Eugene Tackleberry

Eugene Tackleberry
Characteristics
Gender	Male
Dislikes	Criminality and uncooperativeness
Affiliation	Midcity Police Department
Occupation	U.S. Militaryman (formerly) Security Guard (formerly) Police Officer
Rank	Sergeant
Relatives	Kathleen Kirkland (wife) Eugene Tackleberry Jr. (son)
Media Portrayal
Debut	Police Academy 1-7 Police Academy: The Animated Series Police Academy: The Series
Actor	David Graff

Eugene Tackleberry is in all seven films (played by David Graf, and voiced by Dan Hennessey in the cartoon) and is best known for his love of firearms, the military and direct action.

Biography

Tackleberry is a veteran of the US Military and was a security guard prior to joining the police academy. He joined the police force to see more action, but has a poor grasp of the difference between the military and civilian life, using military manners in civilian situations. Tackleberry is trigger-happy; a tendency which would have had him court-martialed long ago had it not been for the fact that he actually has good aim. In the second film, he's assigned to motorcycle duty and meets his new partner, Sgt. Kathleen Kirkland (played by Colleen Camp), who is the beautiful, female trigger-happy officer of his dreams. After seeing her use a machine gun, he falls in love with her. He confides in Mahoney, revealing that he's 28 years old and still a virgin.

He and Kirkland go out on their first date, and Kirkland tells Tackleberry she loves him and they have "gun sex." Afterward, he meets her family: Her father is a World War II veteran who was a boxer in the Seabees in the South Pacific, her "laughing" mother, and her brother, Bud, who was a boxer in the high school championships. Father and son are constantly punching each other out. They get married at the Police Academy Chapel with military customs added and drive off in a Bigfoot truck to their honeymoon. They have a trigger-happy son, Eugene Tackleberry, Jr.

Tackleberry always carries the biggest side arm he can lay his hands on, usually a .44 Magnum, and even used it to shoot a payphone to give an old woman back her quarter and asked: "Can you identify your quarter, Ma'am?" He also has a predilection for using excessively heavy equipment (like a chainsaw for cutting down a tree to bring down a truant boy). In the sixth movie, posing undercover as a taxi driver, he scares off a patron trying to hire his cab by brandishing a grenade. He uses military slang such as "affirmative" and "negative", and the military time system. His personal catchphrase is: "NOW, Mister!" to force people to obey the law. He even went so far as to wade into the ocean off Miami, draw his gun on an invading shark and order: "Desist, and leave the swimming area NOW, Mister!" He is happiest weighing the benefits of penetration vs. stopping power. Tackleberry is at heart a benevolent person with a tough exterior. He wants to bury his heavy equipment in anyone he encounters, and he did get selfish when he was allowed to test out certain new firearms at the Annual Police Display in Miami Beach, and wanted to take them home with him believing he needed them. Callahan told Tackleberry to return them, promising him that she would buy him his very own guns as soon as they returned home.

In the animated series he used the bazooka, and is seen with Callahan. Tackleberry's bazooka was often used for comic violence rather than destruction, an example being on an undercover job as an ice cream salesman, then loading the ice cream into his bazooka to cover the escaping crooks in a mess. In the "Team Tack" episode of Police Academy: The Series, Tackleberry was a captain, and mentions his wife Kathleen was one as well. Jones and Tackleberry are the only characters to appear in all of the movies, the animated series and the television series. Also, he is the very first character seen in the first Police Academy film.