Airplane II: The Sequel

Director: Ken Finkleman

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, William Shatner

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. An extended cameo from Shatner actually led me to prefer this over the original Airplane! (1980) when I was a kid.

Did I Like It: But kids are idiots. Everything is tired here. The jokes are the same. Anything new is mostly jam-packed into the film’s opening minutes. I caught myself laughing at the courtesy van for Air Iran, even though it’s not a great joke, per se. Jokes about Ronald Reagan’s senility work now, but I can’t give extra credit for something being accidentally funnier than it had any right to originally be.

Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar steer clear, and it’s not exactly like Sonny Bono is an adequate consolation prize. Those that remain try their best to keep things breezy, but they are largely repeating old gags with only the slightest variation. Hagerty understands the assignment and remains adorable, while there are several times Hays looks at the camera, as if to beg us not to make the film a success to keep him from the threatened indignities of an Airplane III.

And yet…

The parts with Shatner still kind of hold up. He’s playing a character similar enough to Kirk that we all get the joke, but different enough that Paramount would have to cut one more check to Roddenberry. It’s largely some tame gags, but he is game and understands we’re laughing at him more than with him. He’s at the heights of his cinematic charms, having also had Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) under his belt earlier in the year. I’ll be honest, my most guileless laugh in the whole movie came when Shatner’s character was gently shoved into the outer orbit of a nervous breakdown at the sight of a glass tube with an array of blinking red lights. Those things were built for The Wrath of Khan but are recognizable to any Trek fan for being reused ad infinitum for decades in the franchise.

Airplane! (1980)

Director: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. I always preferred Airplane Ii: The Sequel (1982), but then again I was ten, and not terribly bright. But this film had the first pair of boobs I had ever seen legitimately. Man alive, PG really meant something different back in the day.

Did I Like It: This movie has a lot to answer for. It was a big—and far more importantly, relatively cheap—hit, and as often happens in these cases, the wrong lessons were learned. Thus, they make an army of similar movies, that’s why in the early aughts*, you got an endless series of “spoof” movies that were just an endless series of the same old gags reproduced over and over again. I’ll admit, Scary Movie (2000) probably has quite a bit of blame in that combination, but it’s sort of like blaming the parents of Typhoid Mary for what happened after. But now that I think about it, if Typhoid Papa and Typhoid Mama taught the apple of their eye about proper disease prevention…

This is the part where all of the passengers line up to beat me senseless, right?

Anyway, what separates this from all of the immitators that came to follow? One might be tempted to say that the ZAZ team is the secret ingredient, but all of them eventually went on to make films that were far more part of the problem than not. For every Naked Gun that was to come, there were also An American Carol (2008), Rat Race (2001) (which I didn’t hate, but didn’t love), and even a few of those Scaries Movie (that’s how you pluralize those) in there two.

I think the true secret ingredient that got forgotten along the way was not the act of making a story around the gag that is special in and of itself, but having an  (even if it is a bizarre sense of) affection for the types of movies being sent up. These early movies understood that the best spoof movies that have an affection for that with which they poke fun. Mel Brooks understood that, especially in the earlier years of his career. Those guys who I can’t even be bothered to look up who are trucking in those types of films these days. They’re just a few steps away from an AI engine randomly spitting out things that might have otherwise been tagged as humor.