ABSTRACT
What if one day your school was turned into an undercover site for a police investigation? What if your regular kindergarten teacher was conveniently removed from her teaching duties, and when you went into school the next day, there stood Mr. Kimble, a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a.k.a. star of Terminator 1 and 2, a.k.a. Mr. Universe, Mr. World and Mr. Olympia? As the reviewers of the movie Kindergarten Cop agree, it’s pretty far-fetched! Which part of the above scenario, however, is the most far-fetched-that a school could be an undercover site? Such a thing could happen, couldn’t it? Is it the fact that a kindergarten teacher could actually be taken off her assignment and replaced by a person who has never gone through a teacher education program, and has no teaching experience? This is not necessarily a novel idea for Hollywood, since, as we discussed in the previous chapter, Hollywood teachers are conventionally outsiders. Is it the fact that the teacher is male? This, too, is not a novel idea for Hollywood, where generally the majority of lead roles calls for males, and where, within the genre of teacher movies, the likelihood that the teacher will be male is high (To Sir With Love, Dead Poets Society, Blackboard Jungle, Teachers). No, the real novelty, the Hollywood-writ-large part, is Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. Could there be anything more unlikely than a body-builder-turnedterminator-turned-cop becoming a kindergarten teacher?
