We’ll admit to being a tad confused with this one. A new Baywatch spin-off movie has been announced; with Monty Python star John Cleese fulfilling the role of antagonist. 

David HasselhoffDavid Hasselhoff chanells the spirit of Baywatch in this Splice: Real Fruit promo - Getty 2005, Phil Walter

But even though David Hasselhoff, Pamela Anderson and Alexandra Paul - who appeared as Mitch Buchannon, CJ Parker and Stephanie Holden in the original Baywatch series – will star, the film doesn’t really have anything to do with Baywatch. They don’t have the rights. They can’t mention the word Baywatch. And they probably don’t need to.

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"The B Team is an action comedy with some reality thrown in. We play ourselves, so the audience might not know what is true-to-life and what is made up for the movie. And that is exactly what we want. Were we really agents for the US government during our heyday? The CIA has used famous people as spies before,” Paul, who has developed the new film with fellow former Baywatch cast member Jaason Simmons, told the Independent.

“This movie is about taking the piss out of ourselves and going behind that one-dimensional image people have of actors they see on TV. We play ourselves so there are going to be assumptions the television show in question is the one we actually all were on. But no, it most definitely is not. It is not. Not. Shall I say that again?”

So how about plot details then: We know Cleese is playing the bad guy, in fact, he’s playing up to stereotypes, too – a "classic English villain" called Victor Van Vaught who suddenly has autonomy over a bunch of nuclear missiles from his boat on the Mediterranean sea.  

Baywatch ran for 11 seasons between 1989 and 2001, and even though everyone is calling this a Baywatch spoof or a Baywatch spin-off, you won’t see any official attachment to the franchise.