BSA 106 (Screen Arts) Semester 2 Week 14 : Airplane!, Spoofs, Parodies and Disaster Movies

In class we watched the spoof movie Airplane! (1980), written and directed by three comedy auteurs who would go on to define the parody genre from the 80's to 2000's. There were a lot of disaster movies released in the 70's (1972's The Poseidon Adventure, 1974's The Towering Inferno), a lot of these movies were set in an enclosed space or moving vehicle of some type. Being set on or around an Airplane was quite a popular trope for some of these B-Movies (the Airport series, 1972's Skyjacked). Airplane! serves as a parody of these films. Airplane! was such a success that it is now more well remembered than the films that inspired it.

There were four movies released in the Airport series, each following an ensemble cast as they experience different Airplane related disasters. The first was received luke-warm by critics, some claiming it as utter junk. Regardless the film was recognized by the Academy Awards, being nominated for a whopping 10 Oscars and winning the 'best-supporting actress' award. 

Four years after its released a sequel was made in 1974, peculiarly titled Airport 1975. This would continue for the subsequent films, each being stamped with the year of its release, Although the last installment has to take the cake for weirdest name: "Concorde...Airport 1979".

 The slew of sequels were not met with the same academic success and followed different characters and situations, like an anthology series. It did have one connecting character though, Joseph "Joe" Patroni  played by George Kennedy, who was seen slowly making his way up in a career of aviation, going from a chief mechanic to an airline pilot.

If the series was at all popular or fondly remembered today I'd say there'd be multiple fan theories about how the re-occuring character is cursed, that many disasters for one man is too much of a coincidence.

I grew up with Airplane!, but never knew about the the disaster heavy 70's that preceded it. To me disaster movies seemed like a genre that had never had its time and were simply a sub-genre of action. It is very interesting to see how popular they once were. 

My clearest memories of disaster movies growing up are The Day After Tomorrow and the 2007 remake of The Poseidon Adventure (simply titled "Poseidon"). I remember enjoying these to some extent but recognizing that they were neither well made nor particularly entertaining, I would have much rather spent my time watching Spider-Man or Harry Potter. 

The interesting thing about the genre is seeing normal people thrown into a larger than life situation. Faced with their own mortality characters boil down to their cores and revert to more primal states. This is what is really so engaging about these stories, the people feel real and we can easily put ourselves in their situation. The reason the genre works well for blockbusters is that you get both halves of a good cinematic experience, the spectacle and the human element. I love Airplane!, but I think it only captures one half of this idea. Airplane! is all jokes (the spectacle), which makes it exhausting to watch.

The movie is so aggressive with the pace of it jokes that after a while it feels like there's no time to breathe and take it all in. The biggest problem I have with the film is that there is no investment in the characters. It might seem like a paltry complaint, but it does affect the way we experience the film. Towards the end I always feel myself getting restless, not because the quality of the film drops, but because there is no real reason to watch it till the end. The only reward for finishing the movie is more gags, and after an hour of them a person has had enough. 

Something like Shaun of the Dead is a good example of a parody that does both halves well. That movie has clear progression in the characters and the director makes us care for them. Shaun of the Dead has a similar pace with its jokes, but it's focus on the characters keeps you engaged until the end. The last part of that movie isn't even that funny, but we keep watching because we want to see what happens to the characters. Every time I watch Airplane! I consider turning it off after the first hour or so.

This brings me to another point: zombie movies are the modern rendition of disaster films. I mentioned that disaster movies never seemed that relevant to me growing up, but I think that is just because it's been given a bit of a make-over and I never noticed. The addition of horror to a disaster movie seems like a bad idea, but somehow it managed to become the most popular genre. Zombie movies, games and even books were all the rage when I was growing up, and it just so happens that it shares the same exact conventions as disaster movies. 

The worst part of Airplane! is that it has too much of a good thing and not enough of something else, but it has to be said that the good thing it does have is very, very good. I have watched Airplane a lot in my life and I can still appreciate the finesse in its writing. The gags in Airplane! are extremely witty, yet admittedly ridiculous, the film spawned a new age of spoof. While Mel Brook movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein served as the spoof movies of the 70's, Airplane! set the standard for the 80's. It played with language and metaphor unlike people had seen before.

The classic "surely you can't be serious" joke is a good representation of what the movie is like, however that isn't all it has to offer. The writing in Airplane has a set of distinct jokes that it weaves throughout the film, each of them develop and change over the course of the movie. "Surely you can't be serious" is only one of them, although admittedly the one used most abundantly.

The "Surely/Shirley" joke works off misunderstanding and looks at how we use language. This joke is used throughout the movie. Essentially one character says a common phrase, another character takes that phrase literally or misunderstands and responds to it in that way. Upon first viewing this can take a second or two to register for the audience, but when it does it's even funnier. The one that takes people the longest is where one character says "this is an entirely different kind of flying, altogether", and two other characters say "this is an entirely different kind of flying". The Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams found a joke that takes a while to get but that everyone and anyone can understand. Some of the jokes we enjoy most are those that we feel privy to, the inside joke or one that only some people will get. We enjoy the joke because we had to work for it and because it feel especially made for us. By playing with the English language the writers found a way of emulating that feeling, but casting a large enough net that their entire target audience will get it.

"Two more minutes? They could be miles off course!"

"That's impossible they're on instruments"

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker went on to collaborate on three more projects in a similar vein as Airplane!:

Police Squad was essentially Airplane! as a cop procedural TV show, David Zucker eventually expanded this series into the Naked Gun film franchise. More recently a similar series has popped up. Created by Steve and Nancy Carell, Angie Tribeca returns to the kind of humour displayed in Police Squad and Airplane!. I remember seeing it on the TV one day and being so surprised that someone would actually have the balls to make a series like that today. I loved it but couldn't imagine general audiences enjoying it as much. This type of humour is so specific and cartoony that I thought a lot of people would be put off, to my surprise that series has done quite well and has made it to three seasons with another coming next year. Police Squad only lasted 6 episodes, it seems to me like it would be hard to maintain a steady stream of this type of comedy. At the same time getting it in a shorter amount of time seems like a good idea.

  

The next project that all three the creative heads from Airplane! worked on was the 1984 movie Top Secret!, once again following in Airplane!'s footsteps, this time parodying WWII movies. Their last project together was Ruthless People (1986), after which they all split ways and made their own movies. 

The most successful of the three is most undoubtedly David Zucker, who went on to direct and write the Naked Gun movies and direct two installments in the extremely popular Scary Movie franchise. He collaborated with Leslie Nielsen for most of his career, even bringing him on board for Scary Movie 3 & 4, which gave those films a bit more legitimacy.

Jim Abrahams is most well known for the two Hot Shots movies he made starring Charlie Sheen, the first parodying Top Gun and the second being a spoof of Rambo.

Unlike the other two Jerry Zucker took a different turn with his career, whilst not particularly successful his films provided more diversity than his spoof comedy roots might have suggested. After Ruthless People he directed the Patrick Swayze fantasy romance Ghost (1990). IN 1995 he directed an adaptation of King Arthur starring Sean Connery called First Knight. Personally I know him from his last directorial effort Rat Race (2001), a favourite from my childhood and occasional guilty pleasure.