Remember the Lethal Weapon films?  There were four of them, all released in the theater.  I didn’t see the original at the show, but I watched it plenty on VHS.  Especially the beginning.  But not too much of the beginning, because it gets depressing.

Anyboobs, the point of the monkeyFLASHmonkeyBACK is to pretend what I might have written about in a blog before I had a blog (or as in this case, pre-blog, pre-TripleDoubleU).  I just realized what I’m about to share after watching Lethal Weapon 5 for the second time.  What’s Lethal Weapon 5, you might ask?  It was a video the gang made on an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and like I said… I watched this episode twice and just noticed this… but I’m pretending I did it back when Part 4 was released in 1998.

The Lethal Weapon series was always a fun one.  It was also a series based on opposing forces.

You had Roger Murtaugh:

• a stable family man
• a bit up in his years
• had a nice home
• a good cop that followed the rules
• happened to be black

Then you had Martin Riggs:

• an unstable man (suicidal) that lost his family (his wife)
• in the prime of his life
• lived in a trailer on the beach
• a good cop that didn’t follow the rules
• happened to be white

As the series progressed from the first, both men grew, and their stories paralleled each other, culminating in the dual pregnancies of the fourth film (Murtaugh’s gonna be a grandpa; Riggs a first-time dad).

I always considered myself a huge fan of the series.  In fact, when I saw part three at the theater, I convinced myself that if I had to leave after the first fifteen minutes, I was thoroughly entertained enough to justify the price of my admission.  (Which would have been a “cat”-astrophe.)

But having just noticed such a simple writer’s slight-of-hand, I’ve embarrassed myself.  In creating these two iconic characters, screenwriter Shane Black picked every mismatch possible, as I listed above.  How did I miss this?