Hilarious in Hindsight: In one episode, the guys work out a scheme to boost Muldoon's confidence and improve his dating life. It works a little too well and inflates his ego substantially. One of the guys says of the new Muldoon, "We've created a Frankenstein!"
In an episode where Toody is anxious that the stocks the precinct invested in might have been the wrong pick, Muldoon reassures him by saying the Captain also invested in the company long before they did. It works briefly only for Toody to remember the Captain also bet on Nixon in the 1960 election. At the time, this would have just implied the Captain couldn't pick a winner, but after Watergate made Nixon's name practically synonymous with "untrustworthy" the joke works even better.
Spiritual Successor: Barney Miller from the 70s, with detectives instead of patrol cops. And like that show, Car 54 was often suggested by actual Police Officers to be the most realistic police show on television at the time.note Future Barney Miller star Hal Linden even appeared in an episode of Car 54 as an Assistant DA.
Unintentional Period Piece: The theme song included the line, "Khrushchev's due at Idlewild," a reference to Idlewild Airport in New York City. In December 1963, Idlewild was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport. In 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power by his party colleagues, replacing him with Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary.
Casting punk rocker David Johansen as the lead actor in a cop movie might seem like an eccentric choice, to put it mildly. However, his casting made a lot more sense when you consider that it was originally filmed as a musical comedy, and only changed to a more conventional comedy during editing.
The movie brings back Nipsey Russell and Al Lewis to play Older and Wiser (well, in the former's case, at least) versions of their characters from the series, but recasts all the other regular roles with younger actors, giving the finished product a bit of an identity crisis.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: Only for a certain value of "seriously" of course, considering that it's a comedy, but John C. McGinley is genuinely trying his best to work with some thankless material.
as the jingle for this commercial