Austin Powers Fans Call Out Naked Gun for Rip-Off Gags

The first full trailer just dropped, and while most of it feels true to the original's dumb-smart tone, one gag in particular sparked a small online skirmish—because apparently, comedy fans keep receipts.

Midway through the trailer, the villain tells his henchman to "keep an eye on" Frank Drebin Jr. Cut to a heat-vision POV of Drebin and Pamela Anderson's character in what looks like a very private, very steamy moment. Except… she's just kneeling to scrub his oven. With a scrubber that, let's say, wasn't designed with subtlety in mind. The pose, the angle—it's textbook visual innuendo.

And a whole lot of people noticed that it looks very familiar.

Fans quickly pointed out it's basically a reheat of a scene from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, where villains spy on Austin and Felicity Shagwell's silhouettes and assume something wildly inappropriate is happening. Spoiler: it involves a tennis racket and some deeply confused henchmen. And Goldmember doubled down with the same setup—because if Mike Myers had a favorite joke, you were going to see it three times minimum.

But then the counter-arguments rolled in: wasn't Austin Powers itself lifting from The Naked Gun? Some fans argued that the perspective-based misunderstanding gag actually has roots in Naked Gun 33⅓—although that particular scene involved a Crying Game parody and didn't exactly hinge on mistaken heat-vision voyeurism.

Others traced the bit even further back to Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where Mel Brooks pulled a similar silhouette gag four years before International Man of Mystery came out. So if anything, Austin Powers might be the thief here.