we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside [Music] welcome to vintage video where we're re-watching the 80s so you don't have to we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time over analyzing what you've seen and spoiling what you haven't i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jesse bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of airplane on july 2nd 1980 it was written and directed by jim abrams david zucker and jerry zucker with uncredited screenplay work from hall bartlett john c champion and arthur haley from hailey's teleplay flight into danger and released by paramount pictures and just as a disclaimer if there's any uh difference in the audio quality for this episode it's because we are practicing social distancing to give you an idea of how far ahead we were recording this episode hopefully the coronavirus is not a thing anymore in july but who knows maybe it still is in 1971 zucker abrams and zucker founded a theater company called kentucky fried theater and they would often record late night television to pull out commercials to inspire their comedy routines and one night they accidentally recorded the 1957 feature zero hour as they were scanning through it to look for commercials they found that the film was a perfectly classically structured film and set about writing the comedy version of the same story it was their first screenplay originally titled the late show and they completed it in 1975. worried about how much of the dialogue and plot they had blatantly reused they actually paid warner brothers 2 500 for the rights to the film that's it 2500 yeah it was a super cheapo like made for tv movie it's it's it's only an hour long i just watched it why would they call it the late show because that was what you would call like the movie that played late at night on cable they'd be like oh and our late show tonight is okay and the original structure of the film included a series of fake commercial breaks with parodies of commercials but as they polished the draft the commercials got shorter and shorter and they eventually removed them entirely although little bits and pieces of them still remain like the woman talking about how her husband doesn't get a second cup of coffee was a parody of a coffee commercial i really like that joke of the movie i think i would have liked the commercial version yeah no studio was interested in the script but z-a-z as they're sometimes known zucker abrams and sucker they knew john landis and he encouraged them to instead start with a film based on their sketch work the result of that was a 1977 film called kentucky fried movie for which they had surrendered the director chair to landis they considered it a learning experience and decided that to get the movie they wanted on film they would need to direct it themselves so when they that means they weren't very happy with kentucky fried movie i'm guessing i think it just didn't end up what they wanted it to be exactly john lannister's sense of humor is very different from from the zuckers yes i agree obviously watch blues brothers already this year but if you look at like animal house and or even clue it's a very it's not so slap sticky i would feel that the blues brothers is the closest parallel to this yeah but most of other landis movies are pretty straightforward with their comedy that's true when they actually started making airplane they intentionally cast actors like robert stack leslie nielsen and peter graves who until this point hadn't been comedic actors because they wanted the satire to be more poignant and for everyone to be a straight man basically and the the weirdness was just the situation nielsen in particular was ecstatic about this offer because he thought his career was basically ending and he had no idea that all of his best work was ahead of him like everything i know him from is 1980 and beyond i didn't realize that he had any work that wasn't comedy work yeah he was in the original poseidon adventure as the captain then you also like look at the like what was a forbidden planet yeah and it's like him and george kennedy played the same kind of roles all the time which is why them being paired up in the uh police squad and naked gun movies is so great the studio apparently wanted dom deluise for the doctor but z-a-z said no thank you because that would have been straightforward comedy which is not what they were going for that would have been just terrible if we lost fatso because of this movie according to his autobiography christopher lee was also offered the part and passed on it which i guess he later regretted i could totally see chris really in that role yeah i think he would have been fine because he didn't really do comedy stuff at that point either the role of ted striker here was originally written for david letterman who actually did a screen test but it's pretty awful i found it on youtube you're taking all the blame for what happened on that raid was a pretty courageous thing to do was it because of my mistake six men didn't come back from that raid seven lieutenants have died this morning they ultimately went with the relatively unknown robert hayes though letterman did have a chance to lead the late show 13 years later for cbs bill murray chevy chase robert wool fred willard caitlyn jenner and even barry manilow were all considered for the striker role at various points in the production sigourney weaver had auditioned for the role of elaine dickinson so we might have had bill murray and sigourney weaver pre-ghostbusters in this film but i don't think it works with bill murray i actually think the closest there may be chevy chase it would have been a different movie because he would have been aware that it was a comedy but it would work better than bill murray bill murray would just be straight a joke and i really like julie haggerty in this film she's always a space cadet yeah she's she's perfect there there's no recasting her for this kareem abdul-jabbar was cast as a reference to the co-pilot in zero hour because that character was played by elroy crazy legs hirsch a pro football player and the part was originally written for pete rose but he was not available because this was shot during the baseball season and so kareem stepped in to play the part and i think it works better with kareem because he's even more recognizable and he's also like seven feet tall so it's just like that much more ridiculous that he would go into commercial airliner business when he's clearly built for basketball that's an interesting point i wonder if um there's a height restriction for airline pilots i don't know didn't your mom say that there was for flight attendants like i don't know if there was a height thing but they used to weigh flight attendants like every few months oh i'm pretty sure there was a height thing that there was a minimum and a maximum height that's possible like you never really see like a really huge pilot like yeah like an andre the giant or gwendolyn christie i would love for andre the giant to come out of the cockpit at some point after auditioning several voices for the white zone redzone announcements and not getting the sound they wanted they decided to reach out to lax to find the man and woman who actually recorded the announcements for the airport and insanely the actual voice actors were not only available to record the parts but were a real-life married couple which plays perfectly into the joke of the film that's so great apparently z-a-z intended to shoot the film on a smaller prop plane in black and white but michael eisner who was the head of paramount at the time demanded a larger plane and color as conditions for distributing the film i think that's fair though yeah that as much as they want this to be like a parody film i think some of it is kind of lost if you don't modernize it a little bit more yeah i agree i think i think it works better in color and because the dialogue is so almost one-to-one it gives it this kind of like weirdly out of time uh kind of feeling yeah it's just extra disorienting the film covered its entire production budget of 3.5 million dollars in its first two days of box office and eventually went on to make 158 million worldwide it was followed by a sequel in 1982 but zaz were not involved and claimed never to have seen it robert hayes kind of reprises the role of ted striker because he played an airline pilot in 2014's sharknado 2 the second one but the character has a different name but it's clearly a reference to ted striker we open in the clouds at night with a jaws parody as the tail of the plane is seen crisscrossing through frame chopping up a cloud layer and then suddenly the plane flies up out of the fog past camera and we get titles over what should have been second unit footage of lax but because they were first time filmmakers z-a-z didn't know that they would have to direct every shot themselves so all the footage of like planes landing on the runway and cars pulling in and out of airport terminals was all actually directed by zucker abrams and sucker we see some crew for the flight moving through the airport as the pa announces the white zone is for loading and unloading passengers only and there is no stopping in the red zone the male and female voices of the announcement eventually start arguing when the male voice gets the zones mixed up and this bit finishes with [Music] at the tsa counter a man is instructed to fill a bowl with all metal objects and he starts removing all his fake limbs back outside the psa voices are now arguing about male voice wanting female voice to get an abortion which is uh crazy dark for just outside this airport here an arriving passenger flags down a cab and ted striker hops out of it at the curb assuring the man he'll be right back but not before setting the meter running while he's gone i love this joke that the guy's still there the guy the running gag throughout the film like i was i don't think i've seen this film for 20 years i think i saw it once when i was a teenager and then never again and i'm sure that a lot of the jokes were lost on me at that time yeah or i just didn't care or didn't find them funny but i found this joke really funny we get a three-way writer director credit for zaz which was apparently quite a fight with the dga because at the time director credit had never been split more than two ways and it was pretty much policy that they weren't going to allow that i'm not even sure that it's happened since then but somehow they were able to lock in a three-way director credit for this film an employee on the tarmac is guiding a plane in when his co-worker asks where the forklift is and he gestures off to his right accidentally sending the plane he was guiding crashing through a window into a terminal these two guys are played by jerry and david zucker and since the film's release they have been stopped repeatedly by airline pilots saying that they have very nearly put planes through those windows one said that he even came so close as to touching the pain of the glass with the nose of the plane ted striker catches up with flight attendant elaine as she's headed toward her flight she left him a note breaking up with him but he found it in time to catch up with her on the flight she says that she can't love a man that she can't respect and striker looks directly into the camera and says what a pisser which is the only real fourth wall breaking that we get everything else is like there's meta jokes within the film but nobody else looks directly into the camera to talk to us next we see captain over move past the fiction and non-fiction magazine categories to a stand labeled whacking material and he opens up the latest issue of modern sperm to peruse he gets a page to the white phone but he answers the red phone which then refers him back to the white phone and the pa continues to page him until he just yells at it i've got it and then the voice throughout the airport says thank you the call is from dr brody at the mayo clinic and then we cut to the interior of brody's office and we see his desk is just overflowing with jars of mayonnaise and there's a human heart beating on his desk in a tight shot the heart is bouncing up and down in front of him as he talks and he tells over that one of the passengers is awaiting a heart transplant that he has it there on his desk and she basically needs to get to the mayo clinic within six hours so he needs to get this flight over and on schedule and it's it's an emergency if he doesn't stryker and elaine argue a bit more about their relationship on the way to her plane she connected him with some sort of job offer at boeing but he didn't take it up because he thinks that his war record would keep him from getting the job but she tells him that that's all in his head and he's the only one who cares about his war record it's just a mental block the pilots start the pre-flight checklist as a mechanic climbs onto the hood of the plane outside of the cockpit and he sprays down the windshield and then he pops the hood of the plane to check the oil but when he tries to buckle the hood closed again he falls off the plane and we hear him drop probably 15 feet to the tarmac striker buys a ticket on elaine's flight so that he can continue arguing with her the flight attendant at the desk asks if he would like smoking or non-smoking and he asks for smoking before she hands him an actual smoking ticket with just a billow of smoke coming out of it we cut back outside to see stryker's cab passenger waiting patiently as the meter is still running striker stops outside the plane and we're crossfading over his concerned face with war footage of just an aerial dogfight not a real one an aerial one there's exploding planes and we hear robert stack's voice repeatedly saying the decision is yours the decision is yours on the plane striker takes a seat in the non-smoking section so he bought a smoking ticket but for the non-smoking section the older woman sitting next to him asks if he's nervous and when he says yes she says first time and he says no i've been nervous lots of times outside the plane a pair of lovebirds say their goodbyes as an old-timey station master tells them that he'd better board the plane that they're running out of time and he goes all aboard the boyfriend bill ascends the stairs to the plane and just stands there waving at his girlfriend as she's trying to keep up and she's racing through crowds of people in old-fashioned clothes occasionally crashing into the structures alongside the plane trying to keep up with it as it reaches flight speed roger clarence over and victor the three pilots in the cockpit confuse each other with standard radio communication terms roger and over as well as aviation terms clearance and vector roger all right request vector over what flight 209 are clear for vector 324 we have clearance clearance roger roger what's our vector victor now at radio clearance over let's clearance over over roger roger over but elaine finally notices ted on board and rejects him to get back to her work ted tells the passenger next to him about when they first met he was stationed in drambuie which is a liqueur like i suspected when we were watching it i was like that's not a place off the barbary coast ted stands at a bar in his navy uniform which i thought he was an air force pilot but he's wearing a navy uniform we hear a horn playing as a pair of female legs walk past him on the bar and we tilt up slowly to reveal that the woman is actually playing the trumpet which is a joke we saw earlier this year in mad max though less intentionally funny there a fight breaks out between two girl scouts when one of them tries to cheat at cards and ends with her head driven through a jukebox i found this joke went on far too long yeah they keep bringing it back throughout this entire scene and it was kind of unnecessary yeah but when her head goes into the jukebox it kicks off a high-speed version of staying alive and then we get a big dance number with uh robert hayes and julie haggerty just being crazy on the dance floor elaine notices him from across the room and she's starting to dance with a guy who is immediately stabbed in the back but she thinks that his efforts to remove the knife for some new kind of dance and so she's trying to emulate him for a while before striker cuts in she actually does look like she's doing the elaine here a little bit yeah and she's like using her thumbs to gesture behind her yeah elaine and striker dance insanely for a while and then we cut back to the present where the woman sitting next to stryker has hung herself of boredom we cut to a young boy in a three-piece suit carrying a tray with two coffees and he hits on a similarly adultish girl that is his own age she invites him to sit with her and he offers cream for her coffee to which she replies no thank you i take it black like my man the kid's face is perfect after that he's just like i don't know how to respond to this i guess i'm leaving now i'm not sure how seating on planes worked in 1980 but when striker first sits down he's on the right side of the plane and then with the older woman sitting next to him he has a window seat on the right side and now elaine notices him and he's in an aisle seat on the left side talking the ear off of a man in the window seat but to be fair we see him in like six seven different seats in this entire plane yeah it keeps happening but so far he has not been in the same seat twice in a row elaine has a vision of a parody of the beach kissing scene from from here to eternity featuring her and ted but this is the more realistic version of it so they're getting wrapped in seaweed and surrounded by live fish gasping for air on the beach there's like a catfish just like squirming around next to them it's pretty gross i i had to go back and try to see like because i saw that there were real fish yeah like i think that one was a catfish and they're definitely alive too so they they had them in tanks and they put them right here for the shot she starts to plan their life together but ted's orders just came through and he tells her basically his entire mission he says oh you know we're going to bomb the storage depots at daiquiri which is another drink at 1800 hours we're coming in from the north below their radar and she says when will you be back and he said i can't tell you that's classified so you can tell all the details but he can't tell her that which i remember the first time i saw this i thought that that meant that she was a spy and that he didn't screw up the mission but that she like undermined the whole thing but then that never comes back elaine brings a child named joey to the cockpit for a tour he sits with the pilot over who asks you ever been inside a cockpit before and when joey says no over says have you ever seen a grown man naked which is what peter graves was willing to ask in place of the original line you ever seen a grown man's [ __ ] that was the first draft of that joke i'm glad they went with that one yeah i think so too and in that line too like you can see on graves face that he's he's worried about even saying that line apparently he was terrified completely of taking on the role of this pedophilic pilot but when he showed the script to other family members they were like no you have to do this this is a parody of you and it would be really funny and no one's gonna think you're a weirdo because you're playing a weirdo but i guess it worked out well enough for him because he agreed to be in the sequel so he must not have had too many hard feelings about it and in the sequel they made a they made a more of a mission impossible kind of reference yeah for him than they did with this i mean airplane two is just full of like it's luke shatner so i'll make a bunch of star trek jokes yeah peter graves we'll make a mission impossible joke you know they don't do that with this they don't go down to that level the only time that they do i think is with kareem abdul-jabbar which they kind of do right here when joey recognizes him and he's like no no i'm roger murdock i'm a i'm a pilot and he insists that the kid is confused until the kid starts talking about how his dad thinks kareem isn't a great player and he's not trying unless it's the playoffs and then suddenly kareem like grabs him by his collar and yanks him toward him listen kid i've been hearing that crap ever since i was at ucla i'm out there busting my buns every night tell your old man to drag walton in the near up and down the court for 48 minutes and the kids like freaked out about it and then over interrupts again with join you like movies about gladiators suddenly ted has a window seat again and he's promising elaine that he can fix things she's sitting next to him now and she's remembering the good times there's a very uh interesting you barely even notice it spliced in joke here in the original movie she says i remember the nights when we were together i remember how you used to hold me and afterwards how we watch until the sun finally came but here they changed it just a little so it says mostly i remember the nights when we were together i remember how you used to hold me how i used to sit on your face and wrinkle and afterwards how we watched the sun came i just like like imagining the actors from the original film watching this movie and being like what the hell ted has another flashback of his wartime experience this time he's in the hospital in the aftermath of the the failed attack elena's sitting with him and she lets him know that he's been cleared of all the blame ted says that due to his mistake six men didn't return from that raid and she corrects seven lieutenant zip died this morning spit takes all over her ted is painting a portrait of a soldier with a leg for some reason behind his head carrying a baby away from an exploding jeep ted grants the model a five-minute break and we see behind the easel that there's an actual soldier with a baby and his leg is behind his head and there's a big painting of an exploding jeep behind him one of the veterans in the same wing is ted believes he's still in the war and he's shouting at all of his nurses and still another thinks that he is actually ethel merman this character is of course played by ethel merman in the scene and this was ethel merman's last appearance in film a flight attendant offers coffee to passengers and a husband named jim asks for a second cup we hear his wife's internal monologue wonder jim never has a second cup of coffee at home this is a reference to a popular u-ban commercial at the time which unbeknownst to z-a-z until after production actually starred the same actress from this scene she didn't bring it up in the audition process because she was worried she would lose the part for being the actual person instead of a parody of the person can she get in trouble for that can they get in trouble for that i don't know but she didn't say anything until it was in theaters so didn't they just go through this with the um peloton thing oh i don't know about the peloton thing oh because the girl was in the uh ryan reynolds commercial yeah the girl that was in the original commercial did a parody with ryan reynolds oh i never even saw the commercials i heard about it flight attendant randy tells a nun with a guitar about a sick girl on the flight but instead of asking the nun to perform she asks just to borrow her guitar so that she can sing a song herself on her way to the front of the plane randy bonks the heads of all the aisle seat passengers with the guitar this is funny because the actress playing the nun here is uh maureen mccormick who sings like the theme songs for a bunch of disaster movies like the poseidon adventure and towering inferno but she's not asked to sing the song here randy sings a song for the sick girl and as she's wildly swinging the guitar around she keeps unplugging the girl's iv with the neck of the guitar and the girl's like sucking her face in like a fish when she doesn't have whatever medicine she's supposed to be getting and eventually her mother notices or caretaker or mother i'm not sure who this woman is um and keeps trying to get the iv back in for her stryker is back in an aisle seat and now he's sitting next to james hong who is credited here as a japanese general he's telling hong the story about how he taught an african tribe to play basketball there's not much to this scene it's just him pretending to teach a tribe to play basketball and then they're all immediately way better at basketball than he is he says this is about the time that he developed his drinking problem and then he brings a glass to his face and just pours it all over his face because it's not an alcohol type drinking problem we cut back to the present where james hong is committing seppuku in the plane just slicing open his belly suddenly another passenger is feeling very ill elaine notifies the captain and he suggests that they look for a doctor on board before turning to joey and asking joey have you ever been in a in a turkish prison which i don't know how many children have been in turkish prisons but apparently in turkey this line is changed to greek prison which i guess makes sense i mean you don't want to specifically insult the the prisons of the country in that version i guess uh it makes sense that they would change it but i don't i don't know if i don't know if a prisoner is successful yeah acosta will have to let us know i'm sure he's been to prison a bunch of times i'm just kidding kosty you're great it's probably a running gag between greece and turkey where they just keep [ __ ] on each other they just hate each other it costs you'll have to fill us in if that's the case the two coffee husband starts vomiting uncontrollably and his wife wonders oh jim whatever vomits at home instead of being like oh this is the problem elaine apologizes for waking leslie nielsen's character to ask if he's a doctor but in the reverse angle we see that he's literally wearing a stethoscope while he sleeps which would make it really hard to sleep i would think because you hear everything in the plane he sees to the sick woman and she immediately spits out multiple eggs into his hand in like a 101 magic class style trick he cracks the last egg on her coffee cup and a bird flies out and just flutters around in the plane which i was not expecting and it's a very funny joke he tells elaine to notify the pilot immediately victor in the cockpit also collapses while the doctor is speaking with over roger murdoch collapses and the doctor determines here that everyone who got sick chose fish for dinner there were two choices for dinner steak and fish and the doctor members yes yes i remember i had lasagna elaine and the doctor speak about the symptoms of this fish virus and over is experiencing each symptom as they mention it behind him from there the poison goes to work on the central nervous system causing severe muscle spasms followed by the inevitable grueling at this point the entire digestive system collapses accompanied by uncontrollable flatulence until finally the poor bastard is reduced to a quivering wasted piece of jelly eventually he collapses in a sweating drooling farting pile uh at the controls of the plane elaine engages the autopilot and radios lloyd bridges as mccluskey at the traffic control dispatch office we introduce a zany character in the office named johnny who steals every scene moving forward he's just wonderful his whole like demeanor and voice remind me so much of john ritter sure yeah like i could i could just close my eyes and see john ritter doing all of those same movements yeah he would he would work totally fine in this part lloyd asks hey some coffee johnny and johnny's like no thanks because he's not trying to help anybody mccluskey says that he needs a man who won't crack under pressure and then johnny runs by in the background and suggests mr rogers which was actually a dubbed line to cover what about mamie eisenhower who that was the original joke but she had passed away shortly after the scene was shot so they tried to fit a different celebrity's name who fit those those mouth shapes and they landed on mr rogers mccluskey has elaine read him some of the dials on the dash and then suddenly the autopilot is deflating and the plane is going into a dive she's instructed to reinflate it by blowing into a hose in its lap the doctor walks in to see this and is he turns around to give them their privacy when the plane is righted again the doctor asks elaine if she knows anyone on board who can fly the plane i i like the line that he asks her before i always repeat julie haggerty's part with this line when he says you're a member of this crew can you face some unpleasant facts she goes no and then he just keeps going she's so upset by the prospect of even thinking about it yeah i do that all the time with like my knees and she goes can i ask you a question i go no [Laughter] please don't we cut two strikers sitting next to yet another new passenger and he's dumping water across his face because of his drinking problem and then we're back to the cockpit for a line to say no no no the doctor explains i think you want to know what our chances are the life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing finding someone back there can not only fly this plane but who didn't have fish for dinner we get a shot of elaine announcing something to distract the passengers as pilots are being dragged unconscious down the aisle she ends with by the way is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane and a riot breaks out and madness ensues suddenly a topless woman is jumping in front of the camera we cut back to traffic control where someone is getting to rex kramer's home to pick him up and when he gets inside kramer's dog is like attacking this kid while cramer's wife is waiting at the bottom of the stairs with him kramer's just putting on his uniform in front of a mirror in the entry hall and then after he gets himself all straightened up he steps out of the mirror through into the living room because uh we just have this weird optical illusion trick yeah you actually backed this up for me because i didn't even notice it yeah it's pretty subtle actually i love the implication that his wife is just staring away at nothing yeah he's not she's just watching her dog attack this guy not even because that's behind him that's true yeah that's true what is she looking at um that's funny striker is sitting next to yet another passenger who is dousing himself in gasoline to escape ted's stories randy comes to bring ted to the cockpit and the passenger who is about to kill himself holds the match above the puddle of gas in his lap waiting to see if ted will finally leave and when he does the passenger blows the match out and drops it in his lap which still causes the explosion for some reason the whole plane doesn't go down though that's why you always like run the matches under water before you throw it in the trash why didn't you do that it's still light up again in the cockpit the doctor asks stryker can you fly this plane and land it and he says the immortal line surely you can't be serious to which dr romick replies i am serious and don't call me shirley which i think was the afi nominated it like in the top 100 movie lines of all time after being informed that he is the only chance they've got striker takes the captain's seat we pan across an impossibly long instrument panel and then we get a quick insert of the taxi passenger whose fare back at lax is ticking over into the 113 range despite the taxi not having moved yet it's only 113 dollars i think that's what it said striker accidentally flips a switch that sends the plane into a tailspin and after he corrects it the woman from the u-band commercial starts to lose her [ __ ] to keep her calm a line of passengers takes turns slapping her and second in line here is the doctor who leslie nielsen actually slapped her by accident but they just kept the they kept the thing moving apparently it was her idea to have the passengers all line up to want to slap her because it was supposed to end after the doctor slapped her like a passenger did it to be impatient and then the doctor's like no no calm down and then he does it too which is less professional but then she's like what if everyone does it and so it was her idea to have all these people lined up in the line though of passengers people are armed with like tire irons and guns like everybody after the gun person i feel like you don't have to slap this woman anymore she's she's gone rex kramer beats up a crowd of religious folk on his way into the airport robert stack was 61 here doing his own stunts jumping around people and throwing flying kicks it's pretty cool looking and you could tell it's him doing the whole thing too what is he known for up until this point he he did a lot of like serious television shows for me it was always unsolved mystery well yeah but that wasn't out yet yeah that was post 1980 because that's all i know him from and even 1941 in which he still he kind of played almost this similar kind of character to this character that's true and that was like the year before or uh it had to be it's like 78 or 79 right before but yeah again like the other people here mostly mostly serious characters at the time someone on a phone in the traffic control office complains he's a menace to everything in the air yes birds too what i think is going on in that scene when he says he's he's a menace to everyone up in the air yeah birds too and as it pans over to mccroskey he's on the phone too it's like i know he's a wristband he's the only chance we got oh they're talking to each other yeah i think the implication is that they're talking to each other that's funny funny i didn't get that joke well i don't i don't know if that's the joke that's always how i've looked at it yeah while kramer is filling in mccluskey on his history with stryker a spear for no reason hits a map on the wall behind them i was sure i missed something here but it seems like there's not actually a joke it was just supposed to be funny enough that a spear hit the wall and it's followed by another joke where as mccluskey is talking about guiding the plane all the way to the ground a watermelon just falls out of the ceiling and explodes in the background i've i've read in interviews that ziz have expressed disappointment at the lack of audience reaction to either of these gags at every screening they've ever been to but i'm not sure they even count as gags because they're not there's not a joke to it it's just a weird thing that's happening it's not like when the [ __ ] hits the fan later the rest of them are relevant to the dialogue at least or something these two things just stand out as like they didn't really make any sense and they thought it was just funny that it was weird robert stack gets maybe my favorite line of the entire movie when he sits down to speak with stryker on the radio he says our one hope is to build this man up i'm going to give him all the confidence i can striker have you ever flown a multi-engine plane before and striker says no never and he says [ __ ] god damn waste the times well well you can land this plane but like the way the how quickly he turns in his delivery it just kills me he's just so funny just like ah [ __ ] this is a goddamn way and he doesn't take his hand off of the button so all this is getting broadcast into the cockpit and you have just julie hagerty and robert hayes are just standing there like uh we're not supposed to hear this part like it's really uncomfortable and he says just a route route the plane into lake michigan doesn't kill anybody else yeah he doesn't seem to realize or care that he is still talking to them but he yeah he suggests just crashing into lake michigan to avoid killing any innocent people forgetting that there are hundreds of innocent people on this plane but the air traffic people call the home of captain over's wife to let her know that her husband's flight is having some trouble and she might want to get to the airport as quick as she can she rolls over to tell the horse that she's in bed with that he can let himself out but can he yeah so this is an interesting point because i don't understand the reason to introduce this character at all it's in zero hour i don't know why either because you never see them reunite but you don't they don't do it in the other movie either but it's a great opportunity to have a horse yeah yeah i think the premise of this entire movie was basically an mst 3k episode if they just shot it and put in all their joke dialogue because they were clearly just watching that scene and they were like wouldn't it be funny if there was a guy in bed with her and they're like what's even funnier than that a horse in bed with her and then for no reason then they're just like that's it that's the whole scene it doesn't need to be anything else i also like that she tells him that there's a juice in the fridge like the like the first of all that the horse wants juice specifically and that it's in the fridge as if the horse can get to it there but yeah it's great mccluskey and kramer don't understand why they don't have sight of the plane yet they call into the tower to check the radar range but at the time radar range was a very popular model of microwave so the air traffic controller stands and opens a microwave above all their instruments with a full turkey inside and he says it's about two more minutes chief after having separately lamented that he picked the wrong week to quit smoking and drinking uh mccluskey now regrets his choice of this week to quit using amphetamines it's like i picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines the press swarms the office and mccluskey hands over questions to johnny which kills them pretty quickly because the press is like what kind of plane was it he's like oh it's a big pretty white plane with red stripes and curtains in the window and wheels and it looks like a big tylenol and the reporters say all right boys let's get some pictures and they just start snatching all the framed pictures off the walls of the office before they leave and that's that's the end of the press participation of this film a series of newspaper front pages swirl toward camera and we end with a national enquirer with the headline boy trapped in refrigerator eats own foot the pictured boy is the grandson of producer howard koch who had no idea why his grandfather requested copies of his school photo until he saw the movie montage of news reports of the situation ends with a show called counterpoint wherein the host suggests that these passengers knew what they were getting into i say let them crash uh yeah so this is getting back to the um the gong show movie right where this this actor appears in the gong show movie and all he does is wink at chuck barris and i was like that looks like the guy from counterpoint an airplane and i think i brought hopefully i think i brought that up on i'm pretty sure you did yeah and uh it's like the only thing i've ever seen him in is this movie at this scene apparently he's also an airplane too uh it's a different part it's not another episode of counterpoint but randy breaks down in the galley with the doctor and she says that she's 26 and she's not married yet this is when the coffee lady enters to ask when they might be landing and then she says she's never been so scared but at least she has a husband i think there's there's two layers to this joke the first one is that obviously this 26 isn't that old to not have a husband yet i think even in 1980 but i think the other part of the joke is that the fact that she has a husband really isn't helping at all because they're just gonna die in this plane not being married is worse than dying in a plane crash yeah in the cockpit striker has more flashbacks of his wartime accident this time we're getting stock footage of just random aviation disasters superimposed over his face uh including like early wright brothers nonsense we have a man powered flying machines like a man just covered in like wing parts flight suits bike planes a plane with 12 stacked sets of wings and then that weird bouncy umbrella car that we've all seen i was waiting for the one where it's like a spiraling propeller of fabric you know but that one wasn't in this lineup suddenly ted blows an engine because he hasn't been keeping an eye on oil pressure because he's distracted by stock footage and striker puts otto back in the pilot seat and he says i'm done i'm obviously not you know up to this challenge he goes outside and he pouts in the rest of the plane and then the doctor walks up to him and he says look you don't have to tell me anything i already know i screwed up and he says no no you you did what you could and that's all we could ask of you you know i i remember i was treating a pilot who was dying and he talked about the the order that led to his death and he said that it was the right move and that man's name was george zip and here strikers realizing like oh you know even people whose death i caused agreed with me that what i did was the right thing and i i should be able to trust myself better and then the doc paraphrases a monologue from the 1940 ronald reagan film all-american possibly the film that a passenger earlier was complaining about being nauseated by sometime the crew is up against it the brakes are beating the boys tell them to get out there and give it all they've got and win just one for the zipper and then ted striker gets up and he goes back into the cockpit he's decided he's he's man enough to lane this plane the passengers outside are all preparing for the landing they're enjoying their in-flight movie about a plane crashing on a dirt runway and exploding in flames back in the air traffic control kramer tells over's wife that it doesn't look good and then johnny comes up and tells her that she doesn't look good either he's like where did you get that dress it's awful in those shoes yuck and he just walks away and she's just sobbing there alone the plane is coming in very low over chicago and actually clips the radio tower of w-z-a-z which is clearly a reference to zucker abrams and zucker and it's cutting off a disco station broadcast kramer recommends that ted stay in the air for two more hours because they have a lot of fuel left and there's a lot of fog that just blew in over the airport striker says that the doctor told him that the sicker passengers won't survive more than an hour and so he's bringing it in now mccluskey says that they're going to turn the lights on soon and then one of the air traffic controllers says wouldn't it make more sense to just turn them on now and then creator says that's just what they'll be expecting us dr rumak tells alan and ted i just want to tell you both good luck we're all counting on you mccleskey ends the series of substance abuse quotes with uh the bit from our opening montage i picked the wrong way as the plane is descending very quickly an air traffic controller is shouting his altitude as it's plummeting but then it's like going up and down and he's all over the place a few screens down one of the other controllers opens his monitor and dumps in a load of laundry because it looks like a washing machine from the front the air traffic controller that we're sitting with says he's all over the place what an [ __ ] the lights on the runway go dark for a second and we think it's an emergency until johnny reveals it was a hilarious prank and he plugs them back in mccleskey in a glue fueled haze screams he's coming right ash dives out of the tower window plummeting to a certain death as the plane skids down the runway the pa keeps correcting which terminal the plane will be pulling up to and passengers are racing through the airport as if this plane was going to board anybody after everyone gets off here the plane eventually comes to a stop and everyone's able to get off safely we see ted and elaine kiss on the tarmac and then suddenly they look over and otto is waving to them from the cockpit he takes this [ __ ] up plane right back into the sky and a female co-pilot inflates next to him and they just fly off into the night and that's the end of the film the writers and directors were jim abrams david zucker and jerry zucker i said before the the zuckers were the ones directing the traffic on the tarmac jim abrams plays one of the religious zealots that's trying to sell robert stack religion on his way in together they wrote kentucky fried movie and they wrote and directed airplane naked gun police squad top secret hot shots mafia scary movie four which i guess i owe or re-watch because i didn't realize that they came back to just do that one i've never heard of mafia uh it's okay it's it was like jaymore and lloyd bridges and i mean a lot of their regular people it's obviously not not on the same level with the rest of them but uh our composer here was elmer bernstein who did a lot you gotta cover some of uh jerry zucker's other films oh okay what else do we have ghost oh really yeah oh that's interesting so he did stuff without the other two yeah yeah he did ghost and he did uh ruthless people see i thought i was covering them all by just covering like david zucker because the three of them worked together right right uh but uh yeah ghost is a not a comedy yeah that's very interesting i didn't realize that was him i met jim abrams and david zucker at a screening of i think it was top secret and a bananas double feature at the new beverly so i'll put a picture with them on the uh on the instagram but they were really cool but jerry wasn't there i don't know if if they all live out here or what the what the deal is well i wanted to say something too earlier about the uh three directors yeah i'm kind of curious if you can get special permission to do that because uh i was fairly certain and i looked it up to verify but cloud atlas has three directors it doesn't say it's not the wachowskis as a single credit it has each individual wachowski and then uh tom tickfer oh interesting well because i was also thinking of um the 67 casino royale has four directors but that one was like i don't know if it was the each of the directors did different segments of it or if it was like they were directing at different periods of time and got kicked off of it because i know john houston was one of the four but yeah it's it's a it's weird it's weird how that stuff works the composer here was elmer bernstein who basically he just composed the the love theme of airplane we had him earlier this year for saturn three blues brothers and we'll have him later for ghostbusters three amigos bulletproof uh etc kareem abdul-jabbar was roger murdock or also probably kareem abdul-jabbar i think he's technically playing himself here in disguise as roger murdock but he also plays himself in fletch forget paris and basketball he was an nba player with the milwaukee bucks and the la lakers lloyd bridges was steve mccroskey his uh acting credits date back to the mid 30s he was in high noon he was mike nelson in 155 episodes of sea hunt yeah sea hunt is the the big one yeah i i think i always think of hot shots when i think of him even before airplane i think i have hot shots for him and obviously he's he's uh we said before he's also in mafia and he's the father of some very interesting people lloyd bridges is you're kidding yeah uh no uh lloyd bridges is the father of at least bo and jeff um and the grandfather of our friend dylan who we went to school with so that's fun peter graves was captain clarence over he was on the mission impossible series he's in stalag 17 or stalag i don't know where the emphasis goes there stalin yeah uh yes the emphasis is on the wrong syllable he's also in the classic film parts the cloneus horror by the way if you haven't seen stallock 17 it is fantastic i don't know that i have so maybe that's uh for a while it's a billy wilder film oh okay i like i like pretty much every billy wilderfell in my opinion it's a stage play that was converted into a film and it's it's really really great okay cool do you watch community at all on and off one of my favorite things about that is that uh there's a really old man at the community like going to school his name's leonard yeah and he was one of the actors in stalling 17. oh really this is funny like he's been like acting for so long that's funny anyway weird side story anyway go on that was like uh i remember in college one night someone was like oh we should watch run silent run deep and it's like this clark gable submarine movie but in the background of like one scene i was like that guy looks like don rickles but there's no way he was that old when clark gable was the lead character of movies and it's like no that was don rickles he was just around forever yeah but uh but peter graves was also in a movie called high seas hijack that appears to predate north to sea hijack aka folks by three years and i'm not even sure that it's not like inspired by the same story but it looks like it might be a japanese film but peter graves plays a part of an american team in the film i'm interested to see that now because the plot was very familiar to folks julie hagerty was elaine dickinson here she obviously she's an airplane too she was just in a marriage story she was freddie's mother and freddie got fingered she was carol pewterschmidt on family guy which i believe is lois's younger sister this was her first acting the credit i i always go to uh is she the wife from what about bob yes yeah yeah that's the one that i always go to for her for me it's always freddy got fingered because i actually really like that movie and it's funny because uh she has worked with two lakers because you have kareem in uh this movie and in that movie she divorces or separates from riptorn and starts dating shaquille o'neal but it's great robert hayes was ted striker he'll be back for airplane two also and he plays the dad in homeward bound and i said before he was in sharknado too but surprisingly little work from robert hayes because i think he does a phenomenal job in this film yeah i i always go for him uh other than airplane uh i always go to cat's eye the stephen king anthology film right i still need to see that one yes you do leslie nielsen here was dr rumak he was on forbidden planet he's frank drebin in the naked gun movies a lot of non-zucker comedies that are less terrific like 2001 a space travesty he was also mr magoo in the feature film version of that character did you actually see that movie uh mr magoo yeah i for sure did i couldn't tell you one thing that happened but i was working at blockbuster when it came out so i'm i guarantee you i rented it the day it came out on video he also plays colonel chi and surf ninjas which is the only time i can remember him playing the bad guy in anything and he's also dracula in mel brooks's dracula dead and loving it which which i feel still is a very underrated film yeah we have uh lorna patterson was randy she also comes back for the second film and she played private benjamin on the tv series adaptation of that film we have private benjamin this year too we do that's correct robert stack was captain rex cramer i said before i know him bus from unsolved mysteries he was also the narrator for the hercules animated series yeah he was um he's also in basketball because they do a whole unsolved mysteries bit in basketball but he before that i guess was mostly known for falcon crest but he's also ultra magnus in the transformers movie he was an atf agent in beavis and butthead do america so he's like constantly trying to track them down but he's just got an amazing voice steven stucker was johnny henshaw jacobs that's the crazy guy at the air traffic office he is also back for two as a different character apparently he improvised all of his lines that seems crazy to me because they're so great if he did kudos kudos to that guy frank ashmore was victor basta in the cockpit um he's also back for two as a different character he's not in mafia but he was in mafia two and three which was at two and three which are not related to the movie mafia he was in two video games that were also called mafia but he was only in the second and third installments uh jonathan banks was gunderson unrecognizable but you probably know him from gremlins or as mike ehrman trout on breaking bad and better call saul and he too was on community as a regular character he's the guy who says about two more minutes chief that opens up the microwave and he's also the guy who says 900 feet 1300 feet what an [ __ ] i feel like i have to go back and look this up i did not recognize that's great i'll pull it up for you barbara billingsley was the jive lady the woman who spoke jive on the plane we didn't really talk about that bit because i don't think it translates very well to just describing in summary she was june cleaver on leave it to beaver and she's also the voice of nanny on the muppet babies and i think this role was offered to someone else first i forget now they turned it down thinking that they didn't really understand the movie and then uh regretted it because barbara billingsley rocked it james hong the japanese general here he's obviously lopan and big trouble in little china is mr ping in the kung fu panda movies he plays hannibal chu and blade runner and he's cassandra's dad and wayne's world 2. and can i just say he's just the most wonderful man you'll ever meet he's just the sweet old guy that wants to talk to everybody he just wanders the halls of dreamworks just randomly he'll pop into your office and just like wanders in to look at your stuff like what do you have here look you know and he's like this is cool and he just plays with the toys that are on your desk it's just wonderful he's great um maureen mcgovern i said before was the nun she sings uh the theme song there's got to be a morning after from the poseidon adventure and we may never love like this again for towing inferno she also performed we could have it all from the last married couple soundtrack earlier this year and she'll come back for a song called halfway home in the earthling later in 1984 us she's also the voice of rachel and joseph king of dreams if anyone remembers that movie back from when dreamworks just made 2d animated movies about the bible for some reason ethel merman was uh lieutenant herwitz that's a that's a fun sentence um she is a film actress and broadway performer she originated the role of gypsy on broadway i love her in it's a mad mad mad mad world yes as uh milt milton borough's mother-in-law yeah she's great and uh so we have michelle stacy was the young girl with the coffee who likes it black like her men she played mary 2 and logan's run but she's also the voice of penny from the rescuers which i could actually hear it when i was watching the movie again after i listened to it robert starr was religious zealot number five he plays an underling and last starfighter and he was rex kramer in kentucky fried movie because apparently they reused a bunch of character names from kentucky fried movie for this movie although a lot of the names like ted striker are from zero hour kenneth toby played air traffic controller neubauer he plays patrick hendry in the original the thing as in the thing from another world and he reprised the role of patrick henry 54 years later for a 2005 film called the naked monster i'm not sure the story there but he also plays the man in the restroom in inner space which i think is when the guy's in the bathroom talking to himself at the urinal and the other guy's confused about it play with it pal don't talk to it jimmy walker played the windshield wiper man jimmy walker was obviously jj on good times he also made an appearance in the concorde the airport 79 film and he was grandpa jean and everybody hates chris which i never actually watched but uh i like the entire cast of that show so i really should check it out al white was the second jive talking dude he was one of the singers outside the radio station in hollywood nights he played a sergeant in the macgyver pilot he's in back to the future part two he plays a dad which i think is the dad at the house that marty accidentally goes into and he also plays a desk sergeant in leprechaun too there's a woman named kitten natividad who is credited as the bouncy topless woman on the plane she plays a character named betty big ones in taking it off and taking it all off she started working in hollywood as a maid for fellow nude model and actress stella stevens who we just had in the ballad of cable hogue yeah she would go on to win miss nude universe two years in a row but according to the imdb trivia she says that she wasn't the nude woman she was the woman holding jello and jiggling next to the jello she was not the woman whose boobs are featured in the film so i don't know who to believe the internet's a lie david leisure was one of the uh hari krishna guys but i i think i know him from airplane and that's it is it for me i don't know because i went through his whole list and i was like this guy is so familiar but i don't recognize anything else that he's done i agree he's crazy familiar to me but i couldn't put my finger on what in particular he reminded me of i think he just reminds me of someone else maybe i don't know he was lying in a lot of episodes of empty nest it looks like i've never seen frame one of that show but i was wondering if maybe i was i confused him with fred willard or somebody he does remind me a lot of fred willard but he still he looked super familiar and i don't know why i mean no offense mr leisure i know you're listening and i do like you and i definitely recognize you from stuff but there there wasn't anything huge that i knew from i'm sure there's just something on this list that i've seen a million times and it's just that's probably the same for me but i think it's airplane maybe but he doesn't have hair and i'm thinking about him in something when he has hair yeah because he's got a shaved head in this i don't know he's an airplane too yeah maybe maybe that's it i've seen airplane two so many times like all of zero tests hey so uh editor's note here david leisure i apologize i figured out what i know you from you're joe isuzu from the commercials oh that's 100 what it is it just occurred to me when i was listening to qc the episode and i was like it's not a movie it is a hundred percent what he is from and then i googled it and i was like i should have just checked this wikipedia page because it's all over it yeah but yeah he's joe isuzu from the commercial swear the joke was that he would just say completely outlandish things that the car could not do and that was the commercial for the isuzu it was just like no it can't do that like in subtitles it would contradict him and yeah keep it legal yeah i remember those commercials good stuff um yeah i love this movie i think this movie has always been funny to me i actually think it loses a little bit of its magic when you find zero hour and you see like how little work they really needed to do but i think nobody made movies like this before them uh in terms of the just the execution of all these background jokes and like the density of the comedy like this movie is 90 minutes long and it has probably a hundred quotes that people say constantly yeah i i mean i said before that i don't think that i've seen this movie in 20 years and i didn't appreciate it when i saw it 20 years ago and i was like i never watched it again because of that but now that i've sat down and watched it again i'm like this movie is hilarious yeah i really liked it which is really interesting to me that you guys like this movie so much and yet you do not like the blues brothers this is way way funnier than the blues there are jokes in this movie though the blues brothers is a character piece there's not jokes to me the comedy is obviously very different but they're to me they're both classics uh and it's just i just thought it was like because i love both of these movies i'm fully willing to admit that blues brothers is a classic i just disagree that it's funny i think a lot of people like it a lot but it's it's not as funny i mean i think you're 30 minutes into blues brothers before the first like technical joke happens i also feel like this movie was is non-stop it is just dense with really amusing things that are happening you know jokes visual gags all of it and that just doesn't happen in blues brothers there's a lot of just nothing that movie's really long but that's also i mean like that was the case with most movies by then though because i think almost no movies are as densely comedic as airplane or any given zucker abram zucker movie you look at top secret or any of the hot shots movies like it's just non-stop because every single scene has to have as many jokes as they could fit in it before they cut to the next scene it's just surprising that they're as funny as they are the whole time because usually when someone's like oh i just care about jokes for a minute then they're all crappy jokes but yeah i i don't feel like it uh stands up to blues brothers all right up or down patrick it's an up for me richard oh it's definitely not of course it's an up it's an up we got three ups on this one what do we think letterbox wise jess uh it's pretty high for me uh i'm going to put it in eighth place right now for me for the year which is uh below the island but above knight of the juggler which for me was unusually high yeah uh richard what are we looking at letterbox twice uh yeah i'm really i'm really struggling for this but i think i too will put it just below the island which is above where the buffalo room okay i think uh for me hmm it's hard i think it goes right under the island uh and above the changeling for me i think we all agree the island is slightly better than here well i think i think what happened was that i had zero expectations for the island so now in my head it's like a miracle and so i i can't put this above it but it's i really like the airplane and honestly when we started this year i was sure airplane was going to be the top of my list but re-watching it and and watching for the first time from beginning to end zero hour like in a big part of it gets wiped out in my head where i'm just like oh so you just took a movie that existed and you plugged some jokes into it and it's like still there's a lot more to it than that and they're all good jokes but it seems less like impossibly brilliant to me now knowing that the the whole story came from something else but it's still great and which is why it's in fifth place still on my list for the year so i think that's where it goes for me it's in sixth place for me okay so i actually had it lower than both of you two yeah yeah but i think that's everything for this one if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share with us we're vintage video pod on twitter facebook instagram and letterboxed where as i said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year we can also be found at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider rating us on itunes to help people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can support the show through patreon.com vintagevideopodcast thank you so much for listening and i hope you'll join us next time when we'll be discussing alligator which imdb describes like so a baby alligator is flushed down a chicago toilet and survives by eating discarded laboratory rats injected with growth hormones the small reptile grows gigantic escapes the sewers and goes on a rampage that sounds marvelous to me can't wait we leave you now with the trailer for alligator [Music] it lives 50 feet beneath the streets [Music] it's 36 feet long [Music] it weighs over 2 000 pounds and it's about to break out [Music] we're looking at the one who saw it and it was big you said it was dark now perhaps you're mistaken an alligator half that size would starve in a week he kept coming up with some garbage about alligators in the sewers alligators in the sewers once it escaped there was no way to stop it [Music] the safety of the public is my job it could be anywhere there he is [Music] ready to attack at any moment you know i've seen what this animal can do you better take all the help you can [Music] get [Music] keep coming [Music] at first no one believed it now no one will forget [Music] alligator