Tuesday, April 27, 2010

AIRPLANE!




(June 1980, U.S.)

When AIRPLANE! was released 30 years ago, it spoofed all of the "Airport" films that had been popular in the '70s as well as Paramount's own 1957 film, ZERO HOUR. Even back then, though, the idea for a comedy with spoofs, silly jokes and bad puns was not exactly original. Mel Brooks had already been doing it for nearly a decade. However, AIRPLANE brought on a fresh degree of rudeness, ludeness and crudeness that created a comedy classic that still cracks me up even 30 years later (it's even part of the film library at Turner Classic Movies!). This is a movie that seems to have its style of humor all perfectly and tightly packed into a simple 87 minutes of screen time. Because of this, I've never felt the redundant need to own any of the films from THE NAKED GUN, HOT SHOTS or SCARY MOVIE series. It's like I'm always telling my four year-old son; if you say something too many times, it's not funny anymore.

One thing in particular I've found interesting is that even when you think you know a film inside and out, there's always one or two things you're apt to discover as you get older. I first saw AIRPLANE! when I was a pre-teen and continued to see it multiple times on on pay cable channels. It's only in my adulthood that I manged to pick up on a few things. For instance, I never realized this when I was younger, but that young black man checking under the hood of the plane before takeoff is none other than GOOD TIMES' own Jimmie Walker himself. Here's another one: as a kid, everytime Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays) mentioned "the war", it was always my presumption that because of the old black and white combat footage shown in the film, that he was referring to World War II. Clearly, as time and age would dictate, he must have talking about the Vietnam War. As a kid, though, I simply didn't pick up on that.

And now, just when you think you know everything about everything, here's one final revelation about AIRPLANE! that I've only just recently discovered. Ready? AIRPLANE! is practically a remake of an earlier Paramount adventure called ZERO HOUR (1956). It's practically a duplicate of everything AIRPLANE! (including the hero named Ted Stryker!), but without the jokes. But it's completely unfair and inaccurate to say it's a copy of AIRPLANE! when it came out first in the 1950s. So, out of intense couriousity, I watched it recently and tried very hard to take it seriously. Impossible! I've been weaned on AIRPLANE! for three decades now and I can't possibly listen to a serious piece of dialogue like, "Can you fly this plane and land it?" from 1956 without hearing the natural response in my head: "Surely, you can't be serious!", followed by, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

And so, even to this day, I'm ashamed to admit that occassionally one of my best friends and I will find ouselves quoting one of the many quotables from AIRPLANE! to get a laugh out of each other, particularly when it comes to two white guys trying to speak "Jive". Hey, if the woman who played June Cleaver on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER could do it, why not us??

Favorite line or dialogue:

Jack Kirkpatrick: "Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

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