He then goes on worldwide satellite television and threatens to destroy the Earth unless Clouseau dies. Dreyfus escapes, however, and forces a scientist and his daughter-assistant to build a Doomsday Device. The former Chief Inspector Dreyfus is nearly cured of his insanity when an encounter with his old employee Clouseau puts him right back in the loony bin. "Strikes" picks up right where "Return" left off. But it's rather like the name "Frankenstein" attaching to the movies of a certain unnamed monster or "The Thin Man" to the Nick and Nora mysteries the "Pink Panther" moniker stuck to the Clouseau movies, and there you have it. The diamond does reappear in a few of the sequels of the original series (1963-93) and in the 21st-century reboot. The spotlight was supposed to shine on Niven as the gentleman jewel-thief, but Sellers, who was merely to provide comic relief, stole the show, and the series became all about the inept inspector thereafter. The Phantom sought to steal the Pink Panther from the exiled South Asian princess who safeguarded it for her people, and Clouseau tried to prevent him. In the opening credits, in fact, an animated pink panther leaps from the diamond to Herny Mancini's famous "Pink Panther" theme - the same rosy feline who would feature in the credits of all but two of the films (and eventually have his own TV series). The Pink Panther was a large pink diamond with a flaw that resembled a bounding panther. "The Pink Panther" (1963) starred David Niven as the Phantom/Sir Charles Lytton and Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.
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