He’d had a leading role in the seminal sci-fi flick Forbidden Planet two dozen years earlier, and he’d played the captain of the doomed ocean liner in the disasterpiece The Posiedon Adventure, a perfect specimen of the type of movie Airplane! was sending up. The ZAZ guys really liked picking on him, apparently.īut even more critical than that sturdy plot is the way Airplane! adopted the trappings of a “real” movie, from its Elmer Bernstein score to a company of actors not known for cutting up: Peter Graves, who’d been team leader Jim Phelps on TV’s Mission: Impossible Robert Stack, who’d been crusading Prohibition-era lawman Eliot Ness on TV’s The Untouchables and of course, Leslie Nielsen. Not for nothing, Zero Hour! had been written by one Arthur Hailey, who a decade later published his novel Airport, the basis for the eponymous 1970 movie. ![]() It’s also an asset that many of the send-ups that followed its success didn’t have-as in when the ZAZ trio reteamed for 1984’s Top Secret! starring Val “Iceman” Kilmer, not to mention 1982’s ZAZ-less Airplane! II: The Sequel. That strong narrative spine is what keeps Airplane! aloft for its fleet 87-minute running time. They also pilfered character names, scenes and verbatim exchanges of dialogue, even as they layered on a nonstop parade of jokes-absurdist, frequently childish, some certainly in poor taste by contemporary standards, but mostly just…funny. But Airplane! writer/directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as “ZAZ”) didn’t just take the earlier film’s premise. In that little-remembered potboiler, food poisoning knocks out an airliner’s entire flight crew, leaving only Dana Andrews, playing a haunted World War II fighter jock who hasn’t flown in years, to land the unfamiliar aircraft safely in bad weather. 171, “The Remarkable Rise of the Riddler”) without changing a word-and then had its actors play the material straighter than a balance beam- Airplane! stole both plot and punctuation from a very particular source: the 1957 endangered-aircraft thriller Zero Hour! Released 40 years ago this month, Airplane! earned its titular exclamation point with its energetic send-up of 1970s disaster pictures (the diminishing-returns Airport quadrilogy chief among them) and postwar melodramas.īut just as the 1960s Batman TV series instantly found its campy tone when its pilot episode “adapted” the script of a Batman comic (No. ![]() ![]() It isn’t the first movie that comes to mind when you think “aviation-themed summer blockbuster,” but it’s certainly the funniest.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |