It is impossible to overstate the importance of Airplane!, the 1980 Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker film, on me and my poor, poor psyche. That I still use some of the lines in the movie in everyday life (e.g., when I spill something, intoning, regretfully, “And that’s when I started having my drinking problem” … or a mildly chiding “Shep, bad dog!” when we see parents letting their kids run amok … or regretting it was the wrong week to stop sniffing glue … or even telling myself that I have to concentrate (concentrate (concentrate))) demonstrates the horrible, horrible way this film has stuck with me.
The New York Times celebrates its 30th anniversary, and BoingBoing has a great article on the “Jive” scene.
I don’t have the Film Critique Creds to analyze the movie’s roots or antecedents. What I do know is that it was the funniest thing I had ever seen in a theater. Swinging non-stop between deadpan delivery of absurd lines, furious sight gags, homages to an array of film tropes, terrible puns … populated with relative unknowns (Hagerty, Hays), stolid straight-arrows (Bridges, Nielsen, Graves, Stack, Billingsly), oddball casting (Abdul-Jabbar, Jarvis), and a host of comic talent … nothing other than the whole Monty Python oevre has adhered to my brain in quite this way.
That resonance may be because it came out when it did, right after my freshman year in college (egad), when my personality was malleably and being remade, and I latched onto it like a newly hatched baby duck imprinting on a rabid platypus.
That having been said, it’s been a while since I watched it — and, honestly, some of the humor doesn’t work with me today as well as it did then (my absurdism has contracted a bit over the years, for example). It’s like going back to your old home town — some of the fond memories and old haunts make you shudder, even as you still feel the nostalgia.
But an improbable amount of the movie reduces me to giggles even today, just to recall it. The dueling airport PA voices. Robert Stack’s sunglasses. Pretty much anything that came out of Leslie Nielsen’s mouth. Roger, Clarence, and Victor in the cockpit. The running verbal gags (“A hospital? What is it!”). The flashback to the War. The hapless passengers sitting next to Hays. Johnny the ATC guy. The endless pan across the cockpit controls.
Yeah, I need to watch it again.
Airplane! is turning 30. Surely you can’t be serious.
Special bonus: a comparison between Airplane! and Zero Hour! (the 1957 movie that, plotwise, inspired the ZAZ team):
I caught it on TCM a few weeks ago. Still cracks me up. Especially Johnny.
Did you hear the 25th anniversary bit on NPR’s All Things Considered five years ago?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4735876
I had never heard of Zero Hour! Interesting precedent.
I had heard of Zero Hour, though not until after seeing Airplane!. I had not realized how closely the plot and dialogue of the two movies matched. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could ever watch Zero Hour without laughing all the way through it.