Airplane ! Question

[TransporterBeam]

Was Airplane a remake of an old movie with John Wayne called the High and the Mighty ? I think there was a thread here about it being a remake of another movie from the 1950s. In the High and the Mighty the people all told stories of their lives and you saw scenes of them off the plane.
My neighbors told me that. We have it on dvd and it is funny !

 

[John Picard]

No. Airplane! was a spoof of the old "Airport" airplane tragedy movies of the 1970's.

 

[Christopher]

Airplane! was a spoof remake of a 1957 disaster movie called Zero Hour, following the same plot and using many of the same lines of dialogue throughout, but with comedic twists added. Zero Hour was itself a remake of a 1956 Canadian TV movie called Flight into Danger.

 

[John Picard]

^^ Good point. Go here for more information.

• The film is mostly a parody of Zero Hour! (1957), a film that had a main character named Ted Stryker and such famous "not meant to be funny" lines like "We have to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."

• The film was specially geared to spoof the "Airport" series, but chiefly spoofs Airport 1975 (1974), where Karen Black is a stewardess forced to pilot a plane after both pilots are incapacitated, Linda Blair is a girl needing a kidney transplant, and Helen Reddy plays a singing nun.

• Universal threatened to sue when they found out that the directors were trying to get Helen Reddy to repeat her role as the singing nun from Airport 1975 (1974). George Kennedy from the original Airport movies was also being courted for the film but thought better of running afoul of Universal.

• The casting of professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a member of the flight crew was a reference to pro football player Elroy 'Crazylegs' Hirsch's role as a pilot in the serious airplane disaster film Zero Hour! (1957)

If you ever get a chance, watch The Kentucky Friend Movie. One of the best comedies of all time.

 

[UssGlenn]

As said before, Airplane! is based on Zero Hour. However, when "The High and the Mighty" was released a couple years ago, they played up the similarities to Airplane! to make people want to watch, even though the two movies are not directly related. That's probably where your neighbors got the idea.