My vision of having Leslie Nielsen star in the A-Team Movie have been spoiled twofold: first, apparently Hollywood doesn’t listen to me, and second – contrary to what I wrote three months ago, he’s now dead.

I was devastated by this news, even though he has lived a full life and reached the ripe age of 84 before finally taking his last breath, because there was always something timeless about Leslie Nielsen in my eyes: Airplane and the Naked Gun were among my favorite movies as a youngster, and even though they’re over 20 years old, they’re still funny to me to this very day (and even more so, since as a child I didn’t understand some of the jokes.)

Also, I’ve always known him as a guy with grey hair and that gave the impression that he wasn’t really getting older.

Nielsen was more than an actor – he was an icon; his work with Jim Abrahams and the Zuckers is an example of what parody movies should be, something that has been lost in the past decade with the oversimplification of various “X Movies” (Lets pretend for the sake of the argument that David Zucker had nothing to do with Scary Movie 3 and 4.)

What people outside of Israel are probably not aware of is that Naked Gun started a tradition in Israel, which some might consider unholy. In Israel, movie titles are translated to Hebrew, though the movies themselves are rarely dubbed (with the exception of movies for kids.) Sometimes the translation is accurate, sometimes it’s phonetic, and sometimes they come up with a pun that has nothing to do with the original title.

So in Hebrew, Naked Gun roughly translates to “The Gun Died Laughing”, which is actually a wordplay on the translation of Die Hard (Which was roughly translated to Dying to Live).

From that moment on, any parody movie, particularly those starring Leslie Nielsen, were slapped with the Died Laughing stamp. Wrongfully Accused became “The Fugitive Died Laughing”, 2001: A Space Travesty became “Space Died Laughing”, Spy Hard became “The Spy Died Laughing”, Loaded Weapon 1 was called “Dying to Laugh” while the Scary Movies series received the clever variation, “Died Screaming”.

In fact, there were even some movies starring Leslie Nielsen that weren’t even parodies but still received the Died Laughing wordplay! For example, Mr. Magoo became “The Millionaire Died Laughing”, and movies that didn’t even have Leslie Nielsen, like the 1997 version of George of the Jungle, which became “The Jungle Died Laughing”.

Obviously, Israel has to apologize for its crimes.

Rest in peace, Leslie Nielsen. You will be missed.