Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit movie referencing.
Forty years ago, a crew that had given us one somewhat obscure and tepidly received parody movie decided to take inspiration from something that was already ridiculous, namely a fifties airline disaster movie involving spoilt seafood. Throw in some fine deadpan actors, all the jokes one can possibly cram into a single scene, and we got the definitive—and most arguably still the best—parody film Hollywood has managed to cough up. Yes, it’s Airplane!
It wasn’t entirely the first parody movie as we understand it—back in the sixties, we had Bond pastiche Casino Royale (yes, there’s one besides Craig’s debut), which, erm, can best be described as a demented LSD trip that Hollywood decided to blow bazillions of dollars and cast dozens of stars on realizing. And of course, we had the considerably more watchable Mel Brooks entries like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in the seventies—but they weren’t quite like the rapid-fire string of surrealism that the Zucker brothers and Jim Abraham gave us in 1980.
The storyline of Airplane is more or less the same as the aforementioned fifties flick, Zero Hour, dealing with a damaged war veteran pilot chasing an old flame onto a commercial flight, where by chance, the crew are all incapacitated by badly cooked fish. Except here, the ridiculous premise and stilted lines of that forgotten cheeseflick are all part of the fun—and you’re not really here for the story, or why Ted Striker (Robert Hays) apparently can’t drink a glass of water without pouring it onto his face. You’re here to see Leslie Nielsen, prior to this known only for serious roles like Forbidden Planet, utter hilarious nonsense with a completely straight face. You’re here to see Stephen Stucker go absolutely nuts on set as the only one not going completely deadpan. And you’re here to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a pilot who’s totally not very defensive about his NBA record!
What makes Airplane hold up, for me, is that it never just rests on its moment-by-moment laurels. Sure, some of the references are very much of the time, like the Saturday Night Fever parody—but what still makes it funny is that throughout that scene, for instance, they keep piling on the visual gags, until it goes into wonderful absurdity with gravity-defying disco. In any given later spoof flick, they’d just put on a contemporary song…and that’d be the end of it.
I could go on and on about individual scenes, but there’s just to so many gags that it’d turn into absolute redundancy just to list them all. Not all of them stick, but there’s so many around each corner, even in split-second shots, that it ends up not mattering at all. You combine visual absurdity with silly performances that are played absolutely straight, and it’s a comedy hit that can still render you rolling on the floor four decades later.
Of course, now we need to talk the film’s legacy. We had not long thereafter a sequel, which, while not absolute garbage, wasn’t as memorable…with the exception of William Shatner, playing a moon traffic controller (because of course we had to go into space for this one, thereby not really making it about an airplane, but oh well), who gives us some good quality Shat. Like, for instance, his rant about “BILLIONS of BLINKING lights and they're BEEPING and FLASHING--"
Most of the folk involved in Airplane went on to do other things, but the results were varied to say the least. Collaborative works like Top Secret and the Naked Gun are still fondly remembered, and Jim Abrahams seemed to get the best of it with the Hot Shots duology. Suffice it to say the second one hit that Airplane sweet spot the best, with liquid metal Saddam Husseins and a body count to shame Rambo. David Zucker, however, gave us increasingly insultingly idiotic Scary Movie flicks, and then killed his career with Bush-cheerleading political tract ‘An American Carol’, which failed to please even its intended audience.
Other than that…the last mainstream parody film that was even halfway watchable was arguably ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ back in 2001 (you'll never see Chris Evans the same way at any rate), and the genre essentially dived all the way into the toilet after that. Do you fondly remember Meet the Spartans? Or Disaster Movie? No. No you don’t. And if you do, I have no doubt there’s a row of Jack Daniels bottles within arms reach at every waking moment.
Still, we’ll always have Airplane and the Brooks comedies at any rate. If anything, they prove that for a parody flick to really stick, you need just that right formula of talent and energy—never stick with just one thing, and always make sure you have a good balance instead of the barrage of nonsense that lesser films took from them. I don’t know if it’ll be truly replicated in the future, but surely someone will try one day. Whether or not they’ll be called Shirley also remains to be seen.
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