Airplane!
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Airplane! is an American comedy film, first released on June 27, 1980, produced and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lorna Patterson. It is the first film the trio wrote and directed together (the group previously wrote The Kentucky Fried Movie, directed by John Landis). In some foreign releases (including Australia), Airplane! was entitled Flying High: the reason most often quoted for this is that "in those countries 'airplane' is not used to refer to a powered flying machine, the correct word in countries of the British Commonwealth being 'aeroplane'."
Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster movie genre. It has elements of a serious storyline at its core, although the entire movie is thoroughly engulfed in humor. The movie is meant to be a spoof of several films, including Airport and Airport 1975, as well as commercials of the era. However, most of Airplane's storyline is based on the 1957 movie Zero Hour!. Many devotees of this movie repeatedly re-watch the film, in the process catching gags that they did not notice earlier due to the sheer number of often-overlapping sight, sound, and dialogue gags.
, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre. Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the two films have no writers or directors in common.
Several actors were cast in order to spoof their established images: Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges had played many adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guys, including Stack as the captain in one of the earliest airline "disaster" films, The High and the Mighty.
This film is number 6 on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies.
Plot synopsis
When the pilots of a commercial airliner get sick, an ex-fighter pilot, Ted Striker (Robert Hays) must conquer his fear of flying and fly the plane to its destination. Striker's ex-girlfriend (Julie Hagerty) is a flight attendant. Nielsen portrays a doctor on board.
The plot of Airplane! is a well-travelled one. The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, started as the CBC TV movie Flight into Danger, then became the 1957 Paramount Pictures movie Zero Hour! Thus Airplane! is the fourth remake of the Arthur Hailey novel Runway Zero-Eight. Also, there are several influences from the disaster movie Airport 1975.
Airplane! is very close to Zero Hour!, following it virtually scene for scene, and lifting its major characters and most of its story line. The directors acknowledge all of this in their DVD commentary. Indeed, many of the best known lines are repeated verbatim, for example, "Can you face some unpleasant facts?" and "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking," which becomes a running gag. As the plot escalates, so does the potency of the drug ("I guess I picked the wrong week to quit 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! also has elements based on films in the Airport series, specifically Airport 1975, which was also based on novels written by Arthur Hailey. The elements that the film lifted from Airport 1975 included the guitar song (a flight attendant played by Lorna Patterson in Airplane! and a nun played by Helen Reddy in Airport 1975) and the sick little girl that the guitar song is played for (played by Linda Blair in Airport 1975 and Jill Whelan in Airplane!). In this case, the well-meaning guitar player keeps banging into the girl's life-critical intravenous drip and unplugging it.
Notable characters
Nielsen's catchphrase in the film became famous worldwide. In response to the question from Ted Striker, "Surely you can't be serious?" Nielsen's character responds: "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley". ...and don't call me Shirley has recently entered the language as an all-purpose, response. He gives a similar response to Ted later in the movie. Ted says, "Surely there must be something you can do." Nielsen's character responds, "I'm doing everything I can. And stop calling me Shirley."(Although the origin of this saying is widely attributed to Airplane! it originated with the Marx Brothers in the 1930s.)
Nielsen's career would forever be changed due to this film; his deadpan, serious brand of comedy not only altered the subtext of his earlier, serious roles, but he'd become almost exclusively typecast in gag comedies, including the Naked Gun films by the Airplane! directors Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Stephen Stucker became known for the scene-stealing flamboyantly gay-stereotype character Johnny Hinshaw, inspiring many catch-phrases like "And Leon's getting laaaaaarger!", "The tower?! Rapunzel! Rapunzel!" and describing the airplane as "Oh, it's a big pretty white plane with red stripes, curtains in the windows, wheels. It looks like a big Tylenol!"
Lloyd Bridges portrays the chief air traffic controller Steve McCroskey, and Robert Stack plays Hays' former commander, Captain Rex Kramer, who is brought in to aid him in landing the airplane. Bridges' role was a direct spoof on his San Francisco International Airport television role of Jim Conrad. Howard Jarvis, the author of California's property tax initiative Proposition 13, plays a man who patiently waits in the back of Striker's cab throughout the movie. As the directors point out, Jarvis was well-known at that time and is a mystery man to the modern audience.
David Letterman screen-tested for the Ted Striker role that eventually went to Robert Hays. In fact, the screen test was shown by the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team on an early episode of Late Night With David Letterman. The trio had appeared to promote their show Police Squad!, and Dave was clearly surprised (and not pleased) that they brought along the tape. This led to Dave's rule that he never be surprised in such a way on-air again, and an unofficial ban on Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker from his show.
Airplane! is one of the most famous and acclaimed examples of a genre of similar gag-based comedies that defy logic, reason, and the "fourth wall" to produce laughter in any way possible, with comic references to other famous 'straight' disaster films such as Airport.
Notable gags
Note: The special "Don't call me Shirley!" edition of this film was released to DVD on December 13, 2005, and some of the following insights are either taken from or confirmed by the three directors' commentary on the DVD.- The opening sequence shows an airliner's tail fin moving about sticking out of clouds, accompanied by the theme music from Jaws.
- During the entire movie (except the final scene) the jetliner makes propeller noises instead of jet noises.
- The X-ray machine at the security gate shows a standard chest X-ray on-screen instead of the contents of luggage.
- Captain Oveur gets a phone call from the Mayo Health Clinic about one of the patients on board. Then he get's a message over the phone that there is a Mr. Ham on line 5. He then replies "Okay, give me Ham on 5, hold the Mayo".
- When the airplane is taxiing to takeoff, the tower and pilots call each other by name, saying: "Do we have clearance, Clarence?" "Roger, Roger." "What's our vector, Victor?"
- When one of the passengers is asked to "place all metal objects in this tray", he proceeds to unload a collection of hardware (including a collection of guns and an artificial arm and leg).
- When the man with the two hand-held red beacons is guiding the taxiing airliner toward the terminal, someone interrupts to ask: "Where's the forklift?" Without thinking, he immediately gestures its direction with the two beacons. He looks back to see the airplane crash into the arrival hall, parodying a similar scene in the "runaway train" disaster movie Silver Streak.
- When Rex Kramer (Robert Stack) arrives at the airport, he dramatically whips off his sunglasses only to reveal that he's wearing a slightly smaller pair of sunglasses underneath.
- As the airplane is approaching the runway, Rex Kramer orders all of the airport's lights on the runway. The movie then cuts to a dump truck unloading a mound of table lamps on the tarmac.
- At the front entrance to the airport, a pair of voices — one male, one female (the actual LAX announcers, in fact) — announce not to stop in the red zone, and not to park in the white zone. They are assumed to be recordings, until the man gets mixed up as to which zone is which and they begin arguing. In a later scene at the entrance, they are discussing her pregnancy and his advice to get an abortion (a sequence of dialogue taken almost word-for-word from a passage in Arthur Hailey's novel Airport).
- When Ted gets his ticket for the flight, he's asked, "Smoking or non-smoking?"; he answers intently, "smoking, please," and is handed a ticket that appears to be smoldering, and it is still giving off smoke when he is outside ready to climb aboard the aircraft.
- When Ted sits down he begins to tell his excruciatingly tedious life story to a variety of fellow passengers. Each time, after the stereotype flashback sequence, eventually the picture fades back to the cabin with Ted saying: "Well I could probably go on for hours, but I'd probably bore you to death," by which time his fellow passenger has either committed suicide or is in the process thereof. The first older woman he told the story to hanged herself, a Japanese General he next told the story to committed seppuku, and an Indian man had doused himself in gasoline and was about to set himself on fire.
- A young boy asks if he can see the flight cabin, a request the stewardess seems reluctant to grant, but not for the reason everybody thinks. Captain Oveur appears to be an unrepentant pedophile, asking the boy such questions as "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" and "Do you like movies about gladiators?" However as with many other scenes, Graves manages to make this politically outrageous suggestion merely amusing.
- Some instruction notices inside the plane are duplicated in a phonetic spelling of an attempt at African American Vernacular English, e.g. "Go back and sidonna".
- When the passengers first start to fall ill and the stewardess starts looking for any doctors who might be on the flight, one of the passengers says: "Stewardess; I think the man sitting next to me is a doctor," pointing at Leslie Nielsen, who is wearing a stethoscope.
- When the crew pulls the fainted Roger Murdock out of his seat, he can be seen wearing the bottom half of his Los Angeles Lakers uniform and a pair of athletic goggles, despite his denials earlier in the film.
- As Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) rattles off a list of the food poisoning's gradual effects, one of the poison's victims, Captain Oveur, begins experiencing the effects as they are verbally listed.
- When the "seat belt" lights come on, they are in the shape of two people in compromising positions.
- The "automatic pilot" is nothing more than an inflatable doll, aptly named "Otto", that inflates in the co-pilot's seat when activated. If deflated, it has to be manually inflated (via a nozzle located below the belt). Elaine has to reinflate it at one point during the film. Because of the nozzle's position, it appears that she is performing oral sex on Otto, and both she and Otto are seen smoking cigarettes in an apparent post-coital situation.
- A man dressed like a service station attendant (Jimmie Walker) lifts the plane's hood to check the dipstick, but falls off the ladder while trying to leap onto the hood to get it shut. Another attendant continues the service station gag by handing a credit card slip to Oveur to sign.
- In a wartime flashback (including grainy stock footage of World War II dogfights), Ted gives all kinds of detailed ambush information to Elaine, where and when they're going to be bombing, but when Elaine asks Ted when he'll be back, he replies, "I can't tell you that. It's classified."
- In another wartime flashback, parodying the famous "kiss in the surf" scene from From Here to Eternity, when the wave recedes Ted and Elaine are covered in seaweed.
- Barbara Billingsley, the archetypal suburban mother on Leave It to Beaver, makes an appearance wherein she offers to translate for a pair of hip African American passengers whose jive talking is incomprehensible to stewardesses: "Stewardess? I speak jive."
- A female passenger is putting on red lipstick when the plane hits turbulence and she gets a long lipstick streak across her cheek. Later the plane hits more turbulence and the same passenger is seen still applying makeup. Now she has green eyeshadow smudged on her face as well.
- A prepubescent boy dressed up in business man's attire attempts to hit on a prepubescent girl in similar attire by offering her a cup of coffee. When asked how she likes her coffee, she responds "Black... like my men."
- After interviewing Johnny, one reporter tells a group of his fellow journalists, "Okay boys, let's get some pictures." The reporters respond by grabbing framed pictures off the wall.
- A shell-shocked fighter pilot who thinks he's Ethel Merman is actually played by Ethel Merman (in her final film appearance, and singing a bar of "Everything's Coming Up Roses").
- In a running gag throughout the movie, Ted has a "drinking problem" where he brings a drink up to his forehead or torso and pours in on himself instead of drinking normally.
- Ted is flying the plane and Elaine is on the radio relaying the messages between him and Kramer. Ted says, "It's a damn good thing he doesn't know how much I hate his guts." Elaine says to Kramer, "It's a damn good thing you don't know how much he hates your guts."
- When Dr. Rumack is asking Ted what flying experience he's had, Ted says "Well, I flew single-engine fighters during the war, but this plane has four engines! It's an entirely different kind of flying, altogether!" To which Rumack and the stewardess respond, all together, "It's an entirely different kind of flying."
- A stewardess says, "Assume crash positions", and the passengers sprawl out everywhere like they were just thrown out of their seats by a crash.
- In a running gag throughout the movie, a character makes a statement such as, "We must get this man to a hospital!" Another character asks, "A hospital? What is it?" The character misinterprets the question, answering "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now".
- Steve McCroskey explains that he picked the wrong week to quit various addictions. During one week he attempted to quit smoking cigarettes, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. After a week of going cold turkey, it took one day to make him go back to his habits.
- When the #4 engine blows, Striker comments, "When Kramer hears about this, the shit's going to hit the fan". Directly afterward, the scene shifts to Chicago, where a quantity of the offending material collides with a desk fan.
- When a radar operator at Chicago informs McCroskey that the plane should be in radar range in two minutes, McCroskey says "Two minutes? They could be miles off course!" Kramer responds "No, that's impossible. They've got instruments". The scene then shifts to the plane's cockpit, where Elaine, Ted, Dr. Rumack, and a stewardess are performing jazz on a clarinet, a bass, a saxophone, and a trumpet.
- McCrosky shouts "Check the radar range", and one of the operators checks on a turkey cooking in a microwave oven ("Radarange" being a brand of microwave oven by Amana).
- When a radar operator is speaking about the plane, in the background, another radar operator opens the radar screen like a clothes dryer and takes out laundry and puts it in a basket.
- As the plane comes in to land, there is a radio call: "Air Israel please clear the runway". An airliner with a yarmulke and prayer shawl draped over its front end hurries out of the way into a parking bay.
- When the plane lands it hits the runway too hard causing the landing gear to collapse and the plane to skid down the runway. Inside the terminal the announcer says over the PA "Flight 209 arriving at gate 8.
Gate 9. Gate 10..." etc. Passengers waiting at gate 8 in the terminal begin running off-screen towards each new gate as the plane slides past them. - Among the "emergency vehicles" that rush to the airport: an ice cream truck, a cement mixer, a tractor, and a tractor-trailer hauling Budweiser beer.
- When the plane is entering Chicago, it comes across the antenna of radio station "WZAZ, where disco lives forever". It knocks over its antenna, silencing it.
- When Ted is telling his war story, the locations he mentions are actually the names of alcoholic beverages, e.g., he was stationed in Drambuie and he flew to Daquiri on a mission.
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-Jabaar as Roger Murdock
- Lorna Patterson as Randy
- Stephen Stucker as Johnny Henshaw
- Otto as Autopilot
Response
- 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 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. 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 2nd greatest comedy film of all time.
- At a critical point in the film, the passengers are watching a movie. The attendant advises everyone to remain calm and not to worry. The passengers continue to watch the in-flight movie, and we see a fiery crash of an airplane (taken from the 1964 film Fate Is the Hunter). In reality, most airlines would never show a movie that hints at any sort of mid-air problem with an aircraft. At that point, in the DVD commentary, the directors reported that the only actual airline to buy the rights to their film for in-flight showing was Aeromexico. That same crash footage would be used in the film's 1982 sequel when Ted is describing a plane crash he had just survived.
- 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.
Trivia
- Airplane! was filmed in only 34 days, mostly during the month of August 1979.
- The three co-directors' commentary on the DVD released on December 13, 2005, is interesting for at least two reasons. One is that they do not provide very much scene-by-scene analysis, they mostly tell general stories about the making of the movie (and point out some amusing goofs, such as a gaffer laying down cord). The other is that the commentary speaks in the present tense about Robert Stack, who had died in May 2003, two and a half years earlier. The commentary was originally recorded in 2000 for the initial DVD, hence the inconsistencies with Robert Stack.
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's name is misspelled as "Kareem Abdul-Jabaar" during the final credits of both the movie shown at theaters and the version made for home video release.
- One interesting area of discussion was the varying degrees of effort required to get some of the seasoned professional players to do this spoof in the way the directors wanted.
- *Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves required more coaching, as they were not totally comfortable with doing satire.
- *Robert Stack played his role differently in early rehearsals than what the directors had in mind. They had to play for him a tape of impressionist John Byner "doing" Robert Stack. As they said in the commentary, Stack was doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack.
- *Leslie Nielsen "got it" quickly. Nielsen is known for having a wry, deadpan and sometimes bawdy sense of humor in real life.
- The popularity of the film is such that Otto, the inflatable plastic pilot, has [his own entry] in the IMDB.
- Although Stephen Stucker appears in both this movie and , ostensibly playing the same character, he is credited simply as "Johnny" in the first one, and "Jacobs" in the sequel.
- Rumack's last lines, which are repeated three times in the movie (right before they start the landing, during the end of the landing, and a few minutes after the plane is landed safely and everyone is evacuated), "I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you." The gag would later return as Nielsen's final line in Scary Movie 3, also a Zucker film.
- When the taxiing airliner is being guided toward the terminal, the ground crew member holding the red beacons is played by David Zucker; Jerry Zucker then enters as the second ground crew member who asks where the forklift is located.
- The Zuckers' mother, Charlotte Zucker, who is cast in small roles in all of their films, makes a cameo as the woman attempting to apply makeup in the plane as it violently shifts.
- Jim Abrahams is one of the many religious zealot characters scattered throughout the film.
- For the scene where the "shit hits the fan", Robert Stack later confirmed on a telecast of The Merv Griffin Show that it was a mixture of wet clay and walnuts.
- Adolf Hitler is listed in the crew credits as the Worst Boy.
- Gregory Itzin, who played President Charles Logan in the FOX series 24, played "Religious Zealot #1" in Airplane and said the film's first lines: "We'd like you to have this flower from the church of religious consciousness. Would you care to make a donation?"
- WZAZ, the call letters of the radio station whose transmitter is destroyed by the airplane, is a reference to the directors' names (Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker).
- See Zero Hour! for further information on the source of the script.
- This was Ethel Merman's final film.
See also
External links
- [Airplane! Script] at Simply Scripts
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