The prequel to Airplane!, the prequel to Elizabeth Hurley

On Saturday night I watched a movie you'd think I would have seen ages ago. After all, when you really love a parody, you have a natural curiosity about the thing that inspired that parody.

The parody I love is Airplane! (called Flying High in Australia -- true story!), and the thing that inspired it is Airport, George Seaton's 1970 disaster movie. It's one of the famous 70s disaster movies with an all-star cast, alongside something like Towering Inferno. I saw Inferno way back in college, but it took until I was a 43-year-old man to finally see one of the granddaddies of the airplane-in-peril genre.

Although more plot elements of the original Airplane! are out of Airport '75 (or is it Airport '77?), there's no doubt that this movie provided the template for the jokes in the Zucker-Abrahams spoof classic. That's especially so because those other two movies were direct sequels to this one. Actually, in a bit of counterintuitive logic, Airplane II: The Sequel actually derives its plot about a crazy bomber directly from the first Airport movie ... with the notable change of the bomb in the suitcase being on a space shuttle instead of an airplane, of course. Sonny Bono memorably plays the bomber in Airplane II, while here the role is essayed by an actor named Van Heflin. But the details of the execution are almost identical, from both actors being twitchy and refusing to stop clutching their briefcases (called an "attache case" in Airport) to the rest of the passengers gathering behind Dean Martin and/or Robert Hays as he tries to talk the bomber down (having the passengers in the parody lean so far in as to actually absent-mindedly fondle Ted Striker while waiting to see what will happen).

I laughed repeatedly during Airport, but not primarily because of the hokey writing and dated pacing (it takes a full hour before the plane in peril even gets off the ground). No, it was laughter inspired by a new appreciation of how spot-on the parody in Airplane! is, including white courtesy vs. red courtesy phones, stands at the airport that sell life insurance policies, the self-serious air traffic controller jargon that makes excessive use of the word "niner," and the domestic entanglements/squabbles of the various professionals brought in to address the crisis.

All that said, I'm not entirely sure I can recommend Airport because of just how slow it is. For the first hour of the movie you'd think that the greatest crisis they have on their hands is a snow storm, and whether one particular flight from Chicago to Rome is going to get off the ground. Nowadays, flight cancellations are as commonplace as airline peanuts -- or perhaps more so, as many airlines have moved away from actual peanuts. (And in Airport, one passenger actually complains about a package of those freebie snacks being stale.)

Perhaps the single most surprising element that originated in this movie is the slapping of hysterical passengers, one of the most memorable scenes in the Zucker-Abrahams parody. There are two different instances of a hysterical passengers being slapped in this movie, though one is certainly played for comedy, as it's a priest doing the slapping. That was really the only moment in the whole movie where they appeared to be winking at us.

There's also a hilariously long amount of time spent on a subplot about a little old lady who flies airlines without buying tickets, as a stowaway. In the days after 9/11, it is simply inconceivable to us that there could have been a time when security was so lax that people without tickets could get on planes. A variation on this character shows up in Airplane! as well. Then again, when it's the guy who actually bought a ticket who tries to blow up this plane with a bomb, maybe little old lady stowaways should be the least of their security concerns.

Now for the other half of the title of this post. There are a lot of big names in this movie, from Martin to Burt Lancaster to George Kennedy to Maureen O'Hara. But there was one I hadn't seen in anything for so long, I had sort of forgotten what she looked like, especially since I'd never seen her in anything when she was this young.

Well, what she looked like was a lot like Elizabeth Hurley.

That's Jacqueline Bisset I'm talking about, and once I saw it, I couldn't un-see it. It doesn't hurt the comparison that she's also British, like the model-turned-actor who was once Hugh Grant's love interest.

I'll let you judge for yourself:

It's not only that I could see Elizabeth Hurley playing her in the remake -- if the remake had been made 20 years ago -- but part of me wondered if Hurley had actually jumped in a time machine and gone back to 1970 to star in the original.

They've both got aging well in common, as Bisset still looks beautiful at age 72, while Hurley might not even need the hypothetical Airport remake to have been made 20 years ago in order to star in it -- she just turned 52 yesterday and is still stunning:

Bring on Rocky VII

We haven't quite reached as many Rockys as are in this poster from the movie Airplane II: The Sequel, but we're starting to get to the point that Sylvester Stallone would actually look like this if he donned the gloves again.

Whether he'd be Asian or not, I can't say.

I'm seeing Creed -- the seventh Rocky movie -- at a critics screening tonight, and I won't be half surprised if Stallone does actually get in the ring.

After all, he did a boxing movie, as a fighter, as recently as 2013 with the movie Grudge Match. He's going to be 70 next July, but why not one more?

I'm guessing Stallone finally has enough sense not to go that route with this one, especially since 2006's Rocky Balboa -- which I quite liked -- was a return to a greater sense of realism in the series. Oh, the terrible Rocky V -- you know, the one where he fought that guy Tommy Morrison in a street fight -- was meant to be that return, but gritty did not necessarily translate to "realistic" in that case. In Rocky Balboa, it did, and Rocky Balboa is what gives me cautious optimism about tonight's film.

Another thing giving me optimism: Someone told me there's talk of Stallone garnering an Oscar nomination for his role as the coach of Apollo Creed's son, Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), who is following in his father's footsteps. (Let's hope he also doesn't get fatally pummelled by a massive Russian who says things like "I must break you.")

That seems a bit farfetched, but the source is one I trust, so we'll see.

Sylvester Stallone may never get to 38 Rockys, but at this point, it would be unwise to bet against him reaching double digits.

Highly irregular

A friend and I came to the conclusion a couple years ago that although Airplane! is probably a better movie than Airplane II: The Sequel, we actually quote more jokes from Airplane II.

Maybe it's not such a surprise, then, that my most quoted line from 2001: A Space Odyssey is also from Airplane II.

One of the benefits of not yet being eligible for Australian employment is that when I make promises on this blog, I'm actually in the position to sort of keep them. Last week I told you that I was due for another viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The very next day I found a copy at the library, and yesterday, I watched that copy. I mightn't have done so if it had been a nice day, but it was cold and rainy. That seemed like perfect 2001 viewing weather.

I should get this right out of the way at the start: It blew me away. This was my third viewing of the movie, but apparently only at this age of my maturity have I been able to fully appreciate it. The deliberate pacing had finally become nothing but a joy to me, and all the pieces finally fit together. This was the first time I don't think that I secretly thought it was just a disconnected montage of pretentious images -- a brilliant disconnected montage of pretentious images, but a disconnected montage of pretentious images nonetheless.

The thing that surprised me the most, however, was that I realized that the line I most commonly use when doing my HAL 9000 impression was never actually spoken by HAL. It's the following:

"What are you doing, Dave? This is highly irregular."

To me, this was, is, and has always been HAL's quintessential line of dialogue. Except, he doesn't say it. The closest he comes is:

"Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"

He never speaks about whether anything is regular, irregular or otherwise.

So who does talk about the relative regularity of Dave's actions?

Why it's ROK, the evil computer that takes over the shuttle in Airplane II, of course.

Here he is:

If I'd stopped to think about it, I might have realized the line of dialogue seemed so familiar not from the two times I had seen 2001, one of which was when I was only seven years old, but from the 12-14 times I saw Airplane II, which we owned on VHS when I was young because we'd copied it off The Movie Channel.

Even if I had realized that, though, I probably would still have thought that the phrasing "This is highly irregular" was lifted straight from 2001. It had come to seem like such an iconic part of HAL's mental and emotional breakdown that I would never have thought that its originators were the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams.

Yet that appears to be the case. I kept waiting and waiting for HAL to say it, but he never did. Okay, I didn't have to wait too long. HAL's pretty darn quick, and he knows almost immediately that a) Dave Bowman means to disconnect him, and b) the only way he can stop Dave is to persuade him he's feeling better, or simply to get Dave to take pity on him. HAL doesn't waste any time trying to accuse Dave of incorrectly following protocol. It'd probably be a bit hypocritical anyway.

It's kind of like that quote from Casablanca, "Play it again, Sam." You know, the quote that is never actually spoken in the film. It's kind of like that quote from On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando complains that "I coulda been somebody." When in reality he actually complains that "I coulda been somebody."

You'll have to forgive me if I persist in my misquoting of HAL. I've just been doing it for too long.

You could say that at this point, it's part of my circuitry.

Before I knew who they were

There are many pleasures to revisiting a favorite movie you haven't watched in 20 years, but one of the most delightful is seeing actors you didn't realize were in it because you didn't know who they were at the time.

Case in point: Airplane II, which my wife and I watched on Sunday night. I watched this movie almost as much as I watched Airplane! when I was growing up (I had both on VHS, having copied them off cable), but my wife had never seen it. So something like my tenth viewing, first since the late 1980s, excited me not only because I wanted to share the movie with her. And not only because we'd just revisited the original about three weeks ago. And not only because of William Shatner.

But I also wanted to see if what a friend of mine recently told me is true: We may not realize it, but when we still, to this day, quote Airplane!, more of our quotes are actually from Airplane II. Airplane! just gets all the credit, because, as the first movie and an undisputed classic, it's "obviously" better. It seems crazy to think this, but for my money, the two are close enough in quality that this proclivity of ours (if true) is not blasphemy.

I won't comment on that, in part because it would be hard for me to come up with a definitive list of our favorite quotes from these movies and determine which ones are from which. Except to say that my friend's instinct seems right. I think the movies are able to blend together so seamlessly because they got almost the entire cast to return from the original movie, the only prominent exceptions being Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen. Of course, in just ten minutes of screen time, the aforementioned Mr. Shatner more than compensates for the both of them. ("No tower? WHY THE HELL AREN'T I NOTIFIED ABOUT THESE THINGS?!")

But back to the original point. I kept seeing familiar faces pop in Airplane II, though only now are they familiar to me. Here's a short list:

Who: John Vernon
Where I first met him: National Lampoon's Animal House
Who he plays in Airplane II: Dr. Stone, Ted Striker's doctor at the mental hospital, who "doesn't do impressions"

I now think it's safe to say I haven't seen Airplane II since before I went to college, because it was my freshman year in college (1991) when I saw Animal House for the first time. (And then saw it about ten more times before the end of the year.) If I had seen Airplane II since then, I would have had that "Hey, that's Dean Wormer!" moment before now. In retrospect, I can imagine that Vernon must have seemed familiar to me in some way, but I don't think I consciously acknowledged that I recognized him from Airplane II. And in this case I would have, because he doesn't just blend into the scenery like at least one other person I'm going to mention here.

Who: Rip Torn
Where I first met him: Defending Your Life
Who he plays in Airplane II: Bud Krueger, one of the bigwigs behind the shuttle program, who is "familiar with" the Des Moines Institute (which specializes in treating impotence)

Coincidentally, 1991 was also the year that I saw and fell in love with the wonderful Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, where Torn plays Brooks' afterlife attorney, who is going to try to make the case that Brooks should get into heaven (rather than going back to Earth for another human life, where he'll try to be a more self-actualized person). Torn is pretty hilarious in that film, displaying a kind of daffy disinterest in whether Brooks is successful in his case. Yet more proof that I have not seen Airplane II since 1991.

Who: Oliver Robins
Where I first met him: Poltergeist
Who he plays in Airplane II: Jimmy Wilson, owner of Scraps, "a boy dog"

Okay, I saw Poltergeist in the theater, so I saw Robins getting sucked into the tree outside his window long before I saw him board the shuttle in Airplane II (which came out the same year as Poltergeist, but which I did not see until it was on cable). Come to think of it, my Poltergeist screening was probably on a re-release, but that still wouldn't have been any later than 1985. I just don't think I made the connection that Jimmy Wilson was also Robbie Freeling. Or maybe I just did my best to block the terrifying Poltergeist, probably the single most frightening experience I've ever had at the movies, out of my memory. Especially the tree scene.

Who: David Paymer
Where I first met him: Quiz Show? The American President? Get Shorty?
Who he plays in Airplane II: A court photographer, who takes a couple pictures of Striker (literally -- he is handed one from a manila folder)

Paymer is one of those character actors who has not really had one defining role, so it's likely that he just seeped into my awareness over time. But I definitely wasn't aware of him until the mid-1990s or later. Even if I had been aware of him, though, it's very likely that I could have overlooked him. His role in Airplane II is of the "blink and you'll miss it" variety.

Who: Pat Sajak
Where I first met him: Wheel of Fortune
Who he plays in Airplane II: An anchor reporting on the impending shuttle disaster, working out of the thriving metropolis of Buffalo, NY

Okay, I think I did know that Vanna White's partner in crime was in Airplane II. But I'd forgotten. So the delightful feeling of discovery was similar. Even though I really, really don't like Wheel of Fortune.

Okay, that's just about enough of that.