YMMV / Dragnet

• Anvilicious
  • It's a Jack Webb production, so... yeah, though decidedly less in the 50s version compared to the 60s version.
  • The Mark VII Limited production logo.
• Awesome Music
  • DUNNN Dun-DUN-Dun...
  • The techno music Friday and Streebek dance to at the PAGAN rally in the 1987 film. As well as that film's rendition of the famous theme tune.
    • "City of Crime", released for the abovementioned movie, also goes surprisingly hard for a tongue-in-cheek Theme Tune Rap performed by Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, of all people.
  • There's a reason "Funny Man" (used in "The Big Bar" as the killer's favorite tune) was so popular.
  • The rock-and-roll Standard Snippet that plays at most teen parties in Sixties Dragnet (and early seasons of Adam-12).
• Complete Monster:
  • 1967 series' "The Big Explosion": Donald Chapman is a Neo-Nazi who had many run-ins with the law due to his various hate crimes. When Chapman learns a local school is about to be racially integrated, Chapman steals a large supply of dynamite from a construction site. Chapman uses the dynamite to build a bomb and hides in the school, with the bomb wired to the school bells, to ensure it goes off when the children arrive. When detectives Joe Friday and Bill Gannon arrest Chapman, he stalls for time to prevent them from stopping his plan.
  • L.A. Dragnet's "Killing Field": John Wesley Fuller is pulled over by the LAPD one day on a shoplifting charge only to find his vehicle, the name on his ID, and several of his possessions are from missing people. Digging deeper quickly reveals the truth; Fuller is a Serial Killer responsible for torturing, raping, and murdering dozens of people in his homemade Torture Cellar, burying the bodies around his old house. Fuller had his accomplice record over 197 separate tapes of him torturing the eclectic variety of men, women, and children he filled his victim pool with, and one of the videos gleefully shows him promising to murder the child of a woman he's about to rape should she resist him. While his accomplice was twisted into evil by his abusive father, Fuller kills people simply to feel powerful.
• Genre Turning Point: This franchise has been credited with not only popularly establishing the Police Procedural, but also changing the image of the police in the arts from the Inspector Lestrade stereotype and the Keystone Kops bunglers into upstanding professionals and heroes for the public good.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Remember Goldman from "The Big Hammer"? Well, his call sign is 1-Adam-12, which means he's Malloy's partner who was KIA not long after.
  • In the intro to "The Big Kidnap", when Friday is talking about how most people work to earn a living, one shot is of Ed White's spacewalk. The day after the episode aired, White and his two crewmates, Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee, died in the Apollo 1 Fire.
  • Malloy's involvement in the Police Brutality investigation in the 1969 season, seeing how a few years later he himself lashed out at a scumbag.
  • One of Joe Friday's most famous lectures in Dragnet 1967 is to a hippie in the episode "The Big Departure" (which first aired on March 7, 1968) who he rebuts with an Appeal to Worse Problems, noting, among other things, that 55,000 Americans will die in car accidents in any given year, "nearly six or seven times the number that will get killed in Vietnam." As it turned out, not only was that almost exactly the number of American servicemen who ultimately died in Vietnam, but the final toll of 58,281 made it a lowball estimate. What's more, around that time Ralph Nader was making automobile safety a major issue and sharply criticizing the automakers for making unsafe cars, which made him a fixture in left-wing activist circles and led to the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1970.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the movie, Streebeck has a hamburger phone in his apartment. Twenty years later, the hamburger phone would make an appearance in Juno and became a small meme for a while (even leading to a spike in hamburger phone sales). However, Streebeck's phone seems to work much better.
  • Hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight: In the third season of the '60s series, one episode dealt with Friday and Gannon's efforts to recruit more minorities into the force from a group of high-school graduates. One of the prospectives is none other than one Orenthal James Simpson.
  • Tom Hanks performing the 1987 film's Theme Tune Rap "City of Crime" alongside Dan Aykroyd is humorously prescient of his son Chet Hanks' own rap career.
  • Any time in the radio series that Harry Morgan (who later played Bill Gannon) is voicing a character who's not happy to have Friday and Romero nosing around.
• Memetic Mutation: Aside from the implacable deadpan police investigator archetype, there is of course BUHMM-BA-DUM-DUM.
• Mood Dissonance: The original series was a serious drama, yet the 1987 film was Played for Laughs. (Sure, it was an Affectionate Parody, but still...)
• Narm:
  • This might have been horrifying back when the first episode premiered, but the introduction of the first perp (of the 60's revival show) they bring in might invoke humor. They find a young man with his head buried in the ground, but clearly alive. Friday and Gannon bring his head up...to shockingly reveal one side of his face is painted blue and the other side is yellow with a dramatic scare chord!
  • The aforementioned "City of Crime" music video. While it is a catchy tune, it's pretty odd to see a full-scale techno/rap video that would have more in common in a work like Xanadu than a semi-serious police procedural. Especially when you have actors like Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd, who are, to a modern audience, more straight-laced actors absolutely hamming it up in more traditional, reserved roles like Sergeant Joe Friday. Then again, considering the nature of the film itself, that's kinda the point.
  • Pretty much any of the 60's episodes that deal with marijuana will be full of this to modern viewers.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Averted on the '60s show. Jack Webb used a regular group of actors to play various roles (see You Look Familiar on the main page), and in such a way that even if you did recognize that person from a previous episode, it was just as likely as not that the character would turn out to be the episode's perpetrator. However, most of the actors had a 'type' of character they were known for playing, and you could reliably depend on the knowledge that if a character had played a cop before, he was playing a cop again, or if he had been a non-cop, he wasn't likely to be a cop this time out.
• Nightmare Fuel: The giant python used for the Virgin Sacrifice in the 1987 movie. It doesn't help that it's in a dimly-lit tank of sewer water.
• Plot Twist: In the 1951 radio episode "Big Ben", Friday and Romero are investigating a carjacking. Halfway through the story, Friday is shot and seriously wounded by the perp. And, for the only time in the entire series history, Joe's partner (in this case, Ben Romero) takes over narrating the case.
• Retroactive Recognition: Greg Brady is an altar boy in the third and final version of the 'red wagon for Christmas' episode (which was done on radio and both TV versions).
  • Julius from "The Big Boys" was Leonard Nimoy's television debut, though it's chiefly the voice that's recognizable.
  • Kent McCord, later of Adam-12, has a bit role in "The Big Explosion" as a cop named Martin.
  • Tim Donnelly, who played Chet in Emergency!, is in "The Big High" as a neglectful pothead father.
  • The 2000s revival's second season features Eva Longoria before she hit it big in Desperate Housewives.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The radio show was written in the Late 40's/Early 50's and it shows. For starters, the main sponsor of the show is a cigarette brand. It was written years before DNA was even discovered and decades before DNA tests became a thing. The interrogations usually happen without a lawyer as Miranda rights weren't codified. A plot point hinges on the fact that a bar actually had a TV in it in one episode. An elevator operator has to tell Friday how to work the elevator as they have to evacuate the building due to a bomb, and he needs to leave.
  • Then there is hearing Friday say that twenty dollars is a lot of money for a teenager to have on him. This was before America under went several high inflation periods in rapid succession. In fact later on in the series, Jack Webb actually has a PSA on a few episodes about the massive inflation period after World War 2.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Some of the police procedures used in the original series, while acceptable at the time, don't carry over to well in current society. The Darker and Edgier 1954 movie includes two examples. When investigating a mob killing, the LAPD pulls in a large group of gangsters, holds them in a local hotel, and questions them for hours without legal representation. Later, Friday and Smith employ a "rolling stakeout" against one suspect. It involves them using tactics that would today be considered police harassment. Toned down by the revival which aired only a year after the Miranda trial.
  • There was an entire episode in the 60s series, "The Big Clan," dedicated to gypsies and fortune telling (at the time illegal in California) which portrayed them as essentially a bunch mob families with them trying to bribe Friday in order to 'have someone on their payroll' and him dealing with a clan war following the death of the self proclaimed king of all gypsies.
  • Another episode has someone bring up homosexuals and how society have come to so easily accept them and asks Friday how (the police) are going to deal with that fact, at which point Gannon only silently shakes his head. Implying that he shares the man's view.
  • The '60s series in particular never misses an opportunity to say that Drugs Are Bad. Nowadays public opinion has shifted towards legalization of several recreational substances, especially marijuana, and decriminalization of the use of hard drugs, addiction now being viewed as more of a public health issue than criminal. On the flipside, Joe Friday smokes like a chimney. Smoking tobacco is now frowned upon due to its health impacts (better-known now than in 1967) to the point where some US jurisdictions have banned smoking in public. In 2021 New Zealand even moved to phase out the legal sale of tobacco products altogether.

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