‘Airplane!’ vs ‘Zero Hour!’: exploring the origins of a comedy parody
Comedy is, and will always be, a genre of subjectivity. Whilst one person will love the boisterous chaos of NBC’s Parks and Recreation, another will prefer Channel 4’s dry, awkward British series, Peep Show. Of course, there are some films and TV shows that manage to bridge the gap between tastes, with the 1980 parody flick Airplane! being considered one of the universally beloved comedies of all time.
Written and helmed by a directorial trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, Airplane! was cut from the same cloth as the Mel Brooks comedies of the 1970s, including 1974’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Altogether more updated, however, the 1980 movie moved with a frenetic, theatrical pace, where gags were stuffed into the very fabric of the film, visible in the background of shots as well as being present in the snappy screenplay.
Prodding fun at melodramatic romance flicks of the time, the film’s loose story follows an ex-pilot who has developed a fear of flying and his efforts to land a passenger plane after the pilots become sick mid-flight. Lacking any discernible movie stars, aside from the straight-faced dramatists Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen, and the cameo appearance of basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Airplane! was an unexpected hit upon its release.
Still, the influential parody flick isn’t quite as original as you might expect, being directly inspired by the 1957 film Zero Hour!, from which it borrows much of its central plot, as well as a number of characters and lines of dialogue. In addition, Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers also looked towards Airport 1975 and other films in the same series to influence their fast-paced slapstick comedy
Writing the film whilst performing in their Kentucky Fried Theatre production company which they founded in 1971, Airplane! was devised from a mosaic of ideas found on late-night television, with the 1957 Hall Bartlett thriller, Zero Hour!, being one of many shows they happened to record.
Speaking to AV Club, Jerry Zucker recalled the initial writing process, explaining: “We’d never heard of Zero Hour! before then, and at first, we were probably sort of just fast-forwarding to the commercials, or maybe looking at but mostly just waiting for the commercials—but then we started really watching it and getting into the movie. And, you know, Zero Hour! actually works…You could teach film structure using Zero Hour. It’s a perfectly classically structured film”.
The directorial trio took so much creative license that, fearing a legal copyright battle, they sought to negotiate the rights to remake the movie and ensure that Airplane! came under the parody law. Obtaining the rights from Warner Bros. and Paramount for approximately $2,500, gave the production team full creative freedom, allowing them to copy much of Zero Hour’s original structure.
Watch the side-by-side comparison of the movies below to see just how similar Airplane! is to the original mile-high drama.
