What’s slower than a speeding bullet, and able to hit tall buildings at a single bound?
It’s July 2, 1980. Jimmy Carter is President, gas is $1.25 a gallon, and a loaf of bread costs 50 cents. Disco is on the way out, but cocaine is still going strong. Charlie’s Angels is on TV that night. The #1 song in America is Coming Up, by Paul McCartney. And a little spoof movie is about to land on an unsuspecting U.S. getting ready for its Independence Day weekend.
Written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, Airplane! took the visual gags and punny dialog style they’d previously deployed in The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and applied them to a perfectly serious 1957 disaster film, Zero Hour! That film had itself been adapted from an earlier TV movie, Encounter: Flight Into Danger, both of which were written by Arthur Hailey, who would go on to write the novel Airport in 1968, which Airplane! ALSO spoofs. Did you get all that?
In fact, Airplane! lifted large sections of dialog verbatim from Zero Hour! [It probably helped that Paramount owned the rights to both movies, but the writers of Zero Hour!—Hall Bartlett, in addition to Hailey—really should have been credited.] And delivering this serious dialog were perfectly serious actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Billingsley, and Peter Graves.
In any event, this is the movie that launched a thousand catchphrases. A small sampling:
- “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”
- “A hospital? What is it?” “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”
- “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”
- “Sheeeeeit.” [Subtitle: GOLLY]
- “What’s our vector, Victor?”
- “Jim never vomits at home…”
- “The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.”
- “I haven’t seen anything like this since the Anita Bryant concert.”
- “That’s just what they’ll be *expecting* us to do.”
The screenplay for Airplane! would go on to be nominated for both Golden Globe and BAFTA awards, and the film won the Writers Guild of America’s award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium. It *still* has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the American Film Institute voted it “one of the 10 funniest movies ever made.”
On the flip side, one of the acting performances, Jill Whelan’s sick little girl Lisa, was nominated for both Best Young Comedienne by the Young Artist Awards AND Worst Performance by a Child in a Featured Role by the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. So there you go.
Over the past 40 years, the movie has grossed more than $83 million worldwide. (Not bad on an estimated budget of $3.5 million.) Its success led Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker to release Airplane II: The Sequel 2 years later, as well as The Naked Gun/Police Squad universe (1982-1994), Top Secret! (1984), and Ruthless People (1986). Abrahams alone would go on to write and direct the Hot Shots! movies (1991 and 1993); David Zucker, to direct films such as BASEketball (1998) and Scary Movies 3 and 4 (2003, 2006); and Jerry Zucker, to direct Ghost (1990), First Knight (1995), and Rat Race (2001).
In honor of the movie’s 40th anniversary, Paramount has reissued Airplane! as part of its Paramount Presents series of remastered Blu-ray versions. Special features on the new version include audio commentary, a New Filmmaker Focus segment, and a new Q&A with the directors.
Any disaster-movie fan deserves to watch Airplane! Where disco does NOT live forever.
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