Airplane!: The Movie

On 2 July 1980 a movie premiered in America. This low-budget film took off as a fan favorite and hasn't looked back since. 25 years later people still quote lines from this movie and several lines have been voted among the top 100 movie lines of all time.

"Surely you can't be serious?"

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley"

Airplane! took the world by storm 25 years ago today. The twisted airliner seen in movie posters was only a hint of the twisted plot found in the movie. The airliner was so full of sight gags, voice gags, and double entendres that multiple viewings is in order to catch them all-or as many as can be caught.

The movie was the creation of three men from the Milwaukee area, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, who had grown up together and tried their off-beat comedy on each other. Think Mystery Science Theater 3000 and you have a picture of these three individuals together making wise comments about movies and TV shows they are watching. That zaniness is evident in their movies, beginning with Kentucky Fried Movie and found in Airplane and Airplane II and the Naked Gun and Hot Shots films.

This is not a film that follows the conventions of political correctness. It was designed as a lampoon of practically every disaster movie ever made. The major influence for this lampoon, however, was the movie Zero Hour. Many of Airplane's lines are taken directly from Zero Hour.

The budget for Airplane was about US$3.5 Million. Abrahams and the Zucker brothers admitted the film was low budget and that they took every precaution to avoid spending too much money. Yet the film earned over US$80 Million at the box office. Another US$40 Million came in rental income.

The movie starts out at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Robert Hays plays an ex-fighter pilot named Ted Stryker who lost most of his squadron during a raid. Now a cab driver, Ted is afraid of airplanes. We meet Ted's girlfriend Elaine, played by Julie Hagerty, who is a stewardess (not "flight attendant"). Elaine has decided to move out of their apartment and leave Ted. Captain Oveur is played by Peter Graves, who is the pilot of the airplane. The head of Chicago Flight Control, Steve McCroskey, is played by Lloyd Bridges. He calls in a veteran pilot, Rex Kramer, who is played by Robert Stack, to talk Ted Striker through flying the plane. In a plot twist Rex Kramer was Ted Striker's commanding officer during the war and there is no love lost between the two. Howard Jarvis, the author of California's property tax initiative Proposition 13, plays the man who patiently waits in the back of Striker's cab throughout the movie. Is it possible he is still awaiting-and the meter is still running?

The movie was originally written to take place on a propeller-driven plane. The studio objected, since they wanted an up-to-date. The producers relented with the jet plane. They found a way to get even by using the sound of propeller engines whenever the plane is seen. Flashbacks also show stock footage of World War II combat planes in action.

When the plane taxis a young man stands in the door of the plane yelling good-bye to has girlfriend running alongside, a satire of a scene from the movie Since You Went Away where the girl is running alongside a train.

In some foreign releases, such as Australia, Airplane! was entitled Flying High.

The plot of Airplane! is a well known. The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, was a CBC TV movie called Flight Into Danger. In 1957 Paramount Pictures used this plot in the movie Zero Hour!. Airplane! is the fourth remake of the Arthur Hailey novel Runway Zero-Eight. Arthur Hailey, ironically, also wrote the novel Airport. This novel led to the movie by the same name, which spawned several sequels with Airplane! is also said to spoof (and, some say, killed).

Airplane! also has elements based on films in the Airport series, especially Airport '75. The elements lifted from Airport '75 include:
·A guitar playing nun (played by Maureen McGovern in Airplane! and Helen Reddy in Airport '75), and
·A sick little girl that the nun's guitar is played for (played by Linda Blair in Airport '75 and Jill Whelan in Airplane!).

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. But the blame for the demise of the Airport movies can be laid at the feet of the Airport creators as much as at the feet of the Airplane! creators. The Airport series had taken on high levels of credibility gaps. Seriously, can a 747 be submerged underwater without damage for several hours and the passengers having no ill effects?

Several actors were cast in order to spoof their established images. Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges had played many adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guys. Leslie Nielsen claims he played "more cops, doctors, and attorneys than you could shake a nightstick/stethoscope/law book at." Barbara Billingsley, the mother on Leave It To Beaver, offers to translate for a pair of hip African-American passengers whose jive talking is incomprehensible to the stewardesses. Ethel Merman has a memorable cameo as a shell-shocked fighter pilot who thinks he's Ethel Merman. Nielsen probably made the best of his new-found stereotype as he has since specialized in playing clueless deadpan bumblers (who can forget Lt. Frank Drebin in Naked Gun?).

A running gag employed bilingual notices in normal English and phonetically-spelt jive.

In 2000 the American Film Institute listed Airplane! as #10 on its list of the 100 funniest American films.