The stridently horny frat-house slapstick that defined legendary comedy troupe Kentucky Fried Theater’s aesthetic resulted in what could be considered the comedic equivalent of repeated premature ejaculations. The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.
Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s initial foray into film was the disjointed, sporadically hysterical Kentucky Fried Movie, a raunchy, shapeless collection of movie- and TV-spoofing skits. Though the centerpiece Bruce Lee riff “A Fistful of Yen” demonstrated a reasonable level of “to-to concentwaysun” (as the kung fu master would lisp), the rest was content to show little girls frying cats in Wesson oil or bigger girls introducing each others’ bare bosoms by name (“Nancy, this is Susan. Susan, this is Nancy”). So it must’ve been something of a shock when their hit 1980 follow-up, Airplane!, sustained a single premise—spoofing the Airport disaster films—for its entire running time, and did so without going limp.
The reason for this is because the ZAZ team framed their zaniest conceits with an uncredited, scene-for-scene fabrication of 1957’s forgotten Zero Hour. Highlights include Barbara Billingsley trading jive with two unreceptive African-Americans, a furniture-smashing barroom brawl between two Girl Scouts, and the mass plane panic that’s undercut by a big-breasted woman running in front of the action for a single jiggly second. And the filmmakers restaged Zero Hour, which was based on a novel by Airport author Arthur Hailey, with straight faces, hiring a phalanx of B-listers like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, and Peter Graves to deliver the corny action lingo as though they didn’t notice the watermelons dropping or arrows zinging around behind them. The tossed salad of sight gags, incidental vulgarity, fourth-wall obliteration, strident stupidity, intentional chintziness, Stephen “There’s a sale at Penneys” Stucker’s late-emerging queerness, and freeze-dried camp felt, at the time, like a new genre.
It wasn’t. The films of Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby all worked the same territory, and Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker were just taking it as far as it could go without snapping, as in the scene where the older woman, right after disapprovingly refusing a swig from a man’s whiskey flask, snorts a few lines of coke. But the ZAZ team’s major contribution to the blackout piss-take genre, and the main reason that none of their follow-up films seemed even remotely as “novel” as Airplane!, is that they assessed the humorlessness of antiquated thrillers and deemed it, across the board, as a camp sensibility.
Because their key ingredient is that all of the film’s characters are unflappably ignorant of being part of a comedy, the ZAZ formula has unfortunately provided the template for a lot of unnecessary revisionism. So even though this blockbuster is one of the most relentlessly inventive of American comedies, it’s impugned the ability for a lot of taut, professional, but now outmoded dramatic filmmaking to take any serious response from some modern audiences, a trend for which the equally ingenious MST3K would pound the final nail in the coffin. For the benefit of a truly limitless comedy where no reference point would ever be too beyond the pale and the only faux pas is taking any film at face value, the ZAZ team and Joel and his bots have unwittingly sculpted an army of cultural demolition monkeys, ready to pounce on and mock practically any half-assed but harmless film that has the bad fortune to have been produced before Marlon Brando’s second Academy Award.
Image/Sound
The previous DVD appearance of Airplane! came at the tail end of the format’s 1999/2000 take-over. Though it was pressed before anamorphic became as mandatory as chapter stops, the disc indeed came with a decent if dirt-speckled transfer. As far as I can see, this is the same transfer, with the inherently flat colors and only some dirt around reel changes marring the picture quality. A welcome improvement is the addition of the original 2.0 stereo soundtrack in addition to the previous issue’s forced 5.1 remix.
Extras
The previous disc also had a commentary track with the ZAZ team and their producer Jon Davison. Setting some sort of odd record for redundant infotainment, the new disc finds three separate ways to present essentially the same production tidbits and anecdotes (no wonder this edition is named after the most repetitious line of dialogue): there’s an encore appearance of the commentary track (which, though enjoyable and occasionally funny, still hits dead patches where none of the four participants seems to have a thought or story between them), a Pop-Up Video-style trivia track (what was that again about antiquated references?) and then a series of short featurettes hooked up to the feature with “find the white rabbit” triggers. Occasionally, if you’re listening to the commentary track with the featurettes turned on, you get the disorienting experience of hearing the beginning of a tangent on the commentary, which will then be interrupted by a featurette discussing the same topic. If it weren’t for the fact that the last item allows some of the other cast members the opportunity to take credit for some of the on-set improvisations (even the promised “deleted scenes” should be familiar to anyone who caught this film on TV), this would seem like the most superfluous special edition ever. Maybe that’s the joke.
Overall
Once the film’s fanatics find out that the “Don’t Call Me Shirley” edition of Airplane! is mostly a gussied-up replay of the previous edition, the shit’ll really hit the fan.
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