So right off the bat I'll say I think Airplane 2 is one of the most underrated comedies of all time. I won't go as far as to say it was as good as the first, but it's not far behind. Yeah it was the same basic plot as the first but it had a lot of original and funny moments of its own and I think was almost lock step in the sprit of the original. It's even more impressive when you realize that almost no one involved in creating the first was involved. I think it gets a bad rap because the Zucker Brothers weren't involved and they've publicity aired their displeasure over it and people have bought into it. It's certainly more funny than 99% of the comedies made in the last 20 years. Anyway my wife is having a family issue and she asked how she should handle it and to make her laugh I said she could just ignore it, which is a scene Shatner is in. So a little later I find the clip to show her, then I watch other clips....he has at least 10 laugh out loud moments. I won't spoil it but one is particularly funny when they talk about some lights that are blinking out of sequence.....and the prop is one that was actually in TWOK and TNG. I think the most brilliant and funny thing about the Airplane films is they got all these actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen, Raymond Burr and Shatner who known as tough no nonsense characters and had zero comedy recognition, then they put them in these outlandish situations where absurd things are going in and they sometimes say and do crazy things themselves, yet they do it totally straight and they rarely break character that this is a serious situation and they are all tough and in charge. Hell Nielsen made a whole second and much more successful career in comedy because of the films. Shatner plays a bit more loosely than guys like Stack and Graves did but it's still hilarious because he's clearly trying to be Captain Kirk despite the fact everything around him is complete lunacy. If you've never seen it. You really should.
Yea it's pretty good. But some of it wouldn't fly today. The whole terrorist subplot kind of made me a bit uncomfortable.
Yeah I think I remember hearing that too. When all those tough guys did it though it was brilliant. It was like "No matter how utterly ridiculous the situation gets keep acting like it's a serious matter and you're being a tough no nonsense take charge kind of guy.....only amp it up just a little bit more than you were like on the show.
Agreed about some of it wouldn't go over well in today's world. But I don't think whole bit with Peter Graves, if he wasn't an actual child molester at least clearly having that inclination, asking thinly disguised sexually perverse questions to a 10 year boy visiting the cockpit would be accepted well today either. Yet it was one of the funniest and most remembered bits in the film. As crude as some it was at least it was done in a clever way, unlike the straight out gross, full of swearing, crap that were the "funny" parts in movies like the "American Pie" series. "Blazing Saddles" would never make it into the theaters today either. But, I'm sorry, despite all of it's racially charged material....it's just a damn funny film. BTW Mel Brooks only decided to put all that stuff in the film when Richard Pryor told him he should and helped write some of the material.
Heck, not only Nielsen, but Shatner, Graves, and Bridges all followed much the same trajectory, doing mostly comedic and self-parodic roles in the wake of the Airplane! movies. It transformed all of their reputations. Sure, Shatner and Graves continued to do dramatic roles, but the comedic and weird roles became a much larger part of their careers. I'd say that the bulk of Shatner's career over the past couple of decades owes more to Buck Murdock than to Jim Kirk.
Meh. I find Airplane II a weak retread of the first film, repeating too many of the gags and bits of business.
I never said it was extremely original. It obviously used the same basic plot as the first and reused some specific elements. But IMHO it also had enough things of its own, like the courtroom seen, Chuck Conners as the Sarge, Moonbase Alpha with the voice activated doors and Shatner himself being a little more animated than all the other "tough guy" actors who played it straight for the most part. So I think it's extremely good especially considering it was a totally different crew making it. And like I said even if people think it's not good and weak compared to airplane...I still think it's funnier than the vast majority of comedies in the last few decades. Besides most, not all but most, sequels are basically retreads of the original. You could easily that almost all the James Bond films have been retreads of "Dr. No". Bad guy or group does something bad, threatens to do something even worse. Bond is on the case, finds clues, gets in fights, but the main bad guy is usually a step ahead of Bond and often captures him, but Bond is able to escape and figure out a way to stop the bad guy's plan, often at the last moment. And along the way he usually drinks and has sex with a few gorgeous women. The fact the basic story is the same in the films since 1963 hasn't stopped it from being a success.
^Not to mention that the airline-disaster genre that Airplane! and Airplane 2 were parodying was itself an exercise in repetition and imitation. They were a direct parody of the then-popular Airport series, which ran for four films: Airport, Airport '75, Airport '77, and The Concorde... Airport '79. So the implausible recurrence of the same crisis with a few extra twists was the very thing that was being spoofed.
The difference in the two Airplane! movies is the same variation that the Naked Gun movies had vs. the series (Police Squad!) that spawned them: Airplane II was flat-out slapstick comedy. It wasn't the "playing it straight" kind that the original was. Remember, over 3/4 of the dialogue in Airplane! was taken UNALTERED from a serious film (Zero Hour!). Airplane! was funny because everyone in it played it straight - they acted like it was a serious drama, but the funny moments were in REACTION to it. The sequel, OTOH, played it for laughs alone. Not to say it wasn't still funny, just wasn't as intelligently funny. The same goes for Police Squad! - its characters played things straight, they did not act funny, and (most importantly) the character of Frank Drebin was actually a competent and upstanding police officer. The films based on the series turned Drebin into a bumbling idiot (which he definitely was not, in the series) and put the comedy in the forefront. Which I might argue, ruined the premise completely...
Shatner's funny in TOS too, but he's much more the serious young actor then. With his later light-hearted works to judge against, you can see the uninhibited Shatner winking inside James T. Kirk once in a while.
Plus, we got to see the original Enterprise, in what may have been her only big screen appearance. The best 3 seconds of the entire movie, in my opinion.
I'll grant you 2 was a little more slapstick and I do know the original was taken in large part word for word from a serious disaster film. I'm sorry though you can't tell me the first Airplane played it totally straight. When you have Lloyd Bridges literally hanging off the ceiling and then jumping out of a control tower window because he's so high on sniffing glue he' s hallucinating the plane is about to hit them. How is that not slapstick....though it was funny as hell. Do I even need to mention Johnny? You couldn't get anymore slapstick if the Three Stooges Themselves had been it. Although I think he wasn't funny and the film could have dropped him totally. The films greatness came from the actors playing it seriously for the most no matter what. There is no way though you can the first one didn't use slapstick in obvious ways at times. And as for playing it straight Shatner didn't break character or even blink of when the whole shuttle came crashing through the wall behind him and flew over his head missing by inches. Don't see how much straighter you can get that that.
Yep, far more Zero Hour than any of the Airport movies. Hell, they bought the rights to Zero Hour in order to make Airplane!, and they wanted to set it in the 1950s but the studio said no. [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BjU-e01zQ4[/yt]
Well, yes, obviously the film is directly based on Zero Hour!, but it was a response to the far more recent Airport franchise, which had become something of the archetype of cheesy '70s disaster movies and was ripe for parody. Airport was based on a novel by Arthur Hailey, so the Zuckers got hold of an earlier, even cheesier movie based on another air-disaster novel by Hailey, and used that as the raw material for their parody of the more recent series. Trust me, everyone who heard about Airplane! in 1980, if they had any movie-watching experience at all, would've immediately recognized it as a satire of the Airport movies and others like them. The title itself makes that clear. Not only was that a series of four high-profile disaster movies with all-star casts (and disaster movies with all-star casts were to the '70s what superhero movies are to the current decade), but those movies were rerun on television all the time. I remember seeing them on TV periodically when I was a kid. So I knew right away what Airplane! was a spoof of. It's ironic that the spoof has ended up being so much more enduring than the then-famous series it was spoofing.
The sequel was OK but I always loved the Shatner parts. I've seen those many times more than the entire film. When I was a kid it was watch the ladies go through the x-ray machine then FF to Shatner, lol.
Considering the plot involved a moon base and a space shuttle, shouldn't it have been moved to SF/Fantasy?