Everything about Airplane totally explained
Airplane! is an
American comedy film produced, directed, and written by
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, 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, Japan and the Philippines,
Airplane! was known as
Flying High.
Airplane! is a
spoof of the
disaster movie genre. It was inspired by and includes various lines of dialogue and references to the 1957 film
Zero Hour!.
Airplane! was a major financial success, grossing over $83 million in U.S. box office. 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 synopsis
When the crew of a commercial airliner suffer food poisoning after eating their in-flight meals, it falls to Ted Striker (
Robert Hays), an ex-fighter pilot, to conquer his
fear of flying and land the airplane. Adding to the challenge is the fact that his ex-girlfriend Elaine (
Julie Hagerty) is a
flight attendant on the aircraft. Nielsen portrays a doctor called to help the sick passengers.
Cast
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, in which an SST was unable to land due to an emergency.
Cameos
The film's writers and directors, as well as members of their family, showed up in cameos.
David and
Jerry Zucker appear as two ground crew members who accidentally direct a plane into a terminal.
Jim Abrahams is one of many religious zealots 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 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 shows up briefly as a soldier who is convinced he's Ethel Merman. This was Merman's last film appearance.
Barbara Billingsley, known as
June Cleaver from
Leave It to Beaver, makes a brief 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, ).
Howard Jarvis, the property tax reformer and author of
California Proposition 13, plays the rider in the taxi that Striker is driving in the movie's opening and closing scene.
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, 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
Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker; previously they'd 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 than 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 is a
Boeing 707; the plane taking off with "The End" credit isn't a 707 (which has four engines), but a
Boeing 727 tri-jet. The ambient noise of the plane isn't a jet but a piston engine, was taken from the soundtrack of
Zero Hour!, making it the longest running gag in the movie.
Reception
Airplane! was a hit. Even though the budget was about US $3.5 million, it earned more than 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 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.
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.
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.
Airplane! had an interesting reception outside the U.S. Its translated titles carry sly comment on the nature of the film. For example, in Australia it's 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?)
MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in
Airplane! #4 on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes."
Parody targets
Airplane! parodies
Zero Hour! directly, with numerous references to other films, particularly those in the
Airport series, the final installment of which,, was released a few months 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 smoking/drinking/amphetamines/sniffin' glue.")
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 is taken from the novel Airport, and is voiced by the two 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.
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'd 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.
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Airplane'.
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