural shows that Police Squad! parodied. When Stack turned them down, they then approached his Airplane! castmate Leslie Nielsen.
• Actor Allusion: Georg Stanford Brown is wearing a policeman's uniform in his cameo.

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