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Vintage Toronto Ads: Will Ze Nikon Shoot a Minkey?
Source: Saturday Night, November 1981.
Did lawyers for United Artists, Blake Edwards, and the estate of Peter Sellers know about this ad?
Perhaps the actor in today’s ad hoped that posing as an Inspector Clouseau knockoff would draw Hollywood’s attention and whisk him away from modelling gigs in Mississauga. All he needed to do was brush up his faux French accent and work on his physical comedy skills. Maybe then he’d receive an audition call to stand in for Sellers when writer/director Edwards continued the Pink Panther series after its star’s death in 1980.
Fortunately for our model, he would have avoided the train wreck that was the first post-Sellers film, 1982’s Trail of the Pink Panther. Cobbled together by Edwards from clips of earlier entries in the series, deleted scenes, and new footage, the film included Joanna Lumley with a French accent and a terminally ill David Niven dubbed by Rich Little. The film received a poor critical reception; locally, the Star’s Ron Base found it a “miserable ripoff,” while the Globe and Mail felt that as a eulogy for Sellers it “smacks of Edwards’ self-promotion rather than a tribute to Sellers’ talents.”
Additional material from the December 18, 1982 edition of the Globe and Mail and the December 17, 1982 edition of the Toronto Star.