YMMV / The Pink Panther Strikes Again

• Awesome Music:
  • The two pieces of background music, "Bier Fest Polka" and "Waltzing in Munich", which can be heard in the scene where the assassins try (and fail) to kill Clouseau at the carnival, as well as the "that is not my dog" hotel scene later on.
  • The strings-heavy theme for the Doomsday Machine helps establish its power.
• Even Better Sequel: This is considered by many to be even better than the already well-received previous movie, and a strong contender with A Shot in the Dark for the title of the best entry in the series.
• Genius Bonus: The President's demand for the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon to find out who won the football game Dreyfus interrupted initially seems to be a Take That! towards the United States' obssession with football and Gerald Ford in general, but Gerald R. Ford was an avid football fan, having played the game in his school-going years and one of the teams on the TV is, in fact, the Michigan Wolverines, the team that Ford played with in his college-going years, so it makes sense that he would be so eager to find out who won the game.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Dreyfus' insulting Badass Boast about Clouseau is that he is an incredibly Lethal Klutz who is one of a kind ("you won't find someone worse anywhere in the world!"), when the franchise went on to demonstrate that there definitely are more men as klutzy as Clouseau (one of which is his own son), and Dreyfus is unlucky enough to meet them all.
• Older Than They Think: Clouseau being persued by assassins at a festival and not only surviving all attempts on his life but taking out all of the assassins through sheer dumb luck had been previously done on a much smaller scale in 1968's Inspector Clouseau with a single assassin at a German heritage festival.
• Retroactive Recognition: Deep Roy plays the Italian assassin as his first film role.
• Signature Scene: Clouseau interrogates the missing victim's servants, and in the course of five minutes, he manages, among other things, to destroy a piano and accidentally shoot a police officer. It perfectly summarizes the character.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • After the UN building is vaporized, what apparently is supposed to be the Empire State Building is visible in background, and we say "apparently" because it looks nothing like the building does in real life.
  • When Dreyfuss' tooth gets pulled out, it's incredibly obvious that the effect is achieved via painting his tooth black.
• Values Resonance: Clouseau's treatment of Jarvis after it's revealed Jarvis is a drag queen is very progressive for 1976. He does struggle for a term to refer to Jarvis as, but this most likely due to him being caught off guard as drag queens and other members of the LGBT community largely kept to themselves at the time and while he is quick to retrieve his badge from inside his coat when Jarvis touches him while in costume, this likely has more to do with the fact that Jarvis did not ask permission before physically touching a police officer. Though Jarvis being killed partway through the film does take away some of the weight of such a progressive take, the dead body of his assassin in the background and the strong implication Jarvis killed his assassin after being mortally injured adds it back.

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