Airplane!

Ex-fighter pilot Ted Striker is a traumatized war veteran turned taxi driver. Because of his pathological fear of flying and subsequent "drinking problem"—he splashes beverages anywhere but into his mouth—Ted has been unable to hold a responsible job. His wartime girlfriend, Elaine Dickinson, now a flight attendant, breaks off her relationship with him before boarding her rostered flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. Ted abandons his taxi and buys a ticket on the same flight to try to win her back. Once on board, however, Elaine continues to reject him, causing Ted to inadvertently drive several other passengers to suicide due to boredom as he windily reminisces. After the in-flight meal is served, the entire flight crew and several passengers fall ill. Passenger Dr. Rumack discovers that the fish served during meal service has caused food poisoning. With the flight crew incapacitated, Elaine contacts the Chicago control tower for help and is instructed by tower supervisor Steve McCroskey to activate the plane's autopilot, a large inflatable dummy pilot dubbed "Otto", which will get them to Chicago, but cannot land the plane. Elaine and Rumack convince Ted to take the controls. When Steve learns Ted is piloting, he contacts Ted's former commanding officer, Rex Kramer—now serving as a commercial pilot—to help talk Ted through the landing procedure. Ted becomes uneasy when Kramer starts giving orders, and he briefly breaks down amid more wartime flashbacks. Elaine and Rumack both bolster Ted's confidence, and he manages to once again take the controls. As the plane nears Chicago, the weather worsens, complicating the landing. With Elaine's help as co-pilot and Rex's guidance from the tower, Ted is able to land the plane safely, despite the landing gear shearing off, and the passengers suffer only minor injuries. Rescue vehicles arrive to help unload the plane. Impressed by Ted's courage, Elaine embraces and kisses him, rekindling their relationship. "Otto" restarts the plane and takes off as a female companion inflates beside him. ==Cast==

Development and writing Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (collectively known as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, or ZAZ) wrote Airplane! while they were performing with the Kentucky Fried Theatre, a theatre group they had founded in 1971. To obtain material for comedy routines, they routinely recorded late-night television and reviewed the tapes later primarily to pull the commercials, a process Abrahams compared to "seining for fish". During one such taping process, they unintentionally recorded the 1957 film Zero Hour!, and while scanning the commercials, found it to be a "perfectly classically structured film" according to Jerry Zucker. While failing to sell their script, the trio met director John Landis, who encouraged them to write a film based on their theatre sketches. They managed to put The Kentucky Fried Movie into production in the late 1970s. David Zucker said, "it was the first time we had ever been on a movie set. We learned a lot. We learned that if you really wanted a movie to come out the way you wanted it to, you had to direct. So on the next movie, Airplane!, we insisted on directing". who was "just a fish in water" in his role, according to Jerry Zucker. Christopher Lee would later acknowledge that turning down the role (to star in the film 1941) was a huge mistake. The role of Ted Striker was written for David Letterman, who had auditioned for a news anchorman role in Kentucky Fried Movie. Letterman did a screen test in 1979 that ZAZ liked and they wanted him to do a second audition, but Letterman did not want to pursue the role and was not selected. Chevy Chase, Barry Manilow, Bill Murray and Fred Willard were also considered for the role. Hays and Hagerty developed an on-screen chemistry that worked in the film's favor; they spent time to practice and perfect the bar dance routine set to "Stayin' Alive", among other scenes. ZAZ lifted some of their dialog directly from the 1968 novel Airport, written by Arthur Hailey who had also written Zero Hour! script. The lifted lines included ones about an unwanted pregnancy; David Zucker said the couple "got a kick out of it". The role of the Hare Krishna in the airport went to a college roommate of Hays's, newcomer David Leisure, due to Leisure's willingness to shave his head for the bit part; it would be several more years before Leisure landed his breakthrough role as Joe Isuzu. Baseball player Pete Rose was originally considered for the role of Roger Murdock. Singer Maureen McGovern, who had previously sung the theme songs of the disaster films The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), made her credited acting debut as the singing nun. Filming Principal photography began on June 20, 1979, and wrapped on August 31, with the bulk of filming having been done in August. Shooting took place mainly at the Culver City Studios, along with location shooting at Los Angeles International Airport. The soundtrack was released digitally on February 19, 2013, by Paramount Music. Post-production ZAZ test screened the film in front of college campuses. ==Release==

Prior to the film's release, the directors were apprehensive following a mediocre audience response at a pre-screening, but the film earned its entire budget of about $3.5 million in its first five days of wide release. Airplane! opened on June 27, 1980, in seven theatres in Toronto, Canada, grossing $83,058 in its opening weekend. It also opened in two theaters in Buffalo, New York, grossing $14,000 in its first week. The film then expanded on Wednesday, July 2, to 705 theaters in the United States and Canada, grossing $6,052,514 in its first five days of wide release, finishing second for the weekend with a gross of $4,540,000. Overall, it grossed $83 million at the US and Canadian box office and returned $40 million in rentals, Worldwide, the film earned $130 million in its initial release, and by 2002 it had made $171 million. ==Reception==

Airplane! received universal acclaim from critics and is widely regarded as one of the best films of 1980. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote "Airplane! is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote "Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise... As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered". In 2008, Airplane! was selected by Empire magazine as one of 'The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time'. It was also placed on a similar list—'The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made'—by The New York Times. In November 2015, the film was ranked fourth in the Writers Guild of America's list of '101 Funniest Screenplays'. MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in Airplane! as number four on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes". Leslie Nielsen's response to Hays' "Surely you can't be serious" line—"I am serious. And don't call me Shirley"—was 79th on AFI's list of the best 100 movie quotes. In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Airplane! as number ten on its list of the 100 funniest American films. In the same year, Total Film readers voted it the second-greatest comedy film of all time. It was also second in the British 50 Greatest Comedy Films poll on Channel 4, beaten by ''Monty Python's Life of Brian. Entertainment Weekly'' voted the film the "funniest movie on video" in their list of the 100 funniest movies on video. A number of actors were cast to spoof their established images: prior to their roles in Airplane!, Nielsen, Stack, and Bridges were known for portraying adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guy characters. Stack's role as the captain who loses his nerve in one of the earliest airline "disaster" films, The High and the Mighty (1954), is spoofed in Airplane!, as is Lloyd Bridges' 1970–1971 television role as airport manager Jim Conrad in San Francisco International Airport. Peter Graves was in the made-for-television film SST: Death Flight, in which an SST was unable to land owing to an emergency. Nielsen enjoyed a major career boost subsequent to Airplane!s release. The film marked a significant change in his film persona towards deadpan comedy, notably in the three Naked Gun films: The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988); The Naked Gun 2 : The Smell of Fear (1991); and Naked Gun 33 : The Final Insult (1994). The films were based on the six-episode television series Police Squad! which starred Nielsen and was created and produced by Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker. This also led to his casting, many years later, in Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Brooks had wanted to make the film for a long time, but put it off because, as he said: "I just could not find the right Dracula". According to Brooks, he did not see Airplane! until years after its release. When he did, he knew Nielsen would be right for the part. When it was suggested that his role in Airplane! was against type, Nielsen protested that he had "always been cast against type before", and that comedy was what he always really wanted to do. ==Influence==

Peter Farrelly said of the film: "I was in Rhode Island the first time I saw Airplane! Seeing it for the first time was like going to a great rock concert, like seeing Led Zeppelin or the Talking Heads. We didn't realize until later that what we'd seen was a very specific kind of comedy that we now call the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker school". During the Qantas Flight 72 incident over the Indian Ocean west of Australia in 2008, the captain recited some of Lloyd Bridges' lines to relieve tension while trying to land the plane. This was commented in the Air Disasters episode "Free Fall". The 2010 documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story opens with a scene from the film, in which a passenger is offered the very short book Famous Jewish Sports Legends by a flight attendant. The MythBusters TV show episode "Airplane Hour" reenacted the climax of the film to see if an inexperienced pilot could land a plane with only a call from Air Traffic Control. The Mythbusters had to use a simulation to test the myth but concluded that the scene was plausible. They did, however, mention that most planes today have an autopilot to land the plane safely. In the 2012 film Ted, main character John Bennett tells the story of how he met Lori Collins. The flashback is a close recreation of the scene where Ted Striker met Elaine Dickinson in the disco. In early 2014, Delta Air Lines began using a new on-board safety film with many 1980s references, featuring an ending with a cameo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reprising his role as co-pilot Roger Murdock. In 2014, Travel Wisconsin began airing an ad with Robert Hays and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reprising their roles from the film. Kareem makes the comment "Why did I ever leave this place?" referring to his time playing for the Milwaukee Bucks. Hays also reprises his role as an airline pilot in Sharknado 2: The Second One. The first episode of the eighth season of the TV series The Goldbergs re-enacts certain scenes. ==Related works==

Sequel Airplane II: The Sequel, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre, though there was still emphasis on the general theme of disaster films. Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the writers and directors of Airplane! chose not to be involved. In the DVD commentary for Airplane!, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker claim to have never seen nor to have any desire to see Airplane II. Book and audiobook An oral history on the making of Airplane! was published on October 3, 2023. An audiobook version was also released, featuring David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty led the surviving cast members providing commentary, along with special guests Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Hader, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Molly Shannon, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Beau Bridges, John Landis, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, among others. ==References==