Said general vibe does not, apparently, extend to original Naked Gun director David Zucker, who recently gave an interview to Women’s World that was ostensibly about promoting his new online comedy course MasterCrash, but which also seemed like an irresistible opportunity for Zucker to talk hefty amounts of shit about Seth MacFarlane, Akiva Schaffer, and everybody else involved in the Liam Neeson revival of the series. (Which Zucker created, along with his brother Jerry Zucker, and long-time comedy partner Jim Abrahams.) “We originated our own style,” Zucker said of the spoof brand he and his collaborators invented, and then pursued across 50 years of making movies. “And we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently. People started copying it, like [producer] Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.”
Although Zucker had worked on plans over the years for a fourth Naked Gun movie (following 1994’s lackluster The Final Insult), they never came to fruition, and neither he nor his brother were involved in the new movie’s production. (Abrahams died last November.) And, if we’re being honest, Zucker sounds pretty pissed off about the whole thing, often pulling unrelated parts of the interview back to a get in a little more shit-talking about the Schaffer-directed film. Let’s run down the various jabs he tosses in: “They tried to replace Leslie Nielsen in the new Naked Gun, and you can’t replace him. No one else can do that.” “You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz. Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.” “Everybody’s in it for the money now, and that feels like the only reason why they wanted to do a new Naked Gun.”
So, yeah: Not a fan.
