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From a box office standpoint, the Police Academy series shows how a once (marginally) funny idea can be (significantly) ground into the dirt, financially speaking. Before Saw came along with seven consecutive yearly installments in the same month, the Police Academy franchise held the record with six films released between early March and early April, 1984-1989. The first three entries in the series grossed $81 million, $55 million, and $43 million, respectively, and spent a combined 12 weeks at #1.

From there the grosses slipped to $28 million, $19 million, $11 million, and for the barely released Mission to Moscow in 1994, only $125,000. After Their First Assignment, all the other installments were PG. The franchise was also spun off - twice to date - for syndicated television. It appeared first in the late ‘80s as an animated sitcom (which ran on weekdays for one year and tallied 65 episodes) and then as an hour-long comedy in the late ‘90s (which lasted for 8 months and 26 episodes).

A long discussed reboot that has been kicking around since last decade appears to be coming together for a 2013 release and based on the screenwriters and directors currently lined up, seems to be aiming for the raunchiness of the first film and then some. If nothing else, I am sure they will find a way to incorporate Robert Folk’s anthemic opening and closing credits score, with its patriotic brass and good-vibe bounce. If nothing else, watching the first Police Academy films has drilled that tune back into my head (though whether it truly left is debatable).

Revenge of the Nerds was also a hit relative to budget (grossing $40 million against sub-$2 million), but never played as wide as Police Academy, opening in only a few hundred theaters in July of 1984 before nearly tripling its screen count, by summer’s end, and spending several months in the top 10. While Nerds is unabashedly raunchier than Police Academy - mostly stemming from a sequence where hidden cameras are installed in a sorority, leading to what was either my first or second glimpse of full frontal female nudity, the other courtesy of Kelly LeBrock in the PG-13 The Woman in Red - it is also genuinely sweeter, has the better ensemble, and doesn’t seem to get off on humiliating its protagonists when setting the stage for the audience to fully enjoy the jock fraternity getting its comeuppance.

Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards have great chemistry themselves as best friends Lewis and Gilbert, who form a fraternity for the put-upon outcasts at Adams College. John Goodman as the football coach and James Cromwell as Lewis’ dad offer solid support with little screen time and the soundtrack slams with songs ranging from early ‘80s mainstream pop hits (“Thriller” and “Burning Down the House”) to a lost New Wave gem (Gleaming Spires’ “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?”). Director Jeff Kanew, working from a script/story with contributions by two different writing teams, crafted an exploitation film that rose above its level, finding a balance between gratuitous nudity, gross-out, and heart that Peter and Bobby Farrelly would get rich off of a decade later. There is also the interesting subtext that the film more or less follows the arc of a slasher movie, but replaces the violence and deaths with panty raids and getting laid, and a little bit of speechifying.

Three years passed (an eon as far as franchises go) before Nerds in Paradise was released in the summer of ’87. It opened wide from the get-go, debuted at #1 and grossed three-quarters of what the original did. From that standpoint, it was a success. But as a film, it is as devoid of laughs and charm as the first one was bountiful. The film strives to find a balance between repeating all of the first feature’s memorable sequences (there is another ad hoc musical performance by the nerds) and taglines (Booger’s “We’ve got bush” is egregiously shoehorned in) and coming up with a new plot.

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