Director Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of Naked Gun is filled with wildly ridiculous jokes, celebrity appearances, and deadpan comedy — essentially capturing all the elements that endeared the original Leslie Nielsen film to audiences.

A standout comedic moment in the film is the ludicrous romantic montage between Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson), which includes a cozy cabin retreat, an enchanting snowman, an unconventional threesome, and a pursuit by an angry snowman. It’s a fusion of Naked Gun and Jack Frost, shifting from disbelief to boundless hilarity in mere minutes.

The concept of the snowman romance morphing into a slasher scene came to Schaffer during the early hours. “One night, at four in the morning, I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I just saw the entire thing,” Schaffer revealed in a Zoom interview with Mashable.

Alongside co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, Schaffer sought to create a love montage as a nod to the original Naked Gun, which spoofed ’80s film montages featuring Nielsen and Priscilla Presley. They, however, needed a novel twist to differentiate it.

Schaffer’s early morning inspiration for the murderous snowman was penned in roughly 10 minutes and dispatched to Gregor and Mand. “It’s nearly beat for beat what’s in the movie,” Schaffer noted. “It hardly changed.”

After drafting the scene, the hurdle was to bring the snowman to life. “The VFX department estimated a million dollars for a VFX snowman, and then, quite rapidly, everyone was like, ‘Well, you can’t do that sequence; it’s too costly,’” Schaffer recounted. “We had to keep insisting, ‘It’s not going to be CG. It has to be a puppet, a mascot costume.’ So we brought in the Jim Henson Company.”

“They joined the process a bit later,” producer Erica Huggins mentioned. “They understood the assignment perfectly and collaborated closely with Akiva to ensure that [the snowman] didn’t come off as too polished.”

“It was essentially like Jabba the Hutt,” Schaffer quipped.

The puppet’s absence of slick visual authenticity renders the snowman sequence effective. Its nostalgic puppetry, particularly the animated eyebrows, amplifies the comedy as the montage transforms into a slasher scene. Who anticipates a Frosty the Snowman Muppet attempting to harm Liam Neeson in a Naked Gun film?

Even Neeson expressed surprise at the sequence, telling Mashable: “I recall reading it in the script and thinking, ‘No, this is too insane. It’s too over-the-top.’ But it appears to work.”

The Naked Gun is currently showing in theaters.