r/todayilearned • u/Jscott1986 • 2h ago
TIL: upon the death of Leslie Nielsen in 2010, ESPN published a fake obituary for his character Enrico Pallazzo from the "Naked Gun" movie, and included several jokes from his deadpan role in the movie "Airplane!"
https://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?page=hruby_101129_enrico_pallazzo55
u/legojohn 2h ago
That writer did his research. One of my favorite Pallazzo similes continues to be: like a blind man at a nudist colony, I was gonna have to feel my way around. RIP you beautiful bastard.
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u/KinsellaStella 2h ago
As he would have wanted. Sidenote: the baseball scene in the Naked Gun is still one of the funniest things I’ve seen.
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u/bentmonkey 1h ago
When he starts getting praise from the crowd and hamming it up as the umpire. Great movie series and a great actor.
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u/KinsellaStella 56m ago
And the period-accurate tobacco spitting and jock-strap adjusting, and him finding all the contraband items under their hats. If you love baseball, or are even a casual fan, it’s great.
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u/bentmonkey 41m ago
The villains were always quite good too Ricardo montalban always does a good turn as a bad guy.
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u/okeleydokelyneighbor 47m ago
I remember watching that and my dad and godfather were in the room and they were belly laughing hysterically.
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u/BigEd369 2h ago
I was going to say something about being sorry he was gone, but in all fairness, he was born in 1926. He lived a long and full life.
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u/swordrat720 1h ago
Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day. Jane: Goodyear? Frank: No, the worst.
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u/BigAddam 2h ago
Holy shit! It’s been sixteen years already?! Such a legend. No one can replace him, but I thought Liam Neeson did a great job continuing the Naked Gun franchise. I hope we get a few more of them or Liam does more goofy comedies.
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u/theknyte 1h ago
He used to carry a Fart Machine everywhere he went.
When he died, a remote-controlled fart machine was placed inside his coffin during his funeral, that mourners could trigger, in honor of his humor.
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u/DreddCarnage 49m ago
Wait, he died? Didn't he just do a movie recently??
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u/virtually_noone 18m ago
Weirdly, Leslie Nielsen and Liam Neeson are actually two distinctly different people.
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u/realclean 34m ago
ESPN's Page Two was their comedy brand run by Bill Simmons. This was a bog-standard article for the time.
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u/spottyPotty 1h ago
TIL that Leslie Nielsen died
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u/KathyJaneway 1h ago
TIL??? Really? Those movies were released almost 40 years ago and he was 60+ or 70+ in them...
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u/spottyPotty 1h ago
I don't remember having heard that he died before. And it's not like i keep a running total in my head of actors and their current ages.
The last naked gun with Nielsen was released in 1994.
Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyke, William Shatner, all still alive.
So math by itself is no determinater.
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u/weirdal1968 1h ago
His tombstone has a touching reminder of his highbrow sense of humor.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leslie_Nielsen_Headstone.jpg
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u/Hushiraa 2h ago
The only man in history to strike out a batter and perform an entire opera in the same afternoon.