In this entry of my Revisited series (where I’m going on the record with a movie I’ve seen before but never written about), I’m looking at a movie I know like the back of my hand. I’ve probably seen Airplane! no less than 20 times, starting when I was 10 or so.
Airplane! (1980)
dir. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
Rated: PG
image: ©1980 Paramount Pictures
Airplane! and I both turned 40 last year. This is one of those films that made me who I am today. Because of my parents’ HBO subscription – it was an add-on to your cable package before it was an app, kids – and our shiny new VCR (on which we taped EVERY MOVIE EVER), I don’t really remember a time when I hadn’t watched this brilliantly crafted spoof of ’70s disaster movies at least 1000 times. It was one of the first DVDs I ever bought to begin my movie collection back in the very late ‘90s (what I was shocked a few days ago to learn that teenagers today are referring to as “the late 1900s,” which makes me feel like I lived through the Civil War).
Airplane! also has the distinction of being the very first movie my now-wife and I ever saw together. She should have been clued into the fact that the rest of her life would be dominated by movies when I suggested a late dinner, then a midnight screening of Airplane! at the historic Inwood Theater for our first date. Her cool points multiplied by five when her response to my suggestion was, “I love that movie!”
What could be described (derisively) as the progenitor of #dadjokes, Airplane!’s gags, visual puns, and silly wordplay run like a swiss watch. Each joke is fired off in rapid succession, barely giving the audience time to recover from the last guffaw before it’s on to the next. One classic exchange – repeated multiple times throughout the movie – is emblematic of the picture’s high jinks, which is on the level of the Marx Brothers at the top of their game:
“Surely you can’t be serious.”
“I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”
Airplane! is the story of an ill-fated flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, and the one man who can get the passengers and crew to safety when the pilots and navigator become incapacitated from food poisoning. The man is Ted Striker. A pilot who flew during “the war,” Ted impulsively buys a ticket to Chicago because the love of his life, Elaine, is a flight attendant – stewardess in 1980 – working on board for the trip.
(I don’t use the word “impulsively” lightly. Ted leaves the fare in the cab he drives waiting, with the meter running, for the whole movie. One of the funniest post-credits sequences ever is the poor guy looking at his watch and proclaiming, “Well, I’ll give him another 20 minutes. But that’s it!”)
Elaine is leaving Ted because his continuing trauma from the war is too much for her to handle. Ted is focused on convincing Elaine to stay with him when, in true disaster-movie tradition, he must rise to the occasion when it’s clear he’s the only person on board who can land the plane.
Proof that the zany antics of Airplane! rise above the material that it’s spoofing is evident in the fact that I’ve never seen a classic Hollywood disaster movie. Wildly popular in the 1970s, movies like the Airport series (consisting of Airport, Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde…Airport ’79) and The Poseidon Adventure are action spectacles revolving around some natural or man-made emergency.
The fact that three of the leads (Leslie Neilson as Dr. Rumack, Robert Stack as Capt. Rex Kramer, and Lloyd Bridges as Steve McCroskey) were cast specifically because they had never done comedy before, and were known for their tough-guy personas, isn’t as important now as the hilarious gags surrounding them.
The pinnacle of the slightly crude, nonsensical humor at the heart of Airplane! comes when Ted Striker laments what the ground crew in Chicago will make of a new bit of information: “When Kramer hears about this, the shit’s gonna hit the fan.” Cut to, naturally, a desk fan in a Chicago air-traffic control office as it’s struck with a – pun completely intended – shitty substance. (I’m trying hard not to fall into the easy trap of writing about comedy, which is simply describing the funniest bits, but I feel compelled to get some of my favorites in here.)
The greatest low-key joke of the movie is one I’ve never heard anybody ever comment on, and one that I only noticed on my latest screening of Airplane!. In exactly what war is it that Ted Striker is supposed to have served? The movie was released in (and presumably takes place in) 1980, and Ted looks to be in his early 30s (the actor portraying Ted, Robert Hays, was 33 at the time). Every PTSD-induced memory Ted has about flying during “the war” is old, grainy black-and-white footage of WWII-era dog-fights. The bar where Ted and Elaine met looks like a dive right out of Casablanca, at least until everybody starts dancing to the Bee Gees’s disco hit Stayin’ Alive. Every flashback that either he or Elaine has about their hopes and dreams “after the war” plays like a WWII melodrama. One of these flashbacks even spoofs an iconic moment from a movie about the WWII era: the beach scene in From Here to Eternity. Doing the math puts Ted as being born in roughly 1947, two years after the end of World War II.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t address those moments of Airplane! that have not aged quite as well as I have in the last four decades. I’m getting to the age now where the stuff I cut my cultural teeth on can look downright regressive in the light of modern thinking. I’m an unabashed progressive, and I can resist becoming defensive when confronted with a piece of pop culture to which I have nostalgic ties that has become retrograde. Unlike members of the right-wing, who feel attacked by “cancel culture” every time someone calls out something problematic, I can recognize when jokes or mores from the past (even ones I used to identify with) prove outdated.
Airplane! has some particularly gross takes on race. The only Black people with speaking parts in the movie (at least, if memory serves) are two men who speak “Jive.” The characters – credited by the movie as “First Jive Dude” and “Second Jive Dude” – are captioned with a standard English translation any time they speak. The gag hinges on the (presumably white) audience laughing at the funny way these men talk, confirming their otherness.
The zenith of their arc comes when the men are trying to communicate with a flight attendant about the food poisoning one of them is suffering. She can’t understand them, so an old white lady – played by Barbara Billingsley, who, in turn, played June Cleaver, the proto-suburban-white-housewife in the ‘50s TV show Leave It to Beaver – who happens to speak fluent Jive, translates for them. The joke is that June Cleaver speaks Jive. That’s humorous enough, and the most charitable reading might credit it as a take-down of white appropriation, but the joke under the joke that really sticks is the way the movie belittles how the Black men speak, as if it’s complete gibberish.
The creators of Airplane!, comedy writing and directing team Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker, also gave us the Naked Gun films (as well as Police Squad!, the short-lived Dragnet spoof TV series that those movies are based on), the Hot Shots! action spoofs, and the underrated and underseen spy spoof Top Secret! (these guys love an exclamation point in the title). While not all of their comedy has aged well, there is enough harmless slapstick and ridiculous shenanigans in Airplane! – “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!” – to make it one of the funniest comedies of the last half-century.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Some of the jokes in Airplane! this time around made me downright squirm, but there’s so much goofy, harmless fun here, too. Airplane! is silly and still incredibly funny after 40 years.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Here’s where I’ll really indulge with some of my favorite jokes:
- The opening reference to Jaws (I wonder how much they had to pay for the theme song) is classic. It’s a hell of a start to the proceedings.
- Everything that comes out of the mouth of air-traffic controller Johnny. I think my favorite exchange is: (Bridges’s Steve McCroskey hands Johnny (played by the irrepressible Stephen Stucker) a computer print-out with details about the flight): “Johnny, what do you make of this?” “Oh, well, I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl…”
- Nothing gets me laughing harder than when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is playing the co-pilot, Roger Murdock, is recognized as actually being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar by Joey, a little boy passenger who gets to visit the cockpit. The basketball great’s anger when the kid starts telling him what his dad thinks of Abdul-Jabbar’s performance on the court is priceless.
- On the topic of the kid, I was struck this time by the pedophilia-tinged things the captain, Clarence Oveur, says to little Joey. As a little kid watching it, I just thought it was a grown-up saying weird things to a little kid. Questions like “Joey, do you like gladiator movies?” and “Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?” struck me a little differently on this go around.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Airplane! isn’t currently available on any of the streaming platforms to which I’m currently subscribed, so I went to my DVD collection (which I ripped to a hard drive about ten years ago) for the revisit.