Police Academy

Police Academy (1984) starts with a police department dropping its recruitment standards. No height, weight, sex or education requirement. What follows is a training course that turns into chaos and an administration trying to make the recruits quit of their own accord. The film established a template: a group of misfits, a hard instructor, a team that succeeds together at the end. Countless comedies over the next thirty years used that same skeleton. Hugh Wilson directed. He came from television, where he had created WKRP in Cincinnati. The commercial result turned it into a franchise. It was made cheaply and did so well that it produced six sequels, a live action television series and two animated ones. The sequels grew steadily more childish, and the series has a poor reputation because of them rather than because of this film. It runs 97 minutes. Good for: eighties ensemble comedy, seeing a template at its source, and Michael Winslow's sound effects. Less good for: a large share of the humour is sexual and indefensible now, particularly the gay bar sequence and the treatment of the women. The jokes are loosely strung together and the second half starts repeating itself.