Character Overview
Frank Drebin is a member of Police Squad, a special department of the police force, where he served for many years. In the original TV series, Drebin is a competent (although extremely strait-laced) police officer, who plays the straight man to the wacky comedy going on around him. In the subsequent films, Drebin is changed to a more comic figure; he is known for being a bumbling fool, causing lots of problems, often more than he solves, but being entirely oblivious to it all. At the same time, unlike people such as his friend who he works under, Captain Ed Hocken (Alan North/George Kennedy), Drebin is a very indiscreetly outspoken man, therefore tending to appear cold and insensitive towards people, not to mention cynical. He just as well lacks having pity and compassion towards struggling individuals when they need it, and having any of it when conversing with officials who confront him about his mistakes. While he works under police Captain Ed Hocken, in Police Squad, he works with Nordberg (Peter Lupus). In the Naked Gun series, he works with Nordberg (O.J. Simpson).
He and Ted Olson (scientist) are the only characters that appeared in both Police Squad! and the Naked Gun films and were portrayed by the same actor.
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“No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)