Airplane!

Airplane!
Airplane! theatrical poster
Directed by	Jim Abrahams David Zucker Jerry Zucker
Written by	Jim Abrahams David Zucker Jerry Zucker
Produced by	Jon Davison Howard W. Koch
Starring	Robert Hays Julie Hagerty Leslie Nielsen Robert Stack Lloyd Bridges Peter Graves Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Lorna Patterson
Cinematography	Joseph F. Biroc
Edited by	Patrick Kennedy
Music by	Elmer Bernstein
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	27 June, 1980
Running time	88 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$3,500,000 (estimated)

Airplane! is an American comedy film, first released on 27 June, 1980, produced, directed, and written by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! starred Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lorna Patterson. For release in Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, Airplane! was re-titled as Flying High.

Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster movie genre. Airplane! (originally designed for a 20-minute sketch) is a virtual remake of the 1957 Canadian airplane disaster movie Zero Hour!, which featured Dana Andrews in the role of Lt. Striker, in which various jokes and gags have been added. The food poisoning plot came from Zero Hour!.

Airplane II: The Sequel, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre. Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the writers and directors of Airplane! chose not to be involved.

In the short term, Airplane! received slight recognition. Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker received the 1981 Writers Guild award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium, Jill Whelan was nominated as Best Young Comedienne by the Young Artist Awards, and the film was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Musical/Comedy) and a BAFTA for Best Screenplay.

It has been in the long term though that Airplane! has received significant recognition. It was voted as the 10th-funniest American comedy in AFI's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list and it ranked number 6 on Bravo's "100 Funniest Movies".

Plot synopsis

When the pilots of a commercial airliner get food poisoning from the in-flight meal, Ted Striker (Robert Hays), an ex-fighter pilot, must conquer his fear of flying, fly the airliner to its destination, and land it safely. Striker's ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) is a flight attendant. Nielsen portrays a doctor on board.

The plot of Airplane! is a well-traveled one. 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, and then in the 1957 Paramount Pictures feature movie Zero Hour! The teleplay and screenplay for these films were penned by Arthur Hailey. Hailey and John Castle then turned the story into a 1958 novel Flight Into Danger: Runway Zero-Eight.

File:Airplane!1.jpg

Elaine Dickinson, Dr. Rumack, Randy, and Ted Striker "on instruments"

Airplane! is very close to Zero Hour!, although Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker transform the original drama into a comedy. As they 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! even at times recreating the earlier film scene for scene, and line for line. Many of the best known 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 ("I guess I picked the wrong week to quit drinking/amphetamines/sniffin' glue.") Even the odd sports cameo remains intact. In Zero Hour!, the cameo is by Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch; in Airplane! it is basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Airplane! uses elements from the films Airport and Airport 1975, which are also based from novels and screenplays written by Arthur Hailey. The elements lifted from Airport 1975 included the guitar song — in Airport 1975 sung by a nun (Helen Reddy); in Airplane! sung by flight attendant (Lorna Patterson) who borrows the guitar from a nun (Maureen McGovern) — and the sick little girl for whom the guitar song is played — Linda Blair in Airport 1975 and Jill Whelan in Airplane!. The twist to the borrowed material in Airplane! has the well-meaning singer banging the guitar repeatedly into the little girl's life-critical intravenous drip and unplugging it.

Cast

• Robert Hays as Ted Striker
• Julie Hagerty as Elaine Dickinson
• Leslie Nielsen as Dr. Rumack
• Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer
• Lloyd Bridges as Steve McCroskey
• Peter Graves as Captain Clarence Oveur
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as Roger Murdock
• Lorna Patterson as Randy
• Stephen Stucker as Johnny Henshaw
• Otto as himself

Several actors were cast in order to spoof their established images: Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges were well-known for their many 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 directly spoofed in Airplane! as is Lloyd Bridges's 1970-1971 television role as airport manager Jim Conrad in San Francisco International Airport.

Cameos

Because Airplane! was a low-budget film, little money was available for hiring extras. As a result, the writers and directors show up in a number of cameos as do members of their family. David and Jerry Zucker appear as two ground crew members who accidentally direct a plane into a terminal. Jim Abrahams is one of the many religious zealot characters scattered throughout the film. Charlotte Zucker, who is David and Jerry's mother, is the woman attempting to apply makeup in the plane as it violently shifts while their sister, Susan Breslau, is the second ticket agent at the airport. Jim Abrahams mother is the woman initially sitting next to Dr. Rumack.

Several other cameos add to the humor through against-type casting. Ethel Merman shows up briefly as a soldier who is convinced he's Ethel Merman. This was Merman's last film appearance. Barbara Billingsley, best known as June Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver, makes a brief appearance as a woman who speaks jive. Maureen McGovern not only appears in a cameo as Sister Angelina (a spoof of the nun in Airport 1975), but also 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 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 level before takeoff. (Jimmie also had a minor role in the 'serious' air disaster film, The Concorde: Airport '79.)

Other Roles

Several members of the cast in minor roles went on to better known roles. Gregory Itzin, who appears as one of the "religious zealots," later 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.

Production

Airplane! was the first film written and directed by the trio of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker; previously they had written The Kentucky Fried Movie, which was directed by John Landis. The filming took 34 days, mostly during August 1979.

Robert Stack initially played his role differently than what the directors had in mind. They played for 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."

Reception

Airplane! was a major hit: The budget was about US $3.5 million, and the film earned over US $80 million at the box office and another US $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 Airplane! has specialized in playing clueless deadpan bumblers, most 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.

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 magazine 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 have claimed that the movie's most "important" achievement was in bringing to an end the Airport series of movies, which could no longer be taken seriously.

Leslie Nielson's line, "I am serious...And don't call me Shirley," was 79th on AFI's list of the best 100 movie quotes. The popularity of Otto, the inflatable pilot, is such that he has his own page on the Internet Movie Database, even though he hasn't appeared in any other films.

Airplane! had an interesting reception outside of the U.S. too. Its translated titles carry sly commentary on the nature of the film itself. For example, in Australia it is titled Flying High; in Germany, it became The Unbelievable Flight in a Crazy Airplane (Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug) ; in French, Is There a Pilot on the Plane? (Y a-t-il un pilote dans l'avion?) ; in Portuguese (for release in Brazil), Fasten your seatbelts,the pilot is gone (Apertem os cintos,o piloto sumiu); and in Spanish, it was Aterriza como puedas (Land as you can) in Spain and ¿Dónde está el piloto? (Where is the pilot?) in Argentina and Venezuela.

MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in Airplane! #4 on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes."

Cultural references

• The opening sequence parodies Jaws.
• The argument between the Los Angeles International Airport LAX announcers over the PA is taken from the Arthur Hailey novel Airport and is voiced by the two actual LAX PA announcers at that time.
• The marshaller accidentally directing the plane to crash into an arrival hall parodies the film Silver Streak.
• The side plot of the ill-fated George Zipp (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 Knute Rockne, All-American (1940 film). While Rumack is delivering his monologue, a version of the Notre Dame Victory March can be heard as the background music.
• 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 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).
• The in-flight movie (of a crashing airliner, no less) is a clip from the horror movie The Bees
• Rumack's last line, "I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you.", which is repeated three times in the movie, is Nielsen's final line in Scary Movie 3, also a Zucker film.
• The band Gomez has referenced characters from this movie with a song called "Rex Kramer" on their album In Our Gun and a B-side titled "Steve McCroski" which appears on their album Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline.
• The TV show Family Guy makes a reference to the film in the episode "Prick Up Your Ears" when it depicts Stewie in shock and being slapped by Brian and Chris. A line forms similar to the film where other various characters in the show are holding bats, guns, and other weapons waiting for their turn to get Stewie out of shock. In the Season 5 episode Airport '07, many scenes from Airplane! are parodied, and prominently feature musical cues from Elmer Bernstein's original score.
• The film is referenced in the parody videos Conversations with the SSS in the Anime Series MADLAX.
• The introduction banter over the loudspeakers in the beginning of the film has been sampled by the hip-hop group Deltron 3030 on their self-titled album, for a track entitled "Positive Contact."
• Ted Striker's drinking problem (pouring drinks down his face) that is shown several times throughout the movie is copied by the pointy haired boss in an episode of Dilbert, where Dilbert and his colleagues are onboard an airplane. The boss, sitting outside the plane on the wing, then comments "I wonder what the movie is".
• In one insert of the comic Candorville, when Lemont Brown asks his future self "Surely, I'm not still telling Airplane jokes 50 years from now," his future self replies by screwing up Dr. Rumack's famous line by saying "Don't call me "fifty", I mean "Shirley."

See also

• Airplane II: The Sequel

External links

• Airplane! at IMDb
• Airplane! at Rotten Tomatoes
• Airplane! Script at Simply Scripts
• Airplane! Clip Crash Scene