Warning: SPOILERS for The Naked GunThe Naked Gun is a joyful reboot-slash-legacy sequel that doesn’t require viewers to have seen the original trilogy of slapstick spoof films–and, apparently, that’s all thanks to a small act of rebellion by its writers. Directed by The Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer, the movie was co-written by him, Doug Mand, and Dan Gregor.

The movie is packed wall-to-wall with funny moments, but one of The Naked Gun’s most unexpected sequences involves Liam Neeson’s Frank Drebin, Jr. being carried through the air by an owl that is supposedly his father, the original Frank Drebin played by Leslie Nielsen.

As part of a larger ScreenRant interview discussing The Naked Gun, writers Doug Mand and Dan Gregor revealed how they landed on the idea of the original Frank Drebin appearing in owl form. It turns out that one of the movie’s wackiest moments was a response to a studio note requesting that Drebin senior be more present in the story:

ScreenRant: One thing that I particularly thought was a hoot was the Frank Drebin Sr. cameo. How did you figure out how to do that and why did you want to do that?

Dan Gregor: Very clever.

ScreenRant: Thank you.

Dan Gregor: The studio kept giving us this note where it’s like, “We want a deeper relationship with Frank Drebin Sr. We want him to have more about his dad,” and I think that, for us, that’s in some ways a death knell–to be too up the ᴀss of the old movies. You don’t want the audience to have to come in and have to constantly be thinking about, “Do I know those old movies well enough?”

We were like, “We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to have to make Frank Sr. a really central part of the plot.” And so we’re like, “How do we do that in a way that is really stupid?” So, that sort of was our take on, “Okay, okay. No, so he is in the plot, but he’s a f**king owl and it’s really, really dumb.”

Doug Mand: And we all know that we’re all just trying to endlessly please our fathers and make them proud of us. How do we blow that idea out, and where does toxic masculinity come from? [It’s] this idea that this macho man could be like, “I just want to see you again. I just want you to love me.”

Just Liam Neeson saying “daddy” in such a genuine way is one of my favorite things because it is so innocent. And it’s so clear, when you’re watching these macho men, there are just little boys in there who just really need a f**king hug, and that’s probably why they’re so violent. They just need someone to f**king hug them.

Dan Gregor: We went back and forth. We had two different versions [of the ending to that]. [There’s] the one that’s in there, and then there’s another one where after he sort of rode the owl and had the s*** attack, [Frank’s] like, “Thank you, daddy. Thank you,” and then we cut to the owl and he’s just eating a rat on the ground and you realize, “Oh, it was just an owl. There was no metaphor there.”

Doug Mand: I think the other joke was that Paul Walter Hauser would be like, “This is my dad,” and he’s playing with a lion that escaped a zoo, and then that lion attacks him and he’s like, “It’s not my dad!”

Dan Gregor: But they didn’t want to pay for a lion, much to our sadness.

Doug Mand: Hollywood.

Dan Gregor: Anyway, so it was something that came about in a good way. We got a very sort of normal studio note about paying more homage to the original, having more emotional grounding with pathos, and we were like, “How do we do that in a stupid way?”

What This Means About The Naked Gun

Dan Gregor and Doug Mand clearly have plenty of love for The Naked Gun’s source material, but their approach to a note about tying the film back to its predecessors is a great example of how well they struck a balance between old and new. As ScreenRant’s review puts it, The Naked Gun smartly “focuses on the laughs”, not legacy.

Instead, The Naked Gun reintroduces audiences to Liam Neeson as a comic actor and Pamela Anderson as a true movie star with few references to the original films. The fact that Mand and Gregor fought to make sure their movie didn’t rely on ties to a 30-plus-year-old film trilogy proves their intent to make a film for all audiences.

Our Take On The Naked Gun’s Frank Drebin Sr. Cameo

I’m not sure if Leslie Nielsen’s The Naked Gun movies would have included Frank Drebin hanging from the legs of an owl as it defecated onto bad guys, but the reality-breaking gag certainly feels of the spirit of the original trilogy. That Mand and Gregor crafted that sequence in response to studio pressure is even better.

The joke is one of a few that feel unique to this The Naked Gun–the tangent sequence taking viewers through the entire scope of a relationship with a snowman is another–but it’s easy to imagine that Leslie Nielsen himself would approve of his character returning in this way. This is the guy whose tombstone reads “Let ‘er rip”, after all.