Airplane!

Who: Bill
What: Airplane!
Where: Own the DVD
Why: One of my favorites and one of the funniest movies ever made.

When the crew and some passengers of Trans American Flight 209 are overcome with food poisoning, its up to ex-fighter pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) to overcome his fear of flying and land the plane safely. Helping him in his courageous effort are his ex-girlfriend, flight attendant Elaine Dickenson (Julie Hagerty) and fellow passenger Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen). Sounds pretty serious and heavy, doesn’t it?

Quite the contrary. If you have never seen Airplane!, then you have been missing out of one of funniest movies ever made. In fact, it would be impossible to catch all the jokes in one showing. There are so many and they often come so quickly, that you’ll find something new on a second, third, fourth or more viewings. Credit (or blame, depending on your view) goes to Writers/Producers/Directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, who took parody to new heights (pun intended) with Airplane! However, I do understand the humor will not be to everyone’s taste. Either its 90 minutes of carefully crafted brilliant satire or silly stupidity.

Airplane! was a huge hit upon its release in 1980, due to its on-target parody of then-popular disaster movies and the appearance of many famous faces from film, television and even sports and music. As the jokes “fly” fast and furious, look also for Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Barbara Billingsley, Joyce Bulifant (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) David Leisure (commercial’s Joe Isuzu and Empty Nest), Jill Whelan (The Love Boat) and legendary singer Ethel Merman! Surely, this is a movie not be missed. But don’t call me “Shirley”.

A sequel, appropriately titled Airplane II: The Sequel was released in 1982 without the involvement of Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker. They had already moved on to parodies of television cop shows and detective dramas with the classic but short-lived ABC series Police Squad! (Starring Leslie Nielsen), which in turn led to the successful Naked Gun movies. The trio would also send-up World War II dramas and Elvis Presley movies (!) in 1984’s Top Secret with Val Kilmer in his first starring role.