A Lot of Baseball Teams Wanted No Part of ‘The Naked Gun’
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In a scene that will hopefully one day be edited into the final season of The Crown, the climax of The Naked Gun finds Queen Elizabeth II attending a Major League Baseball game, where she’s nearly assassinated by a brainwashed Reggie Jackson. That is, until the villainous scheme is thwarted by Lt. Frank Drebin, who is dressed like an umpire/opera great Enrico Pallazzo.
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The ending of The Naked Gun is beloved by fans of both comedy and baseball — so much so that when Leslie Nielsen passed away, ESPN published an obituary for “acclaimed Italian opera singer” Enrico Palazzo.
But this wasn’t always the case. During the making of The Naked Gun, a lot of professional baseball organizations were extremely wary of the production. According to The Sporting News, director David Zucker originally wanted the finale to feature the Milwaukee Brewers, his home team. But the MLB said no. Co-writer Pat Proft wanted his favorite team, the Minnesota Twins, but “they didn’t want to.” The league insisted that the film use the Seattle Mariners instead, because they were considered to be a “weak franchise” at the time.
For the home team, since The Naked Gun takes place in Los Angeles, naturally they asked the Dodgers to participate. But the team only agreed to “partial cooperation,” meaning that the movie was allowed to shoot scenes in Dodger Stadium, but the team didn’t want to be mentioned in any way. Per Zucker, the Dodgers were “skeptical about being identified with” their film.
The Dodgers stated this was due to the fact that the team didn’t want to be associated with the bench-clearing brawl at the end of the movie, but apparently, they were fine with a dude falling off of their stadium and getting steamrolled to death?
The filmmakers were then forced to recruit the only other MLB team in the Los Angeles area: the Angels. So, weirdly enough, in the world of The Naked Gun, the Angels and the Mariners played a game in Dodger Stadium. More confusing still, one brief moment was shot at Wrigley Field in Chicago because they couldn’t get access to the location.
The Dodgers also allegedly prevented commentator Vin Scully from playing a fictional version of himself in the movie, despite the fact that he wanted to take the job “because he loved Airplane!” Meanwhile, the plan was always to use Angels-turned-A’s slugger Reggie Jackson. “We would’ve put him in a Dodger uniform,” Zucker explained. “He was one of the most famous, identifiable players there was at the time.”
Incidentally, Queen Elizabeth really did tempt fate by attending a baseball game, along with President George H.W. Bush, just three years after The Naked Gun game out. And as chance would have it, Jackson was coaching the A’s, who were playing the Baltimore Orioles in that game. Beforehand, Jackson got to meet the Queen, and somehow resisted the urge to jokingly pretend to shoot her — although the commentators couldn’t help but reference The Naked Gun.
So clearly the movie became a comedy classic. But hey, at least the teams that rejected The Naked Gun can still claim that they never worked with O.J. Simpson.
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