Airplane 1 & 2 - Peak Parody Cinema!

surely the making of one of the funniest movies ever made can't be that serious and it really isn't okay 1980s airplane was a tough cell and there were minor clashes between the directors in Paramount and lawsuits from a rival Studio threatened the casting of numerous stars but there was also perfect against type casting clever workarounds to silly DGA regulations and a complete reinvention of the spoof movie all of which made airplane one of the greatest comedies ever oh and there were fart machines too and so let's park the taxi avoid the fish and check in on our drinking problem as we find out what the happened to this movie Airplane has its origins in the Kentucky Fried Theater which the trio of David Zucker Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker collectively known as zaz founded in 1971 one act the fellas grew fond of was dubbing over serious movies with their own dialogue a sort of Proto Mystery Science Theater they too loved spoofing commercial and so would record them on VHS throughout the day and night it was here that they accidentally stumbled upon a movie called zero hour from 1957 but the plot was so absurd a former pilot has to man a plane after the real Pilots get sick with food poisoning that they thought they could just remake it all together they even named their lead character Ted Striker just like Dana Andrew's character in the movie although they would modify the spelling and so the script then titled The Late Show could be written completed in 1975 2 years before the group's debut feature the Kentucky Fried Movie hit theaters the script blatantly ripped from zero hour which must have been easy to do since they practically kept the movie on Loop while writing this is seen immediately as the eventual title airplane even steals the exclamation it was also once clunkily titled Kentucky Fried theaters airplane flying high they even took dialogue straight from zero hour because it was so ridiculous zaz was also a concern that they were going to be sued so they secured the rights for a mere $2500 although interestingly enough part of the movie was owned by airplanes eventual Studio Paramount but it wasn't just Zero Hour that zaz pulled from it was Disaster Movie Airport from 1970 and its sequels there is a link between those two as well as Arthur Haley wrote the airport novel and co-wrote zero hour the latter being adapted from his own TV play Flight into danger here univ actually did threaten to sue because airplane was too similar to their airport series they didn't even want it to be called airplane although they would eventually relent on that one unlike most spoofs however airplane didn't require any knowledge of its genre to appreciate the story characters and jokes in fact most of us had probably never even heard of zero hour until we found out it influenced airplane but zaz had trouble actually selling the script and at the urging of John Landis moved onto Kentucky Fried Movie which Landis directed this would give them some of the experience they needed and made them want to have more control of their screenplays going back to airplane zaz got interest from avco Embassy and AIP at various points but it eventually made its way to Paramount and then President Michael Eisner Who first got win through Susan barwald who loved it and enlisted Jeffrey kenberg then working as president of production for the studio to sit down with zaz and recruit them despite still being relatively fresh on the scene zaz had some conditions that they were going to sell they had to direct which surprisingly paramel agreed to saying they could direct under the condition that if their work was bad they would be fired after 2 weeks still zaz would have to relinquish their insistence that it be shot in black and white and on a propeller plane to further match zero hour sounds of propellers are still hurt throughout the movie however find out what the two sick people had for dinner with the studio lined up casting on airplane could begin another demand zaz had was that the movie be populated by non-c comedy actors some of whom we now can't imagine comedy movies without flying Skyhigh in the lead was Robert Hayes as Ted Striker who beat out one of the oddest groups of potentials ever compiled David Letterman screen tested but admitted along with zaz that he couldn't act the team would later show his audition on late night when they were guests Paramount's top choices meanwhile while were Chevy Chase or Bill Murray while everybody from Fred Willard to Bruce now Caitlyn Jenner and whoa Barry Manalo all circled the role Willard apparently didn't get it but later admitted it was a mistake while Jenner read for the part and Manalo would continue writing the songs that make the whole world sing while Hayes did have fun making the movie he would say that simultaneously shooting airplane and ABC sitcom Angie took a toll Julie Haggerty then doing far off Broad away with land Elaine Dickinson edging out Shelly Long and Sigourney Weaver who objected to the sit on your face and Wiggle line Lesley neelon then known for his dramas would play Dr RAC beating out Dom deloise and Jack web better known as Joe Friday on dragut others considered were horror icons Christopher Lee and Vincent Price instead Lee did Spielberg's 1941 and price did some Voice work there too was Peter gra as Captain and Clarence over Graves didn't particularly like the script even calling it a disgusting piece of garbage and saying his character came across as a pedophile still he wound up laughing the hardest at the premiere the role of Steve mccrosky was offered to George Kennedy star of the airport movies but Universal talks him out of it instead Lloyd Bridges won out after some convincing from Robert stack stack who was also known for his dramas and Oscar nominated turn and written on the Wind himself would play Captain Rex Kramer to nail his performance he actually looked at comedian John Bayer's impressions of him and ended up quote doing an impression of John biner doing an impression of stack and you thought there was nothing complex about airplane the rest of the Supporting Cast also has their own individual backstories so let's take a look Kentucky Fried theater Alum Steven Stucker played flamboyant error traffic controller Johnny even writing his own lines kareim Abdul Jabar played co-pilot Roger Murdoch and himself as we no but it took some extra coin getting his salary up so he could purchase a new oriental rug Believe It or Not non Hall of Famer Pete Rose was the original choice for the role through Abdul Jabar zaz even worked in another na to Zero Hour as that movie cast Pro Football Hall of Famer Elroy Crazy Legs hirs as a co-pilot Helen ready was originally cast as sister Angelina due to her role as sister Ruth in airport 1975 but Universal threw yet another fit and so the role went to Moren McGovern stage Legend Ethel Merman turns up as a delusional Lieutenant looking like she's still in the 1960s Good Times Jimmy Walker one of the few comedians in the cast has a terrific Cameo as windshield wiper man here's someone you may not recognize unless you were heavy into politics in the 1970s Howard Jarvis played the man waiting inside of a taxi cab for the entire movie The Joke itself is good but made so much better and smarter when you know that Jarvis was a fiscal conservative politician with the ultimate joke being that he would be content paying who knows how much by sitting inside of a cab with the meter running here's one more obscure Cameo the intercom couple who keeps bickering about red zones white zones and abortions were the actual people who provided the voices at LAX where some of the movie was shot oh and we can't forget Otto who plays himself of course during filming every cast member was told to play it completely straight As is often the case with the best comedies as the directors told them pretend you don't know you're in a comedy filming on airplane began on June 20th 1979 with a budget of $3.5 million originally pegged at 7.5 and right away it was a set of loopholes language barriers and yes farts until finally the poor bastard has used Leslie Neel who again was not known for comedy at the time brought a small device on set that would mimic fart noises breaking people in the middle of takes at first people thought he had a serious issue while other times he blamed it on Julie Hagerty he even sold a few of the devices which hay said he played like a maestro but zaz had bigger issues than flatulence DGA regulations said that a movie couldn't have three directors build on the credits and when zaz tried to develop the collective pseudonym of Abraham and zookers they were shut down and so zaz developed a plan Abrahams would be deemed the director that is working directly with the actors while the zookers hid behind closed doors as such the three had to secretly discuss notes in private fortunately that silly little rule of the dga's was cleared by the guild thus all three names appear on the credits and while Zero Hour was on standby so the team could match the composition and lighting that doesn't mean they hit every note right away zaz had to nudge the actors in the right direction Whenever there were spaces in the script to fill while they had no idea how to write jive talk this was improvised by Al White and Norm Gibbs who further taught to speak to Barbara Billingsley best known as June Cleaver aka the least Jive woman on the planet but not everyone was quite on the same page Ross Harris who played the young Joey admitted he was oblivious to the adult content Peter Graves was throwing out while Graves himself had reservations and thought he was being misled later being misled by zaz who explained that all of his perverse questions about Turkish prisons and naked men would be explained later on they were or not bridges too had trouble adapting to the style asking at one point what the hell's going on here of course he'd grow fond of the spoof genre later co-starring in the Hot Shots movies and Mafia for Jim Abrahams on the music front for the flashback sequence involving a Saturday Night Fever parody zaz acquired the rights to the BG Staying Alive the reason it sounds like a goofy cover is because it has been sped up another one who appreciated the style was Elmer Bernstein who nailed the desired be movie score that stands unique to his iconic works from The Magnificent Seven The Ten Commandments and so many more but if you thought eating the fish was the biggest poison imagine this at an advanced screening of airplanes some rails were played out of order after some rearranging and trimming the movie down to sub 90 minutes from nearly 2 hours the comedy was ready for theaters debuting in Toronto and buffalo on June 27th 1980 before going wide on July 2nd just a few weeks after the Blues brothers and a few before catty Shack with such a small budget airplane easily made back its money in less than 1 week going on to gross 83.5 million during its run and becoming one of the highest grossing movies of 1980 Awards wise it would earn a baath the nod for its screenplay losing to being there and even win the wga for best adapted screenplay it too would be nominated for the best musical or comedy Golden Globe losing to Cole Miner's Daughter like so any upon release today we consider airplane one of the funniest movies of all time the American Film Institute would rank it as the 10th funniest ever Behind The Graduate and ahead of the producers that list number one is Some Like It Hot although the team thinks airplane will one day be considered the best ever once all the Some Like It Hot fans die that is the AFI 2 would rank The Exchange surely there must be something you can do I'm doing everything I can now stop calling me Shirley as one of the greatest movie quotes ever actually one of the few comedies represented The Writers Guild of America would name it the fourth funniest screenplay ever behind just Groundhog Day Some Like It Hot and Annie Hall in 2010 airplane would be added to the National film registry the same year as All the President's Men The Exorcist and more while airplane wasn't the first parody comedy it launched the most prolific decade for them in the history of movies for good or bad on the hardly debatable bad side it spawned a 1982 sequel the appropriately titled airplane 2 the sequel and while it had a wealth of the original Stars zaz sat it out instead shifting Focus to Siri police squad which soon became adapted into the Naked Gun and despite all of the spoofs that came after it and all of the directors it influenced including the Fairly brothers who admit they wouldn't exist without the zookers there is no greater spoof or perhaps purely insane comedy than airplane even zaz couldn't top it although top secret and the Naked Gun give it a worthwhile go in the end it looks like we picked the wrong week to stop producing what the happened to this movie before we continue with our video here's a reminder to click the store tab on any of our joeblow channels and browse our collection of the latest and freshest designs in our merch store go get you some when 1980s airplane proved to be a massive hit becoming one of the highest grossing films of the Year up there with The Empire Strikes Back and Best Picture Winner Kramer versus Kramer it was inevitable that it would get a sequel but how often are comedy sequels even that good anyway when have they ever really recaptured the magic and the laughter of the original well airplane 2 the sequel gave it a go by basically being the same movie except this time around zaz wisely opted out leaving the production with out the strong leaders who reinvented the spoof genre instead they got the guy who wrote Greece 2 one of the most notoriously awful sequels ever so strap in no not to an airplane but a space shuttle as we find out what the happened to this movie the sequel 1980s airplane did incredibly well upon release making just under $85 million on a 3 $5 million budget an astonishing return and so Paramount naturally green lit a followup reenlisting the trio of David zooker Jim Abrahams and Jerry zooker collectively known as zaz to work their magic yet again and so they did for about a half hour or so zaz indeed got the rocket fired up for the airplane sequel even though they had zero interest this was evident early on and and so they left to focus on the two shortlived spoof series police squad which also explains why Leslie neelen would be one of the few stars of the original airplane to not return for airplane 2 as Jerry zooker put it they offered airplane 2 to us they wanted us to do it but we just I mean some movies are great for sequels cuz there's more you can do but the idea of trying to come up with another 90 minutes of airplane jokes or airplane in trouble jokes was just not what we wanted to do so we just said thank you but no so instead Ken finlan was brought in for both script and directorial duties and if you don't know who that is a lot of people didn't prior as he was more equipped in the world of Canadian comedy television he too wrote the script for another sequel Greece 2 so let's give a brief overview of the plot of airplane 2 Robert Hay's Ted shrier must save the day after it's found that the flying craft that he's on board is facing certain Doom all while trying to win back Julie hagerty's Elaine Dickinson oh wait a second is that the plot of 1980s airplane of course not because this one takes place aboard a space shuttle see completely different and weird considering the movie is still called airplane look there's a reason Elaine tells Ted I have the Strang feeling we've been through this exact same thing before oh this movie is more self-aware than Rock but taking the movie from 35,000 ft up in the air up to the depths of space didn't sit right with some chiefly the zaz team who 25 years after the release of airplane still had an issue with it with Jerry saying just the idea that it was what a future mission to outer space or something like that to do satire on something that doesn't exist that's a rule broken or at least it's one of ours anyway at best it would allow for the setup of easy spoofs of sci-fi Classics like Star Wars ET and 2001 A Space Odyssey but really how different does it need to be nobody watched airplane for the plot itself ripped from 1957 zero hour we watched it to see what the Kentucky Fried Movie guys could do with a full-blown narrative so why did we bother with airplane 2 if zaz wasn't even on board well because we loved airplane so much and so did a lot of the original cast with Hayes Hagerty Lloyd Bridges Peter Graves and Steven stooker all reprising their roles with Stucker even taking on a blind Court stenographer ripping on Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles more supporting actors left over from the first movie include Lee Bryant as Mrs Hammond The Jive talking Al White and David Leisure who played the religious zealot added here would be Chad Everett as Simon CTS Rip Torn as Bud Krueger and Raymond Burr as the judge there would also be appearances from the lace of William Shatner lending to Star Trek spoofs Lauren Landon Sunny Bono his then wife Susie was actually sacked from the movie John Vernon and yes even hervey viches then appearing in Fantasy Island at one point actor Aldo Ray was attached to play a character named sergeant major Gus greevy but it doesn't take a lot to notice that neither Ray nor the character are in the final movie also in the mix were Kent mcord aser and James a Watson Jr as done two of those punny names that get overd allaha Roger over and Victor showing just how much finlan and Company were relying on all that came before it and there is a lot of recycled material in Airplane 2 even right from the get-go airplane 2 opens with yet another direct spoof of a box office champ but instead of taking on Jaws airplane 2 opens with a Twist on the Star Wars crawl with its own little perversions attached and then there are the flashbacks and recurring onliners that ripped the originals all together bit and a blank what is it what is it Simon what is it and there are absurd cockpit visits from children and jive talk and slapping women's senseless and ridiculous spinning headlines and Hari Krishna gags and Ted's drinking problem and our hero boring an old lady to death and Lloyd Bridges posing in front of his own photo and on and on and on even one of the posters was just a lazy rehash tacking on another Twisted airplane that's two airplanes in case you didn't pick up on that another one at least had Santa Claus hanging on for his dear life to tie into the movie's December release still it's like everybody knew that this Association would be enough and so with that script complete with all of the lazy or is it resourceful riffs on its predecessor's best bits airplane 2 the sequel was approved with a $15 million budget more than four times that of the original filming began on June 2nd 1982 just a week or so before the finlan pen Grease 2 opened at number five at the box office casting a bit of a cloud over the production 8 weeks later filming wrapped and soon enough airplane 2 was ready for release but just in case anyone thought they were behind behind the sequel zaz reiterated in the press that they had absolutely no involvement with or connection to that movie perhaps sealing its eventual fate at the box office but before it could open wide airplane 2 like 1980s airplane had its own advanced screening but unlike airplane's inadvertently disastrous showing in which reals were played out of order by accident somebody behind airplane 2 sought to take a little a little bit more control as The Story Goes someone had the brilliant idea to play a prank on the attendees reportedly giving out 3D glasses to view the film through with the audience taking a little bit of time to realize the movie wasn't actually in 3D hype was strong for airplane 2 with people even reportedly getting turned away at the doors of its October 1982 sneak preview in San Diego but this did not translate at the box office when it finally launched on December 10th 1982 a quick turnaround compared to the original which began filming in June 1979 and wasn't released until the following summer airplane 2 the sequel opened at just 5.3 million putting it at number two behind the toy and ahead of 48 Hours both also in their debut weekends in its second week it dropped all the way to number six during its run it would only take in $27.2 million compared to the originals 83.5 million this thankfully killed any hopes there may have been for an airplane 3 something actually teased at the end of the movie that's exactly what they'll be expecting us to do airplane 2 the sequel was a disaster and more than 40 years on its reputation is pretty much where we'd expect it to be with critics and audiences virtually in sync with their takes it's just a retread of the original and nowhere near smart enough to be a spoof of a spoof then again if you love the original and who doesn't there's really no reason you wouldn't at least Lake the sequel you might not laugh as consistently but the familiarity and variations on the best jokes are sufficient for an easy laugh if you're willing to play along that said zaz's absence was undoubtedly felt and airplane 2 demonstrated just how Adept and skilled they were at the genre far more so than the dude who would bring us head office to date none of zaz has seen airplane 2 but David Zucker did know I will say that there were evidently some good jokes in it because sometimes people come up to me and say oh I loved your Airplane movie and my favorite joke was and then they'll say some joke I've never heard before for and I'll say oh that must be from airplane 2 I mean it doesn't happen often but it has happened surely he can't be serious oh [Music]

Channel: JoBlo Originals

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Keywords: joblo videos, joblo, wtf happened to, wtf happened to this celebrity, wtf happened to this movie, wtf, the best movie you never saw, awfully good movies, joblo originals, movie review, review, leslie nielsen, leslie nielsen fart, leslie nielsen best moments, leslie nielsen fart machine, leslie nielsen movies, leslie nielsen airplane, leslie nielsen interview, leslie nielsen funny moments, airplane movie clips, airplane movie coffee scene, airplane movie autopilot scene

Id: OPO2t86iha8

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2024