Original ‘Naked Gun’ cast was battle-tested from classic ’70s disaster pictures

A functioning society needs to know they are in secure hands, and the citizens of Los Angeles slept soundly knowing that Detective Frank Drebin and his colleagues at Police Squad were on the scene.

Over the course of three motion pictures (adapted from a six-episode television series, Police Squad!), the cast of the OG Naked Gun trilogy never let problems like Ricardo Montalban using mind control to make Reggie Jackson assassinate Queen Elizabeth give them any worries.

The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker 1988 classic The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is, of course, a gag-a-minute barrage of jokes that steamrolls you into laughter, but a key element of its success is the casting. Those playing the cops were performers primarily known for serious roles — men who exuded competency and professionalism in the face of danger, and veterans of classic 1970s disaster films. (Thus all the more funny that when a buxom woman asks, “Is this some kind of bust?”)

Front and center of The Naked Gun was Leslie Nielsen, a ZAZ veteran who had turned in a deadpan performance in Airplane! and originated the Frank Drebin character on the short-lived ABC series. The Canadian-born actor’s career began in straight dramas on stage and television. His big break in movies came with the part of Commander John J. Adams in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, a serious (for its time) science-fiction adventure loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Years later, he played another captain of a doomed vessel, sitting in the center seat of Irwin Allen’s legendary 1972 disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure.

While it may be considered a cheesy classic now, Allen’s films were box office sensations that managed to secure Academy Award nominations. Indeed, The Poseidon Adventure won two Oscars (Best Visual Effects and Best Song for “The Morning After”) and had seven other nominations including a Best Supporting Actress nod for Shelley Winters. (She already had two wins in that category, so it was fine for her to lose to Eileen Heckart in Butterflies Are Free, though had we been voting that year, Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid or Susan Tyrell in Fat City would have gotten our vote!)

Anyway, check out Nielsen looking serious before his enormous ocean liner flipped upside down, causing grief for Gene Hackman and Red Buttons.

While Allen is the undisputed king of the disaster genre (his credits also include The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, When Time Ran Out, and television movies with subtle names like Fire, Flood, and Cave-In), he didn’t initiate the trend. That started with Airport, or, one could argue, the Airport sequels.

The first Airport does include disaster at 30,000 feet (Van Heflin smuggles a bomb onto a plane, you see), but most of the film is simply a look at how rough it is to run a modern airport. There’s a lot more about zoning issues than you might expect. The beating heart of the film — which won Helen Hayes a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing a klepto-granny, and was nominated for nine more including Best Picture — is George Kennedy’s no-job-is-too-difficult mechanic Joe Patroni.

Airport is a spectacular film with a stacked cast (Dean Martin! Jean Seberg! Burt Lancaster! Maureen Stapleton!), but what happened is that there were three sequels — each one stupider than the last. One of them involved a plane trapped underwater somehow. The connection between them all, however, was Kennedy coming in at the last minute to save the day with his toolbox and can-do attitude.

Kennedy also appeared in Earthquake, another of the all-star cast disaster movies. (That one was toplined by Charlton Heston, who was also in the second Airport picture.)

But speaking of disasters… well, we guess it’s time to address the running back in the room. O.J. Simpson starred in the Naked Gun movies, and it’s not a crime to admit he’s pretty funny in them. (Is he as funny as another sports legend in a ZAZ picture, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane!? Probably not.)

Simpson was part of the enormous ensemble in Allen’s masterpiece, The Towering Inferno. He played the chief of security facing down a frightened group of people atop a blazing skyscraper alongside Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Fred Astaire, and so many more.

Simpson’s later film work included Capricorn One, a really good NASA conspiracy thriller that costarred Elliott Gould and James Brolin — both of Barbra Streisand’s husbands!

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

The Towering Inferno won three Academy Awards — for Best Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Song (“We May Never Love Like This Again”) — and was nominated for five more including Best Picture. (It lost to The Godfather Part II, but it should have lost to Chinatown!)

You can check out its old school trailer below.