Dragnet (drama)

Dragnet was a popular, influential and long-running radio and television police procedural about the cases

Dragnet and Popular Culture

Dragnet has been referenced or spoofed numerous times, aside from the 1987 film version.

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• Both the television series Police Squad and its motion picture spin-offs, the Naked Gun series, parodied elements of the show, particularly the deadpan narration.
• There is a animated cartoon called Rocket Squad which was a futuristic parody with Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as Detectives Monday and Tuesday ("He always follows me").
• In television, it has been parodied, for example, as a popular skit (featuring Webb and Johnny Carson) on The Tonight Show, and years later as "Mathnet", an ongoing film segment of the PBS series Square One TV.
• In music, Stan Freberg took a potshot at Dragnet in the spoken-word comedy take-offs "St. George and the Dragon-Net" and "Christmas Dragnet". Eric Burdon & The Animals spoofed the show's opening at the beginning of their hit single "San Francisco Nights".
• James Ellroy featured a thinly-veiled reference to Dragnet in his L.A. Confidential novel; the popular television police drama called Badge of Honor (also depicted briefly in the film version of L.A. Confidential). Ellroy?s perspective on Los Angeles cops as crooked and vice-ridden contrasts sharply with Webb?s portrayals of police. The Brett Chase character in Confidential was based off of Dragnet star Jack Webb.
• Thomas Pynchon mentions Dragnet in V.; two minor characters in this novel, Patrolman Jones and Officer Ten Eyck, "were faithful viewers of the TV program Dragnet. They'd cultivated deadpan expressions, unsyncopated speech rhythms, monotone voices".