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Airplane! is a American comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lorna Patterson. Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster film genre, and is essentially a remake of the film Zero Hour!. In Australia and New Zealand it is known as Flying High.
Airplane! was a major financial success, grossing over USD $83 million in North America alone, against a budget of just $3.5 million.
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Quotations
Airport management, the FAA and the airlines. They're all cheats and liars. All right, lets get outta here.
I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you. (repeated several times, once even after the plane has landed)
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
Encyclopedia
Airplane! is a American comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. It stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lorna Patterson. Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster film genre, and is essentially a remake of the film Zero Hour!. In Australia and New Zealand it is known as Flying High.
Airplane! was a major financial success, grossing over USD $83 million in North America alone, against a budget of just $3.5 million. The film's creators received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Comedy, and nominations for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Musical/Comedy) and a BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. Years later, Airplane! was voted as the 10th-funniest American comedy in AFI's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list and was ranked 6th on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".
Plot
When the flight crew and numerous passengers aboard a commercial jet succumb to food poisoning, it falls to Ted Striker (Robert Hays), a traumatized ex-fighter pilot, to conquer his fear of flying and land the plane quickly and in poor weather, while air traffic controllers led by Steve McCroskey (Lloyd Bridges) and Rex Kramer (Robert Stack) talk him down. Adding to the tension is the presence of Striker's stewardess ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty), and Striker's negative wartime history with Kramer.
Cast
Cameo appearances
The film's writers and directors, as well as members of their family, showed up in cameo appearances. David and Jerry Zucker appear as two ground crew members who accidentally direct a plane to taxi through a terminal window. Jim Abrahams is one of many religious zealots scattered throughout the film. Charlotte Zucker (David and Jerry's mother) is the woman attempting to apply makeup in the plane as it violently shifts. Their sister Susan Breslau is the second ticket agent at the airport. Jim Abraham's mother is the woman initially sitting next to Dr. Rumack.
Several other cameos add to the humor through against-type casting. Ethel Merman, in her last film appearance, shows up as a soldier who is convinced he is Ethel Merman. Barbara Billingsley, known as June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver, makes an appearance as a woman who announces she "speaks jive" and would be willing to translate. Maureen McGovern not only appears in a cameo as Sister Angelina (a spoof of the nun in Airport 1975), but as a play on her involvement as the singer of the Oscar-winning songs for big-budget disaster films, The Poseidon Adventure (1972) ("The Morning After") and The Towering Inferno (1974) ("We May Never Love Like This Again"). Jimmie Walker cameos as the man opening the hood of the plane and checking the oil before takeoff. (Walker also had a minor role in the 'serious' air disaster film, The Concorde: Airport '79.)
Howard Jarvis, the property tax reformer and author of California Proposition 13, plays the rider in the taxi that Striker is driving in the film's opening and closing scene.
Production
Airplane! was the first film written and directed by Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker; previously they had written The Kentucky Fried Movie, which was directed by John Landis. Filming took 34 days, mostly during August 1979.
Robert Stack initially played his role differently from what the directors had in mind. They played him a tape of impressionist John Byner "doing" Robert Stack. According to the producers, Stack was "doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack."
The plane (model and real) used throughout the movie was a TWA Boeing 707 model operating as a fictional airline in the movie called Trans American Airlines; the plane taking off with "The End" credit is not a 707 (which has four engines), but a Boeing 727 tri-jet. The ambient noise of the plane is not a jet but a piston engine; it was taken from the soundtrack of Zero Hour!, making it the longest running gag in the movie.
Parody targets
Airplane! parodies Zero Hour! directly, with numerous references to other films, particularly those in the Airport series, the final installment of which, The Concorde: Airport '79, was released a year before it.
At the beginning of the film, the opening sequence is a parody of the film Jaws. The music played during the opening of the film is a spoof of John Williams' music from that film.
The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, with the passengers being rescued by a former military pilot shows up in the 1956 CBC TV movie Flight into Danger.
As the film's creators explain in the DVD commentary for Airplane!, they discovered Zero Hour! when they were taping late-night commercials to spoof. They then bought the rights to it. Airplane! lifts its major characters and most of its story line from Zero Hour!. Many of the best known straight lines of Airplane! are repeated verbatim, for example, "Can you face some unpleasant facts?" and "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." The "wrong week" line becomes a running gag — as the emergency escalates, so does the potency of the drug ("Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking/smoking/amphetamines/sniffin' glue.")
The scene where emergency vehicles scramble onto the tarmac begins as a direct recreation of a similar sequence in the John Wayne film The High and the Mighty, though the Airplane! version quickly turns absurd as more and more bizarre vehicles join the emergency response.
Airplane! uses elements from the films and novels Airport and Airport 1975, which are based on work written by Arthur Hailey:
- The argument that breaks out between the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) announcers over the public address system ("Oh really, Vernon. You just want me to have an abortion....") is taken from the novel Airport, and is voiced by individuals who were actual LAX announcers at that time.
- A scene where a stewardess sings to a sick little girl parodies a similar scene in Airport 1975, though in Airplane! the well-meaning singer inadvertently swings her guitar into the little girl's life-critical intravenous drip, disconnecting it, and hitting several people in the head with it while walking by.
Other targets of the parody include:
- The marshaller accidentally directing the plane to crash into the terminal parodies the film Silver Streak, as well as It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
- The side plot of the ill-fated George Zip (one of the soldiers who died in the wartime crash that makes Ted afraid to fly) is "paid off" in a pep talk given to Ted by Rumack; the pep talk is a parody of the famous "Win one for the Gipper" speech from the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All-American. While Rumack is delivering his monologue, a version of the Notre Dame Victory March can be heard as the background music (it is also played over the closing credits).
- Captain Oveur asking Joey "Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?" is a reference to the movie Midnight Express.
- The first wartime flashback parodies both Casablanca and Saturday Night Fever, and a later flashback is similar to the famous kiss scene in From Here to Eternity (although on the DVD commentary track the filmmakers deny having seen the film and say they had either seen some stills without realizing what film it was from or came up with it on their own).
- During the wartime flashback, the jukebox begins playing "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees, which is sped up by 10% to add to the comedic element of the Saturday Night Fever parody. According to the DVD commentary, the film needed permission from the group to speed up the song for the scene.
Reaction
Even though the budget was about USD$3.5 million, it earned more than $80 million at the box office and another $40 million in rentals. The directors were initially apprehensive due to mediocre response at one of the pre-screenings, but the film made back its entire budget in its first weekend of release.
Leslie Nielsen saw a major boost to his career, and since then has specialized in playing clueless deadpan bumblers, notably in the six-episode TV series Police Squad! and its film follow-ups, the three Naked Gun movies. Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack saw similar shifts in their public image, though to lesser degrees.
Airplane! has a 98% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
Network TV version
The network TV version (which first aired on NBC in 1983) contains many additional scenes not in the theatrical release, but altered the scene in which a woman's breasts are jiggling due to airplane turbulence while she wears a white T-shirt that says "Moral Majority" in black letters on it. In earlier network TV versions, this was replaced with a woman wearing a striped yellow and red shirt. Later versions used the original footage but used digital technology to entirely remove the letters reading "Moral Majority".
Legacy
MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in Airplane! #4 on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes." Leslie Nielsen's line, "I am serious...and don't call me Shirley," was 79th on AFI's list of the best 100 movie quotes. In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Airplane! as #10 on its list of the 100 funniest American films. In the same year, readers of Total Film voted it the second greatest comedy film of all time. It also came second in the British 50 Greatest Comedy Films poll on Channel 4, beaten by Monty Python's The Life of Brian. Some critics claim the movie's most important achievement was ending the Airport series of movies, which could no longer be taken seriously.
Several actors were cast to spoof their established images: Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges were known for adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guy characters. Stack's role as the captain who loses his nerve in one of the earliest airline "disaster" films, The High and the Mighty (1954), is spoofed in Airplane!, as is Lloyd Bridges's 1970-1971 television role as airport manager Jim Conrad in San Francisco International Airport. Peter Graves was in the made-for-TV-movie SST: Death Flight, in which an SST was unable to land due to an emergency.
Several members of the cast in minor roles went on to better known roles. Gregory Itzin, who appears as one of the religious zealots, played President Charles Logan in the Fox series 24. David Leisure, who played one of the Hare Krishna, went on to fame as Joe Isuzu before appearing as Charlie Dietz in the sitcom Empty Nest.
American Film Institute recognition
Sequel
Airplane II: The Sequel, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre, though there was still emphasis on the general theme of disaster films. Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the writers and directors of Airplane! chose not to be involved.
Cultural reference
In the "Airport '07" episode of Family Guy, the musical score, many visual images, the noise of the aircraft in flight (more akin to turboprop than jet), the takeoff and some of the jokes used in the gang's attempt to get Quagmire his job back as a pilot were used from Airplane!. Even the inspirational speech from Hugh Hefner to Quagmire was a revamp of Dr. Rumack's (Leslie Nielsen) speech to Striker (Robert Hays) from Airplane!, up to the rendition of the Notre Dame Victory March. The flight number (209) is the same as the flight number in Airplane!, the first line Quagmire radios to the cockpit is directly from the film, and the crash landing of the plane is very similar.
Also, in another Family Guy, the Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope parody/homage "Blue Harvest," Airplane! is mentioned numerous times:
- When the Death Star is approaching Yavin IV, a man says over the public announcement system, "The Death Star is getting closer," at which point, Quagmire/C-3P0 grabs Lois/Leia's stomach and shakes it, saying, "And Leia's getting la-a-a-arger."
- After Peter/Han Solo and Chris/Luke Skywalker save Leia and are being attacked by TIE fighters, when the two get behind their turrets, Leslie Neilsen comes in Han's bubble and says, "I just wanted to tell you both 'Good luck.' We're all counting on you." The makers of the show couldn't get Neilsen to come to the studio and say the line, so they used the sound bite from the movie, instead.
In the video game Call of Duty 4 there is a bonus mission on an airplane after the game has been beaten; during which, one of the characters says "surely you can't be serious", to which the other replies "I'm serious, and don't call me Shirley"; a famous line from Airplane!.
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