Hacker Cinema
Police Academy
1984 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Hugh Wilson
New rules enforced by the Lady Mayoress mean that sex, weight, height and intelligence need no longer be a factor for joining the Police Force. This opens the floodgates for all and sundry to enter the Police Academy, much to the chagrin of the instructors. Not everyone is there through choice, though. Social misfit Mahoney has been forced to sign up as the only alternative to a jail sentence and it doesn't take long before he falls foul of the boorish Lieutenant Harris. But before long, Mahoney realises that he is enjoying being a police cadet and decides he wants to stay... while Harris decides he wants Mahoney out!
3 positive2 negative6 neutralfrom 11 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
13 comments on Hacker News
This is an outrageous lie, there were SEVEN Police Academy movies!!!
No, Kubernetes in Action, but that book was also on my radar (mainly as Kelsey Hightower's name reminds me of the Police Academy films I loved as a kid).
"College... and the Police Academy movies."
--Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere), Wayne's World, on how she learned English
So you've never watched an old film? Listened to music from before you were born? Read a book from before you were born?
There was more than enough of this stuff when I was young, but instead of watching police academy 26 I watched something actually good.
Police Academy isn't meant to be a documentary :D
And it wasn't the depiction due to the time period the Indy film was set in that made it racist, it's the depiction of Indians as primitives who eat monkey brains and all that rubbish. It was just a trope in the '80s. If they aren't from the West, they must be primitives, etc.
Same. If you watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or the Police Academy films, they're so racist that if they were still popular they'd need massive disclaimers. Books are easier to edit so they have.
I'm not sure there is a difference between these concepts here. The quality Netflix is after isn't highbrow content that feeds pretentiousness but isn't actually watched. It's masterful execution of a craft, which can happen in any genre.
As an example: the original Police Academy movie had both quality and a large audience. The rest of the franchise was increasingly cringy and saw, I assume, declining viewership.
The reason why Netflix should care about quality and not just eyeballs is that it's a leading indicator: Police Academy II may well have had a larger audience, surfing on the coattails of the first installment. But that's not a sustainable strategy, and unlike the producers of Police Academy XI, Netflix can't just leave the husk and find a new home if it ruins its brand.
So for Netflix, it's not just important to get many people to watch something. They also need to come away from the experience with a wish to repeat it. There may well be more to the experience than mere enjoyment, as well: I feel like there is a sense of "quality" I get when watching something that is distinct from my enjoyment, and that I am more likely to remember it, and fondly so, if I find that quality.
All that suggests a few ideas that mere viewership wouldn't: Netflix would try, for example, to keep me from watching something that I end up despising, and especially if I do so because I consider it "low-quality". You can do reality TV even if your audience has more Ivy League credentials than a New England Hospital, but you better make sure it has a chance to become a pop-cultural phenomenon, like, say, a show about interior decorating that neatly fits into a wider trend of minimalism.
Teacher is totally right. I used to be a movie buff, I started with the best movies and drilled down like. If I like a movie, I will check director or hero/heroine and start watching their flims. This started in 2004 beginning of torrents. I almost all movies, I ever liked in a 2tb hard disk. Nowadays I just re-download for better print but even I am not sure why I am doing I do it. When it started to hitt downturn is, at a point I was watching movies just to understand what the director is trying to tell as someone has produced this movie. I slowly started to cut back like I don't watch movies if it's more than 130mins and started cutting down the time.
If is say what's my best its mostly the ones between 1980 to 2005. Everything after that was too much CGI or it was like okay movie.
Like comedies I liked were Encino man, son in law, first few parts of police academy, jury duty.
Action movies Conair, lost in space, broken Arrow, specialist, assassins. Desperado.
The infamous “Boob scenes” of 70’s and 80’s cinema always stuck me as a peculiarly pre worldwide web artefact.
ie with ready access to actual, proper porn teenage lads no longer need to see a random set of norks added to films like Police Academy, Porkies or Trading Places solely for titillation[sic].
The world was different back then.
To hook up with someone you had to actually speak to a random stranger, get shot down, deal with it and workout whatever goofy thing you’d said or done before plucking the courage to have another go.
In the meantime there was Sgt Callahan... :P
ET was a bankable director's hobby project.
The two Star Wars movies were still sequels, even if the franchise was new in the 70s. Star Wars wore many of its pulp Hollywood adventure series and World War 2 movie influences on its sleeve.
The three Indiana Jones were two bankable directors' hobby project. In turn, they were heavily based on early Hollywood adventure serials and pulp adventure novels.
Ghostbusters was bankable comedians' hobby project.
Beverly Hills Cop was a "cheap" film in a bankable genre (cop film), that was easy to franchise if successful (which it was, and did).
I won't directly harp on BTTF that much, but some combination of all the above applies to it, too.
5 of those 9 all directly involved Spielberg, in one capacity or another, which is another way for Hollywood to avoid risk by betting on the non-riskiest "risk taker" they can find. (Given Lucas' relationship with Spielberg, you can argue that Star Wars also benefited indirectly from Spielberg's "golden touch" in the 80s, bringing the count to 7 of 9.)
But looking at the Top 10 isn't particularly fair in any decade. For every ET and Ghostbusters there were six of the seven Police Academy movies and seven James Bond films, for two easy 80s examples.
The whole point of that (awful [1]) movie was that they artificially arranged to have the clones grow up much as Hitler did. The first few scenes have hitmen killing the clones' fathers at the same age as the real Adolf.
[1] Well, at least Steve Guttenberg and Lawrence Olivier got to be in the same film. It was either that or Police Academy XII.
"Where did you learn English?"
"College. And the Police Academy movies."
"It was directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite, who rose - and fell from - fame after starring as Zed in the hit Police Academy movies. "