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A Sierra-style adventure in the Police Squad!/Naked Gun universe, on MRPGI — which reimplements AGI, the engine Sierra shipped Police Quest on. The premise: Police Quest's pedantic procedure x Police Squad!'s farce. The game grades you on correct procedure with a straight face, and the reward for perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. Per John, the famous Police Quest II bugs are shipped deliberately as canon gags. - RESEARCH.md — all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films (incl. Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr, 2025), the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar. - DESIGN.md — the joke engine, the two Drebins across three eras (Drebin Sr's 1982 cases render in a monochrome EGA subset for the 1950s M Squad look), an eleven-case campaign, and the PQ2 glitch-to-feature table. - cases/case-01-substantial-gift — playable. Five rooms, 100 points, full win path verified headlessly at 95/100 plus four authored Sierra deaths. Procedure gates, dusting for latents, and Miranda rights in the correct order are all pure JSON; no engine features were invented for it. - tools/sprites.py — all 24 sprites generated locally on MODELBEAST (flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> trim/downscale), reproducible by seed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
149 lines
8.8 KiB
Markdown
149 lines
8.8 KiB
Markdown
# Source material — *Police Squad!* and *The Naked Gun*
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Research notes behind the game design. Everything here is canon from the six TV
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episodes and four films. Design decisions built on it live in [DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md).
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---
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## 1. The canon, in order
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| # | Work | Year | Drebin | Villain | Notes |
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|---|------|------|--------|---------|-------|
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| — | *Police Squad!* (6 eps) | 1982 | Leslie Nielsen | one-off | ABC. Cancelled after 4 aired. |
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| 1 | *The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!* | 1988 | Leslie Nielsen | Vincent Ludwig | Plot skeleton lifted from *Telefon* |
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| 2 | *The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear* | 1991 | Leslie Nielsen | Quentin Hapsburg | Energy policy |
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| 3 | *Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult* | 1994 | Leslie Nielsen | Rocco Dillon | Drebin retired |
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| 4 | *The Naked Gun* | 2025 | **Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr.** | Richard Cane | 88% RT, Critics' Choice Best Comedy |
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The 1982 series was created by Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker straight off *Airplane!*,
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and was a direct parody of ***M Squad*** (1957–60, Lee Marvin) and *Felony Squad*
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— 1950s hardboiled cop TV. **This matters:** the "1950s Frank Drebin Sr" idea
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isn't an invention, it's the form the joke was originally cut from.
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---
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## 2. *Police Squad!* — all six episodes
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Each is a self-contained case. Perfect mission-sized units.
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| Ep | Title | Guest star murdered in the titles | Case |
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|----|-------|-----------------------------------|------|
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| 1 | A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) | Lorne Greene | Credit union manager shot. Teller **Sally Decker** did it — stealing to pay orthodontist bills — and framed a customer. |
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| 2 | Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment) | Georg Stanford Brown | Boxing corruption. Frank goes undercover as a fight manager; a boxer's wife is kidnapped to force a dive. |
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| 3 | Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood) | Florence Henderson | Protection racket. Frank and Norberg open a **locksmith shop** as a front. |
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| 4 | Revenge and Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) | William Shatner, Dr. Joyce Brothers | Courthouse bombing; **Eddie Casales** framed. |
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| 5 | The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand) | Robert Goulet, Tommy Lasorda | Kidnapping of a businessman's daughter during a birthday party. |
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| 6 | Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don't Laugh) | William Conrad, Dick Clark | A comedian dies; Frank infiltrates a nightclub drug ring. |
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*(Ep 5's guest was originally John Belushi, replaced after his death.)*
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### The recurring cast
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- **Det. Lt. Frank Drebin** (Leslie Nielsen) — narrates in hardboiled voiceover
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while doing something idiotic on screen.
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- **Capt. Ed Hocken** (Alan North; George Kennedy in the films) — the briefing.
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- **Officer Nordberg** (Peter Lupus in the series, "Norberg"; O. J. Simpson in
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the films) — exists to be injured.
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- **Ted Olson** (Ed Williams) — lab scientist. Explains forensics while doing
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something wildly unsuitable involving children present in the lab.
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- **Johnny the Snitch** (William Duell) — shoeshine man. Knows *everything*.
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- **Al** (Tiny Ron Taylor) — an officer so tall his head is permanently above
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the top of frame. Never commented on.
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- **Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln** — credited in the titles, never in an episode.
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---
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## 3. The films — plot beats worth stealing
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### *The Naked Gun* (1988)
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Beirut cold open: Drebin single-handedly breaks up a summit of America's enemies
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(Gorbachev, Gaddafi, Khomeini, Arafat, Castro, Idi Amin). Home in LA, **Nordberg**
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is shot on a heroin boat run by shipping magnate **Vincent Ludwig**
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(Ricardo Montalbán). Hocken gives Frank 24 hours to clear Nordberg before
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**Queen Elizabeth II** visits. Frank visits Ludwig's office and accidentally
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reveals Nordberg survived. Ludwig sets his assistant **Jane Spencer**
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(Priscilla Presley) on Frank; they fall in love. Ludwig is being paid $20m by
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**Pahpshmir** to kill the Queen using a **beeper that triggers post-hypnotic
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suggestion** — anyone becomes an unwitting assassin. At the Queen's reception
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Drebin mistakes a ceremonial musket for an attack, causes chaos, gets fired.
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Climax at **Anaheim Stadium**: Frank sneaks in, becomes the **home plate umpire**
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so he can frisk players, and Ludwig activates **Reggie Jackson**. Ludwig falls
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from the stadium, is flattened by a steamroller, then trampled by a marching band.
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### *The Naked Gun 2½* (1991)
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Energy policy. **Dr. Albert Meinheimer** will recommend renewables; oil man
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**Quentin Hapsburg** (Robert Goulet) swaps him for a lookalike, **Earl Hacker**.
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Frank spots the fake because the double lacks Meinheimer's photographic memory.
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Set pieces: the **Blue Note bar** where Frank drowns his sorrows; a SWAT tank
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driven through a house and into the **zoo**, releasing animals; assassin
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**Hector Savage** killed with a fire hose; the squad infiltrating the Press Club
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dinner **dressed as a mariachi band**; a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over
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its power cord. The escaped **lion** kills Hapsburg. Frank proposes to Jane.
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### *Naked Gun 33⅓* (1994)
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Frank is retired, in marriage counselling, and bored. Bomber **Rocco Dillon**
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(Fred Ward) is in prison; Frank goes undercover as **"Nick the Slasher McGurk"**
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to get into his cell, and escapes with him through a tunnel to Rocco's mother
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**Muriel**. Rocco's plan: a bomb in the **Best Picture envelope** at the Academy
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Awards. Famous sequence: Frank repeatedly giving samples at a **sperm bank** to
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avoid being recognised by **Tanya Peters**.
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### *The Naked Gun* (2025)
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**Lt. Frank Drebin Jr.** (Liam Neeson), LAPD Police Squad. Opens with Frank
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foiling bank robbers **while dressed as a schoolgirl** — unaware he's the
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distraction for the real theft: the **P.L.O.T. Device** (Primordial Law of
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Toughness). Tech billionaire **Richard Cane** (Danny Huston) intends to use it to
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revert humanity to a primitive state, cull the population, and ride it out in a
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bunker. Frank investigates the "suicide" of engineer Simon Davenport and teams up
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with his sister, novelist **Beth Davenport** (Pamela Anderson). **Capt. Ed Hocken
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Jr.** (Paul Walter Hauser) and **Chief Davis** (CCH Pounder) round out the squad;
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henchman **Sig Gustafson** (Kevin Durand). Police Squad is decommissioned. The
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climax is a New Year's ball drop at the **"Ponzi-scheme.com Arena"**; Frank loses
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his trousers retrieving the device. **His dead father's spirit arrives as an owl**,
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airlifts him, and blinds Cane with excrement. Ending: "Internal Affairs" turns out
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to be a tropical resort.
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**The father is canon.** The 2025 film explicitly makes Leslie Nielsen's Drebin
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the Sr. to Neeson's Jr., and gives Sr. a literal supernatural cameo. A two-Drebin
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game is not a liberty — it's the franchise's own structure.
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---
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## 4. The comedy grammar (the part that actually matters)
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Plot is scaffolding; ZAZ jokes are built from a small number of repeatable
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machines. These are what the game has to reproduce.
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1. **Deadpan.** Nobody acknowledges anything is funny. Nielsen played it exactly
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as Lee Marvin would have. **Never wink.**
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2. **Literalism.** The joke is a word taken at face value.
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*"Cigarette?" — "Yes, it is."* / *"Doctor" — "Yes?" — "Nurse" — "Yes?"*
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3. **Background gags.** Foreground dialogue plays straight while something
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catastrophic happens behind it, uncommented.
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4. **Escalating property damage.** Frank parks, and something enormous is
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destroyed off-screen with a crash.
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5. **Literalised metaphor.** Someone says "he was in over his head" and there is
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a man in a swimming pool.
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6. **The narration/action gap.** Hardboiled voiceover over visibly pathetic action.
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7. **Nordberg suffers.** Continuously, escalating, uncommented.
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8. **Al's head is out of frame.** Nobody has ever mentioned it.
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9. **Johnny knows everything.** Asked about a case, he also fluently explains
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astrophysics, ballet, or macroeconomics — and everyone queues to ask him.
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10. **The freeze-frame ending.** The cast laughs and holds still — while things
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keep visibly moving and going wrong inside the "frozen" shot.
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**Rule for writing this game:** the *game* must never think it's funny. Text stays
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police-procedural and flat. The comedy is in what the flat text is describing.
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---
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## Sources
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- [Police Squad! — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Squad!)
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- [The Naked Gun (1988) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Gun:_From_the_Files_of_Police_Squad!)
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- [The Naked Gun 2½ — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Gun_2%C2%BD:_The_Smell_of_Fear)
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- [Naked Gun 33⅓ — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Gun_33%E2%85%93:_The_Final_Insult)
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- [The Naked Gun (2025) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Gun_(2025_film))
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- [Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Quest:_In_Pursuit_of_the_Death_Angel)
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- [The Naked Gun Franchise — Fandom](https://thenakedgun.fandom.com/wiki/The_Naked_Gun_Franchise) *(402 on fetch; used for cross-checking names only)*
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