Airplane II: The Sequel

Airplane II: The Sequel
File:Airplane II the sequel.jpg Airplane II: The Sequel theatrical poster
Directed by	Ken Finkleman
Written by	Ken Finkleman
Produced by	Howard W. Koch
Starring	Robert Hays Julie Hagerty Lloyd Bridges Chad Everett
Cinematography	Joe Biroc
Edited by	Tina Hirsch
Music by	Elmer Bernstein Richard Hazard
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	December 10, 1982
Running time	85 min
Country	United States
Language	English

Airplane II: The Sequel is an American comedy film, first released on December 10, 1982, written and directed by Ken Finkleman, and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, Chad Everett, William Shatner, Rip Torn and Sonny Bono. It is the sequel to the 1980 film Airplane!.

In some foreign releases (including Australia), Airplane II was titled Flying High II: The Sequel.

Just like the original, Airplane II spoofs airline disaster stories such as Zero Hour! and Airport. This time, however, they add an element of the science fiction film genre, with elements specifically from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also makes light of the wave of aircraft hijackings that had occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Pat Sajak has a minor role in this movie as a TV news anchor. The year before, he had been named host of Wheel of Fortune. Other cameos include George Wendt, David Leisure, Raymond Burr, Jack Jones, Hervé Villechaize, Art Fleming, Joyce DeWitt and John Vernon.

Some of Airplane!'s original cast members play different characters in the sequel, the most noticeable being Stephen Stucker's "Jacobs" character (in the original, he was known as "Johnny Hinshaw"). In addition, Frank Ashmore, who played flight navigator Victor Basta in the original, has a small role as a Houston air traffic controller while Craig Berenson, who played Paul Carey (the airline employee sent to pick up Rex Kramer) in the original, has a role as a passenger who shaves in the shuttle's restroom as it descends.

The original writers and directors of Airplane!, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, were not involved in this film. According to the commentary on the DVD release of the first movie, all three claim to have never seen the film. They had been attached at one point to make this sequel, but decided that they had gone as far as they could have with airplane jokes with the first film and backed out.

Plot synopsis

Template:Spoilers A Lunar Shuttle known as Mayflower One, which looks very close to the Space Shuttle, is being rushed to launch. The head of the ground crew, The Sarge (played by Chuck Connors, and a spoof of Airport's Joe Patroni), does not like what's going on, but defers to the airline's management. On-board as computer officer is Elaine (Hagerty), who has long-since left Ted Striker (Hays) and is now engaged to one of the flight crew, Simon Kurtz (Everett).

Peter Graves, the captain in the original film, returns as Captain Clarence Oveur. On the flight crew with Oveur and Kurtz are First Officer Dunn (James A. Watson, Jr.) and Navigator Dave Unger (Kent McCord).

Striker has been committed to an insane asylum, having been declared mentally incompetent in a lawsuit brought after the events of Airplane!. The lawsuit was used to silence him because he knew as its test-pilot that there were problems with the Lunar Shuttle that made it unsafe. Now he is ever more haunted by actions in "The War", specifically the events referred to as "Macho Grande" where he lost his entire squadron, but his psychosis is more related to post-traumatic stress disorder than a fear of flying this time. When he reads of the Lunar Shuttle launch, he escapes the asylum and gets a ticket for the flight. Since all the tickets are already purchased, Ted is forced to get one from a scalper.

Mayflower One suffers a short circuit and the computer, ROK, develops a mind of its own, sending the ship toward the Sun. Unger and Dunn try to deactivate the computer room, but end up getting blown out of an airlock. Oveur also tries to stop the computer, but gets gassed to death, all thanks to ROK's self-defense mechanism. Again, Striker gets called upon to control the craft, but first he has to figure out how to make the computer relinquish control.

That is when Steven McCroskey, the air traffic controller played by Lloyd Bridges, comes into play. He reveals that Joe Seluchi (Bono), had boarded the plane with a bomb, intending to commit suicide so that his wife could collect on insurance money (the policy, it turns out, was for car insurance, and therefore worthless). He was originally supposed to fly to Des Moines, Iowa to get treatment for impotence, but boarded the Lunar Shuttle instead. Striker manages to wrest the bomb from him and uses it to blow up the computer and head for the Moon as originally intended. Kurtz abandons Elaine and leaves in the only escape pod before they take control in an instance of "premature ejection".

On the way to the Moon, control of the flight is shifted to a lunar base, commanded by Cmdr. Buck Murdoch (Shatner). He has a high level of contempt for Striker because of Macho Grande, but agrees to help anyway. They manage to land the craft. Ted and Elaine fall back in love and get married at the end.

Gags

In the tradition of the original, many gags and references to contemporary entertainment appear in the film:

• The opening theme and much of the incidental music come directly from Battlestar Galactica.
• The film opens a la Star Wars, with a star field and a plot summary rolling up. Just as the text starts to turn lascivious, the Mayflower shuttle breaks through it, shattering it like glass, and the opening credits roll.

File:Airplane II X-ray.JPG

Security screening

• Anticipating TSA screening by decades, the monitor at the security gate is part X-ray machine; any buxom women walking within its range are electronically "stripped" by the camera and, at the same time, the bell from Family Feud (the Dawson era at the time the movie came out) can be heard. The security guard leers at the women as they walk by unaware. (The monitor is obviously a separate piece of film, but is well-timed with the "live" events, including a woman checking her watch.)

• Early in the film a pay-phone is seen along with a hand resembling that of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (a major hit film from earlier the same year). E.T. lifts the phone off its cradle, and off-screen is heard "phone home!, phone home!" When the operator tells E.T., "Please deposit 6 million dollars for the first 3 minutes", the extraterrestrial hangs up.
• Oveur, Unger and Dunn engage, during pre-flight checkout, in a lengthy verbal exchange about their military careers — who was subordinate and superior to whom — that amounted to a string of puns on their names. For example, Unger says "He was under Oveur, and I was under Dunn."
• While in the mental institution, Striker is painting a picture of what appears to be a pot of flowers and an exotic woman showing her breasts. When the camera pans to the actual canvas, we see that Striker had only been painting the flowers.
• The doctor seems to mistake the call sign for the lunar shuttle with the part number of a muffler bracket for a '79 Ford Pinto.
• McCroskey turns back to drinking during the crisis, and before relinquishing mission control to the Moon, he remarks to the ground crew, "Striker has more guts in his pinky finger than most men have in their large intestines, including the colon!" He then passes out.
• Seluchi purchases the bomb at the airport, choosing it from a selection on the shelf.
• Scalpers now sell airline tickets.
• A scene cut from the video release of the film but still shown on network television introduces Lloyd Bridges' character, Steve McCroskey, in an insane asylum. He has a beard (explaining his use of an electric razor later on in the film) and the nurses claim that "he thinks he's Lloyd Bridges." (A reference to the first film's scene of a shell-shocked soldier who thought he was Ethel Merman, played by Merman herself.) McCroskey then emerges from the bedsheets with scuba gear on, as he wore in his old TV series, Sea Hunt.
• During the trial, the psychiatrist (John Vernon) is asked to give his impression of Ted Striker. He replies, "I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My training is in psychiatry."
• There is a movie poster for Rocky XXXVIII in the airport, with a geriatric Sylvester Stallone (looking remarkably like Pat Morita).
• In this film, Des Moines, Iowa is home to the Des Moines Institute — an impotence treatment center that several characters are uncannily familiar with.
• Striker finds a door marked "Danger: Vacuum" ajar. He opens it, to be attacked by a rogue vacuum cleaner hose.
• During the crisis, Elaine tells Ted that "Simon's turned to Jelly," cutting to a shot of "Simon," which is actually quivering jello in a pilot's uniform.
• When Elaine tells Striker that Kurtz had left in the escape pod, Striker calls it "premature ejection".
• Ted says they are going to "blow the computer," at which point a computer screen shows off a wide smile, as if anticipating oral sex. When Ted enters the computer core, he wears a gas mask and breathes like Darth Vader.
• When the spacecraft goes to warp 0.5 to race back to the Moon, the indicator says "Worp 0.5" in an intentional misspelling of the Star Trek Warp velocity scale.
• When the flight attendant suggests to the passengers that they may experience metabolic changes, all the passengers are wearing Richard Nixon masks.
• When McCroskey says the passengers are in jeopardy, Art Fleming, in a cameo, appears in the cabin and the passengers are playing 1960s-1970s–style Jeopardy! (this was two years before the game show was revived with Alex Trebek hosting). A passenger selects "Famous Airline Disasters" for $40 and the answer given is "The Mayflower".
• When several international TV news anchors report, they all lead in with "a four-alarm fire in downtown" wherever, then quickly switch to the Mayflower incident. The Moscow anchor (Leon Askin) has a gun held to his head by someone off-camera.
• Captain Oveur (Peter Graves) attempts to dismantle the onboard computer by unscrewing a panel and is thwarted when poisonous gas is released onto him. When this happens, the theme music from Mission: Impossible, which starred Peter Graves, plays.
• When Oveur attempts to disable the computer, the computer asks what he's doing, a la the HAL 9000.
• When Murdoch looks in his periscope, he sees a quick stock clip of the Starship Enterprise from classic Star Trek, a play on the fact that he's played by William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in that series. His base has "voice-activated" doors — blowing through gritted teeth opens them, simulating the door-opening sound from Star Trek. Props from the Regula One lab in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan decorate the control room. The movie continues its parody of the fancy Star Trek gizmos — Murdoch and an assistant study one of the Wrath of Kahn props trying to figure out what it does besides blink lights. Murdoch then directs another assistant to "get the lights to blink in proper sequence" on another prop. This line of gags later culminates when Murdoch is nearly driven mad by all the blinking and flashing lights as he talks to Striker in the shuttle.
• When someone goes to get Murdoch, he activates what seems to be a screen in the door, but it ends up behaving like a window, perhaps an homage to Robert Stack's character stepping out of a mirror to replace the "real" person in the first film.
• When Murdoch is asked if he knows Ted Striker, he replies, "Never heard of him. That's not exactly true. We were like brothers."
• A passenger opens a window on the shuttle to throw out a cigarette, causing a violent air vacuum (homage to Airport).
• The "fasten seatbelts" sign continues to generate extra indicators, including "we said fasten your seatbelt, schmuck!", and especially warns the passengers when Elaine is telling baloney to calm the passengers.
• As Striker approaches the moon, McCrosky tells him "We're all betting on you!" The next shot shows people in the air control tower taking bets on whether he will land the plane safely or not.
• When Striker, while listening to "The Beautiful Blue Danube", looks out the window after Unger and Dunn are sucked out into the vacuum of space, he sees their dead bodies float together and appear to "dance" in zero gravity, a reference combining two totally different scenes from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Before landing, Mayflower One crashes through the lunar base in a gag similar to the Boeing 747 crashing into the terminal during taxiing in the original movie, which in turn was a parody of the train crashing into the station in the 1976 movie Silver Streak.
• It turns out that the Moon has an atmosphere and normal gravity, with wolves and swamp creatures sounding off.
• When Jacobs is told to tell McCrosky everything that has happened up till now, he says (as he did in the first Airplane), "First the Earth cooled. Then the dinosaurs came, but they were too fat and died and turned into oil. Then the Arabs came and all bought Mercedes-Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes; I couldn't believe it! He took her best summer dress out of the closet and tried it on...".
• Told that she can only carry one item onto the aircraft, a mother checks her baby to be stowed in the hold; the baby cries as the conveyor belt carries it into the depths of the airport.
• Security has flip-flopped: the security people do not seem to care as the scanner buzzes (as people walk through with weapons, often carrying oversized guns and rocket launchers in full view), but when an elderly woman comes through and it bings "clear" (again, a Family Feud sound effect — this time the face-off buzzer), they throw her to the wall and frisk her. Meanwhile, Iran Air's "courtesy van" brings passengers in, blindfolded, as hostages. As those with weapons walk through, the "strike" sound effect from Family Feud goes off.
• A lunar base official says he pulled Striker's record, pulling out a musical album.
• McCrosky at first doesn't remember Ted, snapping his fingers and repeating "Striker, striker, striker." He then remembers, and points to another flight official and shouts "Striker!" The controller hears this as "Strike Her" and punches a female co-worker standing next to him.
• Ted jumps from the wall of the Ronald Reagan Mental Hospital and throws his gown off camera, which is then tossed back at him, a repeat of a gag in the disco scene from the first film. This is then followed by Striker encountering Jack Jones, the original singer of the theme song from the series, singing The Love Boat theme song.
• When Ted arrives at the airport, someone takes a picture of him getting out of a truck, and a few seconds later, a stack of newspapers is dropped off, showing that photo and the headline about an escape from a mental institution.
• The truck in which Ted arrives at the airport is carrying large green pods; spoofing the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• When the Mayflower "taxis", it is simply raised into an angled position for take-off. A ground crew member attaches jumper cables to the ship and to a car, a 1958 to 1960 Edsel Ranger.
• The ground-control landing system resembles a video game, and a boy from a passing tour group plays with a real airplane thinking it is only a video game.
• Very loud Muzak plays in an elevator, causing everybody except two airline executives to cover their ears. "MacArthur Park" plays on the first level, and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" plays on the fourth level.
• A stewardess takes a seat and says she could use a little breather, at which point the camera pans to reveal diminutive actor Hervé Villechaize breathing heavily.
• In the above scene, the Commissioner refers to "the boys on the board" pressuring him to proceed with the flight. Later, in the boardroom, the Commissioner sits with the boys, who are literally children.
• The passengers are not too concerned about being a "tad" (half million miles) off course, but begin to riot when they are told the shuttle is out of coffee.
• Sonny Bono returns after the end credits, walking into the cockpit to ask for the return of his briefcase.
• When Murdock tells Striker he'll get the shuttle to land with the comment "We'll get her down, and down safe!" A bank safe falls onto the floor behind him.
• When Ted is talking to Murdock, he says at one point "Roger Murdock" who was the Co-Pilot in the first movie.

Airplane III

After the end credits, a teaser trailer appears saying "Coming soon: Airplane III" and a scene of William Shatner saying "That's exactly what they'll be expecting us to do!" (implying that there will actually be no such film). Plans did exist to make a third film, but no script was ever written and the project was abandoned due to Airplane II's poor performance at the box office. Most theatrical and home video prints retain the Airplane III teaser; however, some TV airings omit this teaser.

Shatner's comment echoed the same line spoken by Robert Stack in the first Airplane film, in a different context, and in both cases made fun of a typical B-movie cliché line.

Trivia

• On later TV airings of the movie, after Ronald Reagan's announcement that he had Alzheimer's disease, the mental institution's sign was digitally changed from "Ronald Reagan Hospital for the Mentally Ill" to "Donald Dragon Hospital for the Mentally Ill."
• The film was released in theaters in a polarized 3D format initially.
• When the characters refer back to the events of the first movie, they identify the airplane as a 767, when in fact the plane is a 707.
• The dialogue section:

  Steven McCroskey (Lloyd Bridges): "Sorry to wake you at this time of hour gents."
  The Commissioner (John Dehner): "That's OK, I was reading."
  Bud Kruger (Rip Torn): "What's the story?"
  The Commissioner (John Dehner): "It's about an old man who catches a giant fish, but that's not important right now."

  refers to Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, whose protagonist is pursuing a marlin.

Translations

• French : Y a-t-il enfin un pilote dans l'avion ?

See also

• Airplane!, the original.

External links

• Airplane II: The Sequel at IMDb