On Friday, July 2, Airplane! will celebrate its 30th anniversary. I personally — slightly — prefer Anchorman, but despite my modern leanings, Airplane! is easily the finest comedy ever made. Its gags, puns and sequencing are all perfectly done, sure, but what really sets it apart is that, unlike many of the other comedies that come off as Airplane! wannabes (as well as Anchorman), the Zucker brothers’ and Jim Abrahams’ comic masterpiece also has a fully realized and engaging plot throughout.
Patton Oswalt sums it up perfectly in this great New York Times piece about the anniversary.
“A lot of comedies in the last 30 years have wanted to be ‘Airplane!,’ ” said Patton Oswalt, a comedian and actor and the voice of the hero in “Ratatouille.” “But most of those movies took the wrong message from ‘Airplane!’ They were gag, gag, gag, gag, where ‘Airplane!’ is really structured, driving the story along all the time. In a weird way it’s like a Beatles movie. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of sweat and blood that went into it.”
Comparing Airplane! to a Beatles movie is a little insulting, frankly, but I get Patton’s point.
I really don’t have a lot else to add in celebration of this momentous achievement. If you haven’t seen Airplane!, go do that right now. If you have seen it, you know how great it is. And if you have seen it and don’t think it’s great, I hate you.
One thing I may as well point out for the uninitiated and confused, is that the silly name of this humble blog derives from this comedy classic. You see, during the flick, a young boy comes to tour the cockpit and meet some real-life pilots. And the pilot is really happy about this — something he reveals through a series of increasingly awkward inquiries. And, of course, one of the questions he asks is “Do you like movies about gladiators?” So since this was a movie blog and I had no other title in mind, we just defaulted to this line.
OK, that’s not the best story in the world, but it was a helluva lot better than the origin story you paid to see in Daredevil, so give me a break.
Luckily, the Times piece also offers some actually interesting background for us on how the whole Peter Graves/Joey-interaction thing came to be.
When the creators of “Airplane!” were lining up actors for their rollicking parody three decades ago, some of the straight-arrow character actors that ended up in the cast worried about the harm it might do to their careers. One of the most skittish participants: Peter Graves, the taciturn “Mission: Impossible” star who played the movie’s pilot, a kindly veteran who welcomes a little boy named Billy into the cockpit and asks questions like “Ever seen a grown man naked?”
“His agent got him the script, and he was totally turned off by it,” Jerry Zucker, who wrote and directed the film with his brother, David Zucker, and their lifelong friend Jim Abrahams, said recently during a phone interview with his erstwhile partners. “He thought it was tasteless trash.”
Mr. Abrahams interjected, his voice perfectly deadpan: “I don’t understand. What did he think was tasteless about pedophilia?”
That’s funny … Dustin once asked the cops the same thing.
Also, the fact that the no copy editors at the Times caught the error of this piece calling the kid “Billy” instead of Joey is appalling. Surely, worse than that whole Jayson Blair thing. Probably the yellow cake in Nigeria thing, too.
A copy editor? What is it? … It’s an archaic term for a professional who used to ensure that newspapers had accurate facts and grammar back in the 20th century, but that’s not important right now.
