Speaker 1: Old years bolts.
Speaker 2: It's show tied.
Speaker 3: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 4: When they go out to a theater.
Speaker 3: They are cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in
Speaker 3: the protection booth.
Speaker 5: Everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 6: Cut it off.
Speaker 3: This holiday season. Let Paramount Pictures take you for the
Speaker 3: right of your life with Airplane to the sequel. Get
Speaker 3: your ticket for the funniest movie of the year. Airplane
Speaker 3: two the sequel.
Speaker 5: I got smoking, not smoking, first class coach economy by
Speaker 5: an hour by the window.
Speaker 3: Plane two the sequel reunites old friends Ted have.
Speaker 2: The strangest feeling.
Speaker 7: We've been through this exact same thing.
Speaker 5: For except this time I know exactly what I'm doing.
Speaker 7: Lane.
Speaker 3: Well, my goodness, Scraps is a boy dog, isn't he.
Speaker 3: Airplane two will gives you more drama.
Speaker 4: We've been thrown off course.
Speaker 5: Just to Tad.
Speaker 8: In space terms, that's about half a million miles. The
Speaker 8: bunch you feel are.
Speaker 5: Asteroids smashing into the hull of this ship.
Speaker 7: We're also out of coffee.
Speaker 1: More action that your puppy's done, Yeah, Scraping, he's going
Speaker 1: to the MoU with us.
Speaker 7: Oh no, I'm sorry. No, dogs are allowed on the shuttle.
Speaker 2: I'm afraid scraps will have to be shot and more romance.
Speaker 7: Sir, you should really put that case in the compartment
Speaker 7: above your head.
Speaker 5: I'll keep it with it.
Speaker 2: Why I can help you if you can't get it up.
Speaker 2: A word is out.
Speaker 7: Now what kind of travelers checks were they give? We're
Speaker 7: American excess. Huh, I'm afraid you're screwed.
Speaker 9: Oh see Airplane two the sequel. Because it will grow
Speaker 9: hair on bald men, make fat ladies thin, Let fish
Speaker 9: breathe out of water, make blind men see.
Speaker 3: You've hope to the depressed, to the downtrodden. Let the
Speaker 3: sun shine on the cody day, remove warts, help convicts
Speaker 3: go straight, clear up, addskin, turn an upside.
Speaker 2: Down, take right side up.
Speaker 3: And by the way, you may now remove your three
Speaker 3: D glasses and immediately return them to the attendant.
Speaker 4: In the lobby.
Speaker 3: We hope your use of these glasses has enhanced your
Speaker 3: enjoyment of scenes from Airplane Too, the sequel, The funniest
Speaker 3: comedy of the year, Airplane two, the sequel.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Speaker 4: Join me once again as mister Mark Begley.
Speaker 7: And then we ended up in Fresno. Fresno. No one
Speaker 7: goes to Fresno anymore.
Speaker 4: Also back in the booth is mister Chris Tashue.
Speaker 5: How many kids get a chance to live on another planet.
Speaker 4: We're returning to some familiar territory that we discussed on
Speaker 4: our Police Squad in color series with Ken Finkleman's Airplane
Speaker 4: two of the sequel, known in Spanish as I Piloto.
Speaker 4: The film was released in nineteen eighty two December and
Speaker 4: reunite viewers with Robert Hayes as Ted Striker, Julie Haggerty
Speaker 4: as Elaine Dickinson, as well as a few other familiar
Speaker 4: faces like Peter Graves as Captain Over, Lloyd Bridges as
Speaker 4: Steve McCroskey, Steven Stucker as Jacobs, David Leisure or Leisure
Speaker 4: as a Jehovah's witness, and a few other passengers that
Speaker 4: include Al White as a jive talker. Airplane two is
Speaker 4: set in the near future where space travel is common
Speaker 4: for people just like Katie Gary. This time it's up
Speaker 4: to Ted Striker to try and save an experimental space
Speaker 4: shuttle on its way to the Moon, and a sequel
Speaker 4: that's very much in the If you liked it before,
Speaker 4: you'll like it again, Vade. We'll be discussing that and
Speaker 4: a whole lot more as we go along, and I
Speaker 4: guess I should say that we're going to get into
Speaker 4: some spoilers, but that's not important right now. Mark, when
Speaker 4: was the first time you saw Airplane Too the sequel?
Speaker 4: And what did you think?
Speaker 7: A don't remember. I don't know if I saw this
Speaker 7: in the theater. I always thought I did, because I
Speaker 7: knew that there was a reference to Fresno, which is
Speaker 7: my hometown where I live currently. In anytime anything mentioned Fresno,
Speaker 7: I automatically locked it in my brain. Although knowing that
Speaker 7: there were four pairs of boobies exposed in this film
Speaker 7: and I don't remember that at all, leads me to
Speaker 7: believe that I didn't see this until it was on TV,
Speaker 7: because I guarantee you it would have been renting the
Speaker 7: fuck out of this movie knowing that it was PG
Speaker 7: and I could get away with it and I'd see boobies.
Speaker 7: So I don't know. I don't know if it was
Speaker 7: in the theater. I don't know if it was VHS
Speaker 7: or TV showing. I don't remember much else other than
Speaker 7: that Fresnel line, and nothing really struck me as all
Speaker 7: that nostalgic or anything other than that, and so I
Speaker 7: have no idea. So going into it, I was like
Speaker 7: an eighties comedy sequel, it's going to be diminishing returns.
Speaker 7: And as the jokes flew in that opening segment there,
Speaker 7: as the credits are rolling, and then a little bit
Speaker 7: after that, I thought, oh, this is a fucking joke.
Speaker 7: A minute, We're sticking with that same formula, and I'm
Speaker 7: enjoying most of these visual gags and puns and what
Speaker 7: is it that repeat throughout the film? And I thought, oh, okay,
Speaker 7: this is going well. I'm okay with this. And can't
Speaker 7: say what my initial thoughts were of the film, but
Speaker 7: on watching it this time for the show, I really
Speaker 7: quite enjoyed it.
Speaker 4: And Chris, how about yourself?
Speaker 5: I believe I saw this film sometime in the mid
Speaker 5: two thousands. I owned it on DVD and I received
Speaker 5: it via trade through a person to person DVD trading service.
Speaker 5: I can't remember what the name of it was, but
Speaker 5: it was a really good idea and there was definitely
Speaker 5: a market for it at the time, for the group
Speaker 5: of people that were into trading DVDs amongst each other
Speaker 5: and getting access to things that you would not have
Speaker 5: had access to otherwise. I remember having access to those
Speaker 5: weird versions of Evil Dead because there's six or seven
Speaker 5: versions of Army of Darkness and Evil Dead that came
Speaker 5: out on DVD. Because of that, I have most of them,
Speaker 5: and I would not have any of them otherwise. So
Speaker 5: I know I got this movie through that peer to
Speaker 5: peer trading service. I don't remember much about it. I
Speaker 5: remember unlike Mark, I remember not like it. So I
Speaker 5: was worried this time watching it now that this was
Speaker 5: going to be a slog in the vein of slogs
Speaker 5: that we have done. You didn't mention the Chevy Chase podcast,
Speaker 5: but some of the Chevy Chase movies that we've done
Speaker 5: have been slogs, and some of them have been sequel flogs,
Speaker 5: like Caddy Shack Too, which, by the way, Caddy Shack
Speaker 5: Too is so bad?
Speaker 4: How bad does it?
Speaker 5: It makes this movie look like a masterpiece, And this
Speaker 5: movie's actually quite good. I actually really enjoyed Airplane Too
Speaker 5: as much as Mark put it very afterly, like if
Speaker 5: you liked the first one, this is a joke, A
Speaker 5: minute fest just like the first one. It is, and
Speaker 5: in a lot of ways, there are a lot of
Speaker 5: gags that the first movie does that this movie also does.
Speaker 5: But I would also say that this movie does those
Speaker 5: gags and does interesting things with them that I wouldn't
Speaker 5: expect this movie to do, or any movie to do.
Speaker 5: And in a lot of ways, this movie is uniquely
Speaker 5: suited to do those jokes because it's a sequel to
Speaker 5: the movie that did those jokes. If any movie is
Speaker 5: allowed to do this thing that Airplane did, it's Airplane two.
Speaker 5: And if you liked Airplane one and the jokes and
Speaker 5: gags of Airplane one, Airplane two is literally more of
Speaker 5: the same. In this case, that's not a bad thing.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's a bad thing. I think this
Speaker 5: movie has its problems. This movie is not a perfect
Speaker 5: film by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think
Speaker 5: anybody who comes onto any one of our shows expects
Speaker 5: to hear us say like perfect movies, because we rarely
Speaker 5: run into those films, but we do run into them
Speaker 5: from time to time. I think this movie is a
Speaker 5: perfectly serviceable comedy sequel. And to Mark's initial point, the
Speaker 5: eighties and comedy sequels that is not a necessarily like
Speaker 5: peanut butter and jelly combination, at least not in terms
Speaker 5: of going together or complimentary. And again I would use
Speaker 5: Caddyshack two as a obvious example of that, though, what
Speaker 5: about you, Mike.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't remember the first time I saw this.
Speaker 4: I might have seen it the metrically back in eighty two,
Speaker 4: maybe I would have been ten years old. But this
Speaker 4: movie is indelibly printed on my brain. There are a
Speaker 4: lot of jokes in here, and I had to go
Speaker 4: back to the first airplane and rewatch that just to
Speaker 4: make sure that it wasn't just a duplicate gag. There
Speaker 4: are a couple gags where I'm like, oh, I thought
Speaker 4: that was an airplane, but no, they were actually doing
Speaker 4: it themselves. I want to say, the little Breeder gag
Speaker 4: is one, and that's just something that I thought was
Speaker 4: an airplane. So there are a lot of gags in
Speaker 4: Airplane two that were so good that I thought for
Speaker 4: sure they were in the first one. So even at
Speaker 4: the mental hospital, like checking the guy's oil and refilling
Speaker 4: his oil in all this, like behind Striker, because that
Speaker 4: was the thing I think Finklman really captured very well.
Speaker 4: Is we talk about the whole like the cognizant of
Speaker 4: the background when it comes to Airplane or any of
Speaker 4: the other zaz movies, right, And Finckelman captures that. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of stuff that he captures. And I have
Speaker 4: to say him and Al Jean and Mike Reese who
Speaker 4: would later go on to produce The Simpsons for years
Speaker 4: and years, and the three of them, they crafted some
Speaker 4: amazing jokes. And also the Macho Grande. I thought that
Speaker 4: all of Macho Grandi was in the first movie. That's
Speaker 4: how wonderfully written that is.
Speaker 5: Oh it's not it's not over. Macho Grande is only
Speaker 5: in the second.
Speaker 7: Interesting. Yeah, I thought they were referencing because I know
Speaker 7: he cracked up. That's why he was in the mental
Speaker 7: hospital in the first film. And I thought, oh, they're
Speaker 7: just referencing pretty consistently throughout the film, the first film.
Speaker 7: But that's why I exactly the same thing. I thought
Speaker 7: that Fresno gag was from Airplane because I don't really
Speaker 7: remember seeing Airplane too. And I did an episode of
Speaker 7: my show where I called all these clips of films
Speaker 7: that referenced Fresno, and so I kept putting an airplane
Speaker 7: Fresno gag and it's no direct me to this, and
Speaker 7: I'm like, oh, I obviously saw it at some point
Speaker 7: because it's one of the characters from Airplane, right. I mean,
Speaker 7: he's one of what four recurring characters in the two films,
Speaker 7: Stephen Stucker.
Speaker 5: No Leslie Nielsen, because what was Leslie Nielsen doing instead
Speaker 5: Police Squad in the TV show, Which is wild to
Speaker 5: think about it and of itself, because that feels like
Speaker 5: such a logical progression from this And to your point, Mike,
Speaker 5: the biggest success of this movie is it feels like
Speaker 5: it was directed by Zias and that is a huge
Speaker 5: positive because it's not directed by Ball.
Speaker 7: I thought it was going to be more like the
Speaker 7: episodes of Police Squad that they weren't so directly involved in,
Speaker 7: where you get the pale comparison even that late Joe Dante.
Speaker 7: And I'm speaking for myself, but I believe we all
Speaker 7: kind of love or adore Joe Dante. But that second
Speaker 7: episode that he directed was just one of the worst
Speaker 7: because it wasn't following those zaz Gag rules of you know,
Speaker 7: if you've got something going in the background, you don't
Speaker 7: have something going on in the foreground. You just have
Speaker 7: exhibition or whatever happening in the foreground, or not calling
Speaker 7: attention to the gags, although Robert Hayes does do that
Speaker 7: in this film quite a bit. I was surprised. I
Speaker 7: don't know if it's more than in the first, but
Speaker 7: the kind of knowing glance, the bugging, either fourth wall
Speaker 7: breaking or just rolling your eyes at the gag, and
Speaker 7: that's stuff that seemed to permeate more in the later
Speaker 7: stuff in Airplane that rarely happens, and even in the
Speaker 7: early episodes of Police Squad, it's like, you don't call
Speaker 7: attention to the absurdity of the joke. Somebody's got to
Speaker 7: play it straight, and Robert Hayes, a striker for the
Speaker 7: most part, is our straight man. But the side glances
Speaker 7: and the things like that seem to play out a
Speaker 7: lot more in this one, which to me is I
Speaker 7: don't need to be told that this was funny, Like
Speaker 7: I'm either going to get it or I'm not. There's
Speaker 7: a gag when he shows up to the airport where
Speaker 7: he's in the back of a pickup truck, and if
Speaker 7: you've never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers are going
Speaker 7: to miss that gag, and it's as a kid, I
Speaker 7: probably would have completely missed it, but here I'm catching it.
Speaker 7: They don't call attention to it. That's the whole point
Speaker 7: of that. You just see these big pods in the
Speaker 7: back ever so briefly. And I don't know if the
Speaker 7: name on the truck has anything to do with the
Speaker 7: movie or which movie it would have. Both of those
Speaker 7: movies have trucks with pods carrying places around the country.
Speaker 7: But stuff like that I enjoy, Like I don't call
Speaker 7: it out to me, let me figure it out myself
Speaker 7: in multiple viewings, or if I get it on the
Speaker 7: first take, great, But yeah, the sideline glances bugged me
Speaker 7: in this. And that was about it though. And I
Speaker 7: think Chris, you made a very good point. Is if
Speaker 7: there's going to be a movie that riffs on itself,
Speaker 7: this is a perfect way to do that.
Speaker 5: Only one that's allowed to and not like allowed it
Speaker 5: makes sense, It makes the most sense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it does make sense.
Speaker 5: Let some other people come in and riff, and that
Speaker 5: is what this movie feels like. I feel like we're
Speaker 5: also uniquely suited to have this conversation. It is not
Speaker 5: Caddyshack too Caddyshack two is a fucking abomination of a film.
Speaker 5: It's so bad that the director had like issues afterwards
Speaker 5: because of it. He more or less disavows the movie.
Speaker 5: Alan Arkish is someone who one of our creative partner's father, Malone,
Speaker 5: is friends with was on one of the Blu Ray
Speaker 5: releases for a movie. But that's like a known thing,
Speaker 5: is that movie is so bad and was hacked up
Speaker 5: and taken apart and put back together so poorly that
Speaker 5: the director of the film disavows it. Nobody's disavowing this movie,
Speaker 5: not in the way that Alan Arkish is disavowing Caddyshack too.
Speaker 5: And I see why, because, yeah, maybe this movie, if
Speaker 5: you watch it after watching Airplane, you go and maybe
Speaker 5: I didn't need more of this. But at the same time,
Speaker 5: if you watch Airplane and then watch Airplane two, like
Speaker 5: a year later or six months later, or maybe a
Speaker 5: week later, you'll be like, go, Okay, it's not necessarily the
Speaker 5: same movie. But it's like jazz riffing. It's doing the
Speaker 5: same things, playing similar notes, just and maybe in a
Speaker 5: different key.
Speaker 2: Again, it's like poetry, so that they run.
Speaker 4: By the way mark, the thing on the side of
Speaker 4: the truck. It's as Ken's trucking with a maple leaf.
Speaker 4: It's actually a reference to Finkleman himself in some of
Speaker 4: the side gags here too, like obviously we are very
Speaker 4: much in late nineteen eighty two for some of this,
Speaker 4: So like one of the first vans we see pull
Speaker 4: up at the airport is the Iran passenger van and
Speaker 4: all of the guys coming out and helping the hostages out,
Speaker 4: Or we see an air Pakistan poster later on when
Speaker 4: Lain and Ted are talking to each other and yeah,
Speaker 4: there's this fiery plane in the background.
Speaker 7: So yep, all the Middle Eastern characters carrying bazukahs and oozing.
Speaker 4: Yep, just walking through security like it's nobody's business. And
Speaker 4: you can just tell this is before nine to eleven
Speaker 4: because now it's so to have to get a gun
Speaker 4: on an airplane. Oh wait, no, they just had that
Speaker 4: happen recently, So.
Speaker 5: Hold on a second. In this film, the gate agent
Speaker 5: has a gun. My favorite gag in this entire movie.
Speaker 5: Hey it's blank.
Speaker 2: Hey, what the fuck is.
Speaker 5: This movie's problem? It is the most mean spirited gag.
Speaker 5: A child and his parents with a dog are walking
Speaker 5: through the airport and the Gate agent shows up and goes, oh,
Speaker 5: you can't bring your dog to the moon, pulls out
Speaker 5: a gun and shoots the dog. The dog plays dead,
Speaker 5: and I goes, hey, it's blanks. What it is the
Speaker 5: funniest gag in the whole movie.
Speaker 4: Not just a kid, but Oliver Robbins from Poltergeist fame.
Speaker 5: That kid. Also, again to the reference that I made
Speaker 5: at the beginning of the episode, his dad has one
Speaker 5: of the funniest back and forth. Again, very mean spirited.
Speaker 5: They were asking for it, They're always asking for well, yoh.
Speaker 5: I appreciate the dark humor in this movie. I think
Speaker 5: this movie is a little darker than the original, which
Speaker 5: I think also works in its favor. It's a little edgier.
Speaker 5: I think this movie is a little edgier, and not
Speaker 5: like in an embarrassing way. There's a moment where two
Speaker 5: men kiss in this movie, and the movie doesn't really
Speaker 5: draw any attention to it.
Speaker 7: No, that was hysterical.
Speaker 5: That was hysterical.
Speaker 7: That the rape stuff with the dad was completely unexpected
Speaker 7: for me threw me off completely. I'm like, oh my god,
Speaker 7: we're going there. Kept reminding myself. This is prior to
Speaker 7: the PG thirteen grading. Because I believe it most definitely
Speaker 7: would have gotten that a couple of years down the road,
Speaker 7: just from the newter just.
Speaker 4: All the boobs.
Speaker 5: Yes, in the first ten minutes of this movie.
Speaker 7: Amount of bootage in this movie, I was stunned.
Speaker 4: There's animal play like crazy, and we've had a reference
Speaker 4: to some bestiality in the first movie when.
Speaker 5: Who was a Robert stabberda his wife.
Speaker 4: And here you've got the girl who just keeps pretending
Speaker 4: she's a virgin and the last one you see her
Speaker 4: sleep with us the donkey.
Speaker 7: The two men kissing that you mentioned was great. I
Speaker 7: was totally taken by surprise with that. I'm like, that
Speaker 7: was classic. They continue their conversation and then see it
Speaker 7: at home or whatever.
Speaker 5: It was perfect, zero fanfare.
Speaker 4: Well, you get the little look between David Leisure and
Speaker 4: his fellow Gate agent from Transcendental Air. They just kind
Speaker 4: of look at each other. Oh, isn't that nice?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I like the edgy your humor only and again,
Speaker 5: like you've mentioned the beast reality and it's just it
Speaker 5: feels like a logical extension of the seventies humor of
Speaker 5: the last movie being a little bit less envelope, pushing
Speaker 5: more or again more envelope pushing for the time, depending
Speaker 5: on how you want to look at it. And now
Speaker 5: it's again right at the end of the opportunity to
Speaker 5: be PG, because nineteen eighty three, I believe has been
Speaker 5: Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Arc essentially makes of
Speaker 5: Doom is the one no, no, I know, but Raiders
Speaker 5: the Lost Arc also is PG, and like that movie
Speaker 5: should not be PG either. And I think it's as
Speaker 5: much as we talk about it being Temple of Doom,
Speaker 5: like Raiders of the Loss Arc really is the movie
Speaker 5: that starts the conversation, because that movie should not be
Speaker 5: PG either. There are people's heads exploding and face is melting.
Speaker 5: And I'm not saying I think it's BPG. I'm saying broadly,
Speaker 5: at the time it should not have been, Like there
Speaker 5: was no other rating for it.
Speaker 7: Even Grimlins, and there were a bunch of movies in
Speaker 7: that eighty two to eighty four and before it kicked
Speaker 7: in that we're pushing that envelope. Even sixteen Candles seemed
Speaker 7: very close. They had to cut a few cuss words
Speaker 7: out to get that PG rating. But again you've got nudity,
Speaker 7: A couple shots of nudity in that you've got cuss words,
Speaker 7: one F word, and then I believe a couple other
Speaker 7: F words were edited out. It was either that or
Speaker 7: are and this though, I mean, I know it's just
Speaker 7: bear breasts, but four examples of bear breasts in one movie.
Speaker 7: I was like, man, this, I'm really surprised by that.
Speaker 5: And what's crazy is I quote the fact that airplane
Speaker 5: has breasts in it so often as that's wild that
Speaker 5: it's PG. This is crazy for the times you get
Speaker 5: four times as many, like in Rapid Succession in the
Speaker 5: same scene, and then we never seen breast.
Speaker 4: The just get the one when Striker is doing his painting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so there's three upfront, and then the one pair
Speaker 7: in the Ronald Reagan the Mental Hospital.
Speaker 4: Still before the eleven minute mark. So yeah, definitely way early.
Speaker 4: I think Bonnie and Clyde might have been rated R,
Speaker 4: but then you get to things like Jaws and that's
Speaker 4: rated PG as well. I feel like they just used
Speaker 4: PG thirteen as more of an excuse, and I feel
Speaker 4: like PG thirteen is nowhere near as rough as these
Speaker 4: PG movies were back then. No, I think you get
Speaker 4: one F word and I don't know how many boobs
Speaker 4: because Americans can't handle boobs. We can handle violence like crazy,
Speaker 4: but do not show a bare breast.
Speaker 5: How dare you offend my American sensibilities by showing me
Speaker 5: at nipple.
Speaker 7: I'm always surprised that Jaws was PG, and I had
Speaker 7: created my own Mandela effect in my head, thinking oh,
Speaker 7: that's the current rating because it was rated R when
Speaker 7: agad it would been rated R in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 7: There's nudity, there's gore, they're swearing. Nope, always been PG.
Speaker 5: And what's crazy to Mike's both of your points, like
Speaker 5: now the PG thirteen is one F bomb, no nudity. Man,
Speaker 5: This was a simpler time then, wasn't it. I guess
Speaker 5: people were less offended by breasts back in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 5: And I don't know. I wasn't alive then to comment
Speaker 5: on breast, but I would feel like now we're in
Speaker 5: a different time. But again, people now are just as
Speaker 5: bent out of shape, feel like.
Speaker 7: Played for laughs And every scene in this movie the nudity,
Speaker 7: but it's not sexual in any way technically.
Speaker 5: But and that's the problem with a rating system to
Speaker 5: begin with, is the rating system. These rating systems have
Speaker 5: never really taken context into effect with any of this,
Speaker 5: breast being shown in a comedic fashion is very different
Speaker 5: than a breast being shown during a rape scene. The
Speaker 5: context is very different for the two gags. Even if
Speaker 5: the second was I even a gag, it is just
Speaker 5: being used to again lay up a scene, make a
Speaker 5: scene more intense. I mean again, I think of something
Speaker 5: like Possession, where Isabella Johnny is not naked, she is
Speaker 5: fully clothed, and that scene is horrifying. That scene is
Speaker 5: so intense and there is no nudity there, and yet
Speaker 5: you would look at this movie Goals. Movie has breast,
Speaker 5: so it clearly is the one that needs to be
Speaker 5: rated R and that movie has no Again, it has nudity,
Speaker 5: but in those scenes where people again are getting bent
Speaker 5: out of shape, no nudity. It's like the context is
Speaker 5: so important and all PG ratings or our ratings are
Speaker 5: not created equal, especially at this time during the MPAA's
Speaker 5: kind of reign of terror.
Speaker 4: So the movie plays very similarly to the first one.
Speaker 4: The whole thing of all right, we start at the airport,
Speaker 4: we go through introducing all of the characters, and I
Speaker 4: think we're done introducing pretty much everybody other than Shatner.
Speaker 4: Shatner and Lloyd Bridges I think are the two hold doubts.
Speaker 4: Lloyd Bridges comes in about the middle of the movie,
Speaker 4: and then Shatner towards the end of the movie, which
Speaker 4: is my only complaint because Shatner is just so fucking good,
Speaker 4: But I think using him in spareness is probably a
Speaker 4: good idea. We'll talk about some of the deleted scenes,
Speaker 4: and there's some that he is in that I have
Speaker 4: no idea what they are, but yeah, we'll try to
Speaker 4: postulate about those. And then, like the Sunny Bono thing,
Speaker 4: having a terrorist on the plane, it really doesn't come
Speaker 4: to very much of anything. He's just another passenger. There's
Speaker 4: not a whole lot of time spent with him, and
Speaker 4: once he's taken out of it as a threat, it's
Speaker 4: basically just, oh, we'll use the bomb to blow up Rock.
Speaker 4: Who is their version of the Hall nine thousand, which
Speaker 4: again I think they could have taken a little bit farther,
Speaker 4: but maybe they did write him out here because I
Speaker 4: don't feel like I'm missing anything when I watch this.
Speaker 7: I was confused about the Sunny Bono thing because he's
Speaker 7: supposed to be going to des Moine does he plane
Speaker 7: or the guy's a.
Speaker 4: Total idiot because he also buys what was it like,
Speaker 4: car insurance instead of travel insurance. Yeah, it's like even
Speaker 4: if he died on that flight, it wouldn't pay off
Speaker 4: at all for his wife. And I guess he's just
Speaker 4: in a suicidal mood because of his problem. Oh gosh,
Speaker 4: I can't talk about that problem on the air. We
Speaker 4: might get canceled.
Speaker 7: It wouldn't be a problem today because he could get
Speaker 7: his viagra for you know, blue Chee baby covered by
Speaker 7: his insurance.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, it's funny how I mean,
Speaker 4: we just talked about Joe's problem recently, which was not impotence.
Speaker 4: It was sterility, as Mexica was very quick to point out.
Speaker 4: He was definitely boning a lot of broads on that show,
Speaker 4: especially prostitutes, but no problem getting it up. It was
Speaker 4: just actually having a baby. And I think that's probably
Speaker 4: Sonny Bono's thing here too. I don't think it's that
Speaker 4: he can't have a baby. I think it's that he
Speaker 4: is not the cable of getting it up because he's
Speaker 4: very sensitive too. When Elaine does that little offer of
Speaker 4: do you need help getting it up?
Speaker 7: Yeah, and rip torn and the other guy know the
Speaker 7: institute that they're talking about.
Speaker 5: We're familiar with it.
Speaker 7: That was my other complaint Rip turns under used in this.
Speaker 7: I saw him and I'm like, wait, is that him?
Speaker 7: And I thought, oh boy, we're gonna have some crazy
Speaker 7: shit going on. But he's only in a couple scenes
Speaker 7: and in an ean.
Speaker 5: What would the elevator musaic gag? Did anybody else get
Speaker 5: the music gag?
Speaker 7: It's just louder than it would normally be. It's usually
Speaker 7: you can barely hear it when you're in an elevator,
Speaker 7: but for some reason, it was blaringly loud.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 5: I was just curious because I was like, is the
Speaker 5: gag that? There's a lot of gags in this movie
Speaker 5: that are like intentional, like Rocky thirties six or thirty
Speaker 5: eight or whatever it is. He's an old man again,
Speaker 5: like stuff in the background, Like there's a lot of
Speaker 5: just like things going on in the background that are
Speaker 5: so intentional. And again it goes back to Mike mentioned
Speaker 5: the Simpsons of it all. If you know that the
Speaker 5: space can be crammed full of everything, make sure you
Speaker 5: do because people will go back and be able to
Speaker 5: enjoy your thing multiple times because they're going to see
Speaker 5: something else different every time they watch it, or at
Speaker 5: least seem more than they would have seen the first time.
Speaker 7: The nurse with the I Love Sanity sorry on the
Speaker 7: back of her gown.
Speaker 4: I'd like the thing when Chuck Connors shows up and
Speaker 4: they've got the sign that says no smoking, no spitting,
Speaker 4: and he, like the takes the formerly lit match and
Speaker 4: throws it. Nothing happens, but then he spits and the
Speaker 4: whole thing explodes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was nice.
Speaker 4: Yeah, same thing with Chuck Connor's. I thought there'd be
Speaker 4: more of him as well, and I was just like, oh, yeah, really,
Speaker 4: this focus is so much on Elaine and Ted that
Speaker 4: we don't even really get too much of the other
Speaker 4: guys areding the cockpit, and I was really glad that
Speaker 4: they didn't go the same way and be like, Okay,
Speaker 4: who's going to be our sports star that we have
Speaker 4: sit next to Peter Graves. No, we're not doing that. Instead,
Speaker 4: we've got James A. Watson Junior. And who's the other
Speaker 4: one is that? Kate McCord. That's right, Chad Everett is
Speaker 4: the one that plays Simon. Yeah, ket McCord, that's nice.
Speaker 4: Because wasn't he in Battlestar Galactica.
Speaker 7: Kenton McCord was on ADAM twelve. He was either on
Speaker 7: Adam twelve or what was the one with the EMTs emergency.
Speaker 7: I think it was on Adam twelve. I think you're right,
Speaker 7: get those two shows mixed up. But speaking of amazing sequels,
Speaker 7: he was Impredator too, probably one of the best sequels
Speaker 7: ever made. He was in Galactica nineteen eighty. I don't
Speaker 7: know if he was in the irregular Battlestar Galactica, but
Speaker 7: they used that Battlestar Galactica theme more than the Elmer
Speaker 7: Bernstein theme in this one. And you've got the love
Speaker 7: boat theme going on, You've got all kinds of themes
Speaker 7: going on.
Speaker 5: I was surprised we didn't get O. J. Simpson in
Speaker 5: the cockpit, to be honest with you, that would have
Speaker 5: been interesting given that were like, what only a couple
Speaker 5: of years removed from seeing OJ Simpson in as Zaz,
Speaker 5: thing that I think arguably ends up being the most
Speaker 5: famous thing he ever does in terms of like movies,
Speaker 5: to the point where they're referencing it in that upcoming
Speaker 5: Naked Gun Movies trailer that we know that oj Simpson
Speaker 5: is a real murderer in real life, which is fucking
Speaker 5: crazy to me in and of itself. But yeah, I
Speaker 5: feel like with some of the background gags in this movie,
Speaker 5: and again, Mike, you talked about the deleted scenes, sometimes
Speaker 5: they do swing for the fences in a direction that
Speaker 5: I don't think they were prepared to really land it.
Speaker 5: I think they just sometimes and you see this early
Speaker 5: on in early seasons of The Simpsons. Sometimes they just
Speaker 5: swing for the fences, and there's nothing wrong with that,
Speaker 5: but it doesn't always land. Is the bigger issue. I
Speaker 5: would say some of the things in this movie that
Speaker 5: don't land are retreading some of the old movie stuff
Speaker 5: more or less directly. Like we have him in the
Speaker 5: hospital and they do the exact same gag from the
Speaker 5: first movie. I was like, yeah, it was funny the
Speaker 5: first time, but we don't need to see the layover
Speaker 5: of his face with the planes again. Some of those
Speaker 5: things did feel like we're in the scene and we're
Speaker 5: doing the thing in the scene, but then we are
Speaker 5: one step too far. They gild the lily as it were,
Speaker 5: Like we go to the hospital, we see him doing
Speaker 5: all those hospital things again, but then it does the
Speaker 5: one thing where it's and then we do the thing
Speaker 5: inside the thing again, and I'm like, okay, Like that
Speaker 5: for me was probably one of those like the joke
Speaker 5: within the joke within the joke probably goes too far,
Speaker 5: And that's one of those where I'm like, I don't know,
Speaker 5: Like they did the Macho Grande thing so well, that
Speaker 5: kind of sticks out for me, is okay, the Macho
Speaker 5: grande stuff serves a purpose, but then you do that
Speaker 5: one step too far back in the direction of the
Speaker 5: original thing as opposed to taking it and riffing in
Speaker 5: the other direction.
Speaker 4: That is one of the weaker areas of the script,
Speaker 4: is that the conflating because we've got that trial that
Speaker 4: happens as a flashback what midway through the movie, maybe
Speaker 4: after the first act, and it's conflating the whole thing
Speaker 4: of Ted saying no, you can't take this. Was it
Speaker 4: the XR twenty three hundred, Yeah, as opposed to the
Speaker 4: XR twenty two hundred.
Speaker 2: What's wrong they're launching the XR twenty three hundred.
Speaker 7: You know what that is, doctor, the.
Speaker 4: Muffler bracket for a seventy nine pinto Oh.
Speaker 2: That's the XR twenty two hundred to twenty three hundreds
Speaker 2: the lunar shuttle.
Speaker 5: It's kind of stopped.
Speaker 2: Don't you understand. They frame me and put me in
Speaker 2: here to keep me out of the way.
Speaker 4: You must understand the first st up on the road
Speaker 4: to mental hygiene is admitting.
Speaker 7: That you're sick.
Speaker 10: You're sick, you're sick, you're sick, you're sick, you're sick,
Speaker 10: you're sick.
Speaker 4: This whole thing. If you can't take this XR twenty
Speaker 4: three hundred out, it's still experimental and blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: But somehow they take that and comflight that with this
Speaker 4: guy is a total loon because of what happened over
Speaker 4: Macho Grande.
Speaker 5: And also what happened in the first movie, because you
Speaker 5: mentioned already and we haven't talked about it, the character
Speaker 5: of the jive talker from the first movie comes back
Speaker 5: as a witness to reference what happened in the first movie.
Speaker 5: And they also are again, like to Mark's point about
Speaker 5: Macho Grande, to your point about Mancho Grande, they are
Speaker 5: conflating what happened in the first movie and what happened
Speaker 5: before the first movie that they referenced in the first
Speaker 5: movie with what they're referencing here like mar With like
Speaker 5: Macho Grande is in the first movie. No, it's all
Speaker 5: in this movie, which is pretty nuts because it does
Speaker 5: feel like it almost should have been in the first
Speaker 5: movie in a way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I know that something happened with him and his
Speaker 7: former squad, and so I just assume that that's what
Speaker 7: they were talking about, because when he's in the mental
Speaker 7: hospital then painting the guy with the leg over his
Speaker 7: head and all that stuff out of the exploding jeep.
Speaker 4: Hey striker, how about a break here, huh?
Speaker 7: And he was in the mental hospital in the first
Speaker 7: movie because of what happened at Macho Grande, But they
Speaker 7: never explicitly say Macho Grande. Then that's my goof misremembering
Speaker 7: another Mandela effect.
Speaker 5: I just think this movie gets tangled up in itself
Speaker 5: too much, and I think it retroactively hurts the first
Speaker 5: movie's gags because I do think that some of the
Speaker 5: things for the first movie happened in this movie actually,
Speaker 5: and it's wait a second, and it is retreading old
Speaker 5: ground in an unnecessary way, because there are plenty of
Speaker 5: gags in this movie where they retread old ground that
Speaker 5: do work. That thing feels like even though the Macho
Speaker 5: Grande gag is one of the best gags in the movie,
Speaker 5: that for me is one of the things where I'm like,
Speaker 5: I feel like this was just too much of the
Speaker 5: original movie. For me, that was too much of going
Speaker 5: back to the original movie.
Speaker 6: I flew with Striker during the war. I'll never forget
Speaker 6: the night we bomb Macho Grande. Striker was a squadron leader.
Speaker 6: He brought us in real low. But he couldn't handle it.
Speaker 2: Buddy couldn't handle it.
Speaker 3: Was Buddy, one of your crew.
Speaker 6: Right, Buddy was the bombedier. But it was Striker who
Speaker 6: couldn't handle it. And he went to pieces and he
Speaker 6: went to pieces.
Speaker 1: No, Andy was the navigator.
Speaker 6: He was all right.
Speaker 7: Buddy went to pieces. It was awful.
Speaker 6: How he came and glued.
Speaker 7: How he came on glued, Oh no, how he.
Speaker 6: Was our rock, the best tail gunner in the outfit.
Speaker 7: Buddy came on glued.
Speaker 8: Andy bailed out.
Speaker 3: No, Andy hung tough.
Speaker 4: Buddy bailed out. How we survived was a miracle.
Speaker 7: And how we survived, oh raid not.
Speaker 6: We lost Howie the next day over Macho Grande. No,
Speaker 6: I don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande. Those
Speaker 6: wounds run pretty deep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Some things about the trial that I do like, though,
Speaker 4: are Reamond Burr as the judge, and especially when Elaine
Speaker 4: was talking about the love of a good man.
Speaker 7: Can no a very close one.
Speaker 8: We had the kind of relationship where we laughed and
Speaker 8: laughed and laughed all the time.
Speaker 5: Do you know what it's like to laugh like that?
Speaker 7: Yes, yes I do. Raymond Burr was looking rough there, man.
Speaker 7: I'm like, man, he didn't look that good. And I
Speaker 7: don't know if he was still doing Ironside at the time,
Speaker 7: but yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure, because he came back and did a
Speaker 4: lot of Perry Mason movies. Yeah, but there were some
Speaker 4: of those I whytn't say there were some movies that
Speaker 4: he actually wasn't in that they were set up as
Speaker 4: Harry was that the one where was his name? Paulie
Speaker 4: from Catalyst took over Paulie from Good Fold, and I
Speaker 4: thought he came in and was Sorvino was playing. I
Speaker 4: think he might have been like his partner or something.
Speaker 4: All right, now, I gotta looking at what I'm talking about.
Speaker 7: They did that kind of stuff with the murder, she wrote,
Speaker 7: where they would have whole episodes where she wasn't even
Speaker 7: on it. It was like she was writing the story
Speaker 7: or whatever.
Speaker 4: Also played Anthony Caruso in the Perry Mason movie of
Speaker 4: Perry Mason Mystery The Case of the Wicked Wives in
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety three. This was after Raymond Burr passed away.
Speaker 4: Servino's character was a lawyer, and the movie was the
Speaker 4: first in this series to be filmed after Burr's death.
Speaker 5: Including it doesn't say there, whatever you were reading, doesn't
Speaker 5: mention it. But I'll ask if you want to take
Speaker 5: a swing at it. Do you want to guess who
Speaker 5: also played a lawyer? Then in one of those four episodes,
Speaker 5: it wasn't just Paul Sorvino. It's Stanley Tucci, how Holbrook,
Speaker 5: which must be fascinating. I want to find that and
Speaker 5: watch that. Yeah, I'm with you, Mark, my girlfriend and
Speaker 5: I watch murder, she wrote, from time to time, and
Speaker 5: those episodes will come on, and man, those episodes stink
Speaker 5: on ice face, stink. This is what was happening to
Speaker 5: my cousin. Nobody cares, Jessica Fletcher. If we want Angela Landsberg.
Speaker 7: Without there is nothing appealing about the show at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not to bespirch friend of the show Grayton Clark
Speaker 4: or a friend of me, Graydon Clark, but was in
Speaker 4: the kind of waning years of Raymond Burr before he
Speaker 4: came back as Perry Mason, like he came back in
Speaker 4: eighty five, but right before this he did Graydon Clark's
Speaker 4: The Return, and I remember Graydon telling me about how
Speaker 4: Raymond Burr refused to learn lines and that he just
Speaker 4: insisted on having queue cards everywhere. There's a scene where
Speaker 4: he's like looking down at this like map or display
Speaker 4: or something, and Graydon was like, Oh, yeah, he's got
Speaker 4: que cards all over that whole thing because he just
Speaker 4: never memorized lines.
Speaker 7: That's not uncommon. It's surprising to find it out at
Speaker 7: certain times, but a lot of people did that.
Speaker 5: Marlon Brando was doing it, Johnny Depp was doing it
Speaker 5: as recently as those last Pirate.
Speaker 7: Mitchel getting think the lines lines. The bit that got
Speaker 7: old for me was the what is it? I don't
Speaker 7: know how many times they use that in this one,
Speaker 7: but I was like, come on, it's not that funny again.
Speaker 7: The sun, what the hospital? Like in the first one,
Speaker 7: what is it? What's a building?
Speaker 2: Murrie?
Speaker 7: You go when you're sick.
Speaker 5: One of the other gags that sticks out as well,
Speaker 5: it was so much funnier and worked better in the
Speaker 5: first movie was the old when they cut back to
Speaker 5: Striker telling the story and the old woman is like
Speaker 5: a skeleton. In the first movie, it was so much better.
Speaker 5: She like lights herself on fire.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or the Japanese guy committing Harry Carreys.
Speaker 5: You didn't have to do every single gag for the
Speaker 5: first Some of them do work here. Some of them
Speaker 5: retreading the old gags and then going left when you
Speaker 5: think they're gonna go right do work. But then there
Speaker 5: are some where it's like you don't do enough to
Speaker 5: warrant retreading this again. They did do it better the
Speaker 5: first time. There are gags in this movie, like the
Speaker 5: over macho Grande thing is one of the best gags
Speaker 5: between both movies. It might even be better than some
Speaker 5: of the best gags in the first movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the lady, the hysterical lady.
Speaker 5: I gotta get out of here. I've got to get
Speaker 5: out of here.
Speaker 4: Them just redoing, like showing the flashback to the first
Speaker 4: movie to enter deuce the let's slap her again. In
Speaker 4: the second movie, it's like, all right, didn't need that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, some of it's belaboring the point, but I think
Speaker 5: for the most part, again, like to return to what
Speaker 5: I think are the positives of this movie. I think
Speaker 5: this movie, if every minute there's ten jokes, I think
Speaker 5: eight out of the ten jokes work in this movie,
Speaker 5: and an Airplane, it's like a ten out of ten
Speaker 5: for the most part. If not, it is always a
Speaker 5: ten out of ten with Airplane. I think Airplane is
Speaker 5: a perfect comedy in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: I was a huge fan of John Verman, so him
Speaker 4: showing up as the psychiatrist is great and just he
Speaker 4: can do that so perfectly. I think he's one of
Speaker 4: the first actors I ever saw that can do that
Speaker 4: deadpan so well, but then also just flip it and
Speaker 4: make it comic, just like Les Nielsen would become known
Speaker 4: after Airplane is doing that by John Vernon. It was
Speaker 4: just such a natural for him to do that.
Speaker 2: Doctor.
Speaker 4: Can you give the court your impression of mister Striker.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My training and psychiatry.
Speaker 4: Of course, to have John Vernon, Canada's own John Vernon
Speaker 4: and Canada's own William Shatner is two of the bigger
Speaker 4: players in here. I'm just like, yes, this is great.
Speaker 5: He is really one of the funnier characters in this movie,
Speaker 5: Like you get a lot of mileage out of him
Speaker 5: as an actor and his comedic like deadpan. I think
Speaker 5: we've already mentioned it, but every really could have used
Speaker 5: more Chuck Connors in this movie. As someone who's a
Speaker 5: huge fan of Where Wolf and wanting more Chuck Connors
Speaker 5: in that show. I like the idea of Chuck Connor's
Speaker 5: spitting gasoline and then Lloyd Bridges comes back, which feels unnecessary,
Speaker 5: but at the same time I love it because it's
Speaker 5: like they're just like, just do the same thing all
Speaker 5: over again, literally, and it feels like of all the
Speaker 5: things that they retread, it does work. Even though I
Speaker 5: was convinced it.
Speaker 2: Would, I picked her wrong time to go Seni on.
Speaker 7: I think it's unfortunate that the deleted scene of his
Speaker 7: where he is in the mental hospital is cut out,
Speaker 7: because you don't get the feeling that he's really off
Speaker 7: kilter without that. I missed that, and then when I
Speaker 7: watched the deleted scene, I was like, oh, this makes
Speaker 7: sense because you don't get any of the glue sniffing
Speaker 7: or drinking. You get some of the drinking, but you
Speaker 7: don't get that aspect of him that you got in
Speaker 7: the first film. So it's what's his shtick in this
Speaker 7: other than being off? And it just felt like that
Speaker 7: was missing or I missed the joke. I know they
Speaker 7: refer to him being unstable, but having him also be
Speaker 7: in the mental institution to me seems necessary for this.
Speaker 7: Like I said, I guess I just maybe missed it
Speaker 7: without that. But because I was expecting the glue sniffing again,
Speaker 7: I was expecting something like that to happen, and it
Speaker 7: never does, and I was like, oh, okay, he's just
Speaker 7: brain addled.
Speaker 4: But I feel like they're making another Rigan joke when
Speaker 4: he says I picked the wrong weak to go senile.
Speaker 4: And you've got those two very prom shots of the
Speaker 4: Ronald Reagan Home for the Mentally Ill, and really we
Speaker 4: only needed one of them, and probably the first one
Speaker 4: just to show us an establishing shot because when Ted escapes,
Speaker 4: he does it right by that big sign. I'm like,
Speaker 4: that's a little much here, guys. But if you watch
Speaker 4: the TV version, they caught all that stuff out, or
Speaker 4: they rename it the Donald Dragan Home for the mentally ill,
Speaker 4: and we can't make fun of Reagan, can't do that.
Speaker 4: So I'm like, really, we were debating before the show
Speaker 4: started as far as when did people know he was
Speaker 4: not mentally unsound? Was it the whole I don't remember
Speaker 4: to the Iran Contra.
Speaker 7: Affair, or I feel like it came later. I don't remember.
Speaker 7: I was thirteen when this movie came out, and this
Speaker 7: was still the middle of his first term, so I
Speaker 7: really don't remember there being any kind of snippets about
Speaker 7: him being I'm not even going to say unstable, just forgetful.
Speaker 7: The joke was that he was an old man, the
Speaker 7: oldest president that we had so far we can up
Speaker 7: till then, the kind of oh golly tenor of his
Speaker 7: voice and all that was a joke. But I really
Speaker 7: I was surprised by that and the constant kind of
Speaker 7: sinility jokes, because I'm thinking to myself, nobody was speculating
Speaker 7: on that back then, not until much later in his
Speaker 7: second term. I don't know, but I was a kid,
Speaker 7: so it's very possible that I missed anything like that
Speaker 7: in the news. But they do get they do get
Speaker 7: a shot about air traffic controllers because that was definitely
Speaker 7: a real thing, along with shutting down the mental hospitals
Speaker 7: that we talked about off podcasts, But that whole air
Speaker 7: traffic control thing was a huge deal back then, and
Speaker 7: we traveled. We were flying sometime and around that time
Speaker 7: trying to get up to Oregon to visit my mom's family,
Speaker 7: and it took forever layovers and down in southern California
Speaker 7: to go to go the opposite direction that we were headed,
Speaker 7: and it just was a nightmare for people.
Speaker 4: Thanks Reagan, I remember, and I need to track this
Speaker 4: down because I remember it was a really good segment
Speaker 4: on sixty Minutes that they showed and I don't remember
Speaker 4: what year it was, but it was them basically going
Speaker 4: through a lot of Reagan's movies, and he would be
Speaker 4: giving speeches and he would suddenly dip into his own
Speaker 4: stuff and you're thinking, Okay, yeah, he's just making a reference,
Speaker 4: but no, he would start to do the speech from
Speaker 4: the movie as if he were just doing that right
Speaker 4: then and there, just oh yeah, and as a famous
Speaker 4: man told me, and he would go into this speech
Speaker 4: and are you mixing reality with your movies or what's
Speaker 4: going on here? So I really wish I could find
Speaker 4: that segment because I remember that being great. They'll probably
Speaker 4: scratch the archives pretty soon since I think sixty minutes
Speaker 4: has said bad things about her. Gloriously.
Speaker 7: There you go again.
Speaker 4: Some of the magazine jokes that they have in here,
Speaker 4: especially the anti religious stuff that they have in here.
Speaker 4: The priest who's played by the governor from Benson, which
Speaker 4: he's looking at Altar Boy magazine and tilts it on
Speaker 4: its side. Awful later on when they're like, put your
Speaker 4: head between your knees, your own knees, father.
Speaker 7: At least you wasn't the sity next to the kid
Speaker 7: when they did that joke.
Speaker 5: What about the experience of metabolic change jokes? Speaking of
Speaker 5: going right after politicians of the time, everybody has a
Speaker 5: Nixon mask.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, that one flew right over my head.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 7: I was like, why are they all wearing Nixon masks?
Speaker 5: It's Richard Nixon. It's just funny because it's Richard Nixon.
Speaker 5: There you go, That's all it is.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Like I said, I think they could have done
Speaker 4: a little bit more with the two thousand and one stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm glad that they had Rock, though I'm not sure
Speaker 4: what rock is supposed to stand for. I really thought
Speaker 4: they would go for something a little bit more obvious
Speaker 4: when it came to that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was surprised by that too, because it was
Speaker 7: apparent as soon as it started talking. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 7: this is a hal gag but roc hal. I mean
Speaker 7: they couldn't use IBM obviously, but go letters down again.
Speaker 5: It goes back to the elevator music gag of it
Speaker 5: all right, like that's what it was for. It feels
Speaker 5: like it's rocked just because it comes off as like
Speaker 5: a human beings. But they didn't want to use Hell
Speaker 5: this is I don't know, Yeah, maybe that wasn't This is.
Speaker 7: One of those movies. When it first started, I thought,
Speaker 7: oh god, I'm going to be writing down. I'm going
Speaker 7: to have three pages of just the gags. And I
Speaker 7: know we're not going to do that on the show.
Speaker 7: This is the projection booth. We're not going to do
Speaker 7: a just run through the gag type of episode. But
Speaker 7: you so easily could because, like you said, Chris, there's
Speaker 7: in jokes every thirty seconds, and eight of them are
Speaker 7: going to land and two of them might make it chuckle.
Speaker 7: But man, oh man, it was I was thinking this
Speaker 7: is going to be exhausting because it seems like they
Speaker 7: were laying it on even thicker than the first film.
Speaker 7: Just in that opening segment. It does slow down, but
Speaker 7: I thought, oh my god, this is going to be exhausting.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 7: I know one gag I wanted to mention because it's
Speaker 7: come up on our Chevy Chase stuff and some other
Speaker 7: comedy episodes we've done. The ubiquitous Japanese man with a
Speaker 7: bunch of cameras makes an appearance in this lovely eighties comedy.
Speaker 7: I love that gag in the eighties, didn't we.
Speaker 5: Yeah, boy, it's one of my favorites. The fuck movie. Yeah,
Speaker 5: Long Duck Dong. We're only a couple of years removed
Speaker 5: from Long Duc Dong.
Speaker 7: So and he's got a camera, right, doesn't it.
Speaker 5: He's a different kind of stereo hotwell, but I.
Speaker 7: Do think he his first appearance on screen, he's taken
Speaker 7: a picture of her. If I remembering that correctly, I've
Speaker 7: only watched the movie fifty times, but I could be
Speaker 7: misremembering it and just putting my own Asian guy with
Speaker 7: camera spin on it. But yeah, that was one of
Speaker 7: those just recurring. I'd love to see it YouTube. I'm
Speaker 7: sure there is one of all of that through the years,
Speaker 7: Asian man with camera or Asian person with camera, and
Speaker 7: it's probably forty five minutes long from two hundred different movies.
Speaker 5: Well, see, they were doing that in fucking Rush Hour. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean in Los Angeles. It's funny every time, Chris,
Speaker 5: It's funny every time. Okay, Yeah, because it's true.
Speaker 7: When you take a trip somewhere, that's always Asian people
Speaker 7: with cameras. Only Asian people take pictures. Yes, it's only
Speaker 7: Asian people that carry cameras.
Speaker 5: That's on their interesting.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's types because they're true.
Speaker 2: Guys. Come on.
Speaker 4: I was just going through the script trying to see
Speaker 4: if rock is spelled out any place, and I cannot
Speaker 4: find it spelled any place as far as what it
Speaker 4: stands for.
Speaker 5: So I think that probably in my mind then it's
Speaker 5: probably meant to rhyme with cock.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is it's great toll thing in the script
Speaker 4: about Simon taking a bottle of anti fear pills and
Speaker 4: like how he isn't afraid of anything because he's basically
Speaker 4: popping pills the whole time. I do remember. It starts
Speaker 4: off in like a South American country and there's a
Speaker 4: cross over Ted's bed with a full sized man on
Speaker 4: the cross. So I guess it's like that, hey, Striker,
Speaker 4: can I take a break kind of thing, but instead
Speaker 4: of there being a statue of Jesus, it's a dude
Speaker 4: standing up there. I'm like, okay, that would be interesting.
Speaker 4: But the script is interesting because it does have a
Speaker 4: ton of these jokes and just one after another, and
Speaker 4: they make it such that you can just pick up
Speaker 4: one and move it or just throw it away if
Speaker 4: you need to, and so it's remarkable what is there
Speaker 4: and what isn't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they can put that blast back anywhere in the movie,
Speaker 5: really like the cutaway to him thinking about what happened before.
Speaker 5: Yet the format and I guess like function of this
Speaker 5: movie feels rather not interchangeable, but you can definitely move
Speaker 5: things around because the gags don't necessarily feel hinned in place.
Speaker 5: The gags are taking place within the scene. The gags
Speaker 5: aren't the scene themselves, is what it feels like, which
Speaker 5: I think these Zaz movies are obviously the best version
Speaker 5: of that. And then you have a lot of those
Speaker 5: movies that come afterwards that attempt to do it, but
Speaker 5: these are the original ones doing it the best. As
Speaker 5: far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 7: The later films, and I think we'd in relation to
Speaker 7: Airplane or the whole Police Squad deal, where it's just
Speaker 7: reference after reference, and you get a little bit of
Speaker 7: that here and a little bit in Airplane, but it's
Speaker 7: not the modern spook comedies today just refer to other things.
Speaker 7: So that's the joke. And then if they're referring to
Speaker 7: things that don't last, like we've got references here to
Speaker 7: Star Wars, like we had a reference to Jaws and
Speaker 7: the so we've got the Star Wars crawl in this.
Speaker 7: And then it turns on graphic, which I appreciated. You've
Speaker 7: got a Mission Impossible gag, which I'm surprised they didn't
Speaker 7: do in the first film. I don't think they did.
Speaker 7: And you got Peter Graves is sitting right there, and
Speaker 7: so you've got that. You've got the low boat gag,
Speaker 7: which today a lot of people aren't going to get
Speaker 7: any of those. But it's not just that it's not
Speaker 7: their plane. Too much like Airplane, unless you saw that
Speaker 7: original film for some reason that was totally straight film,
Speaker 7: you wouldn't get. Yes, it's spoofing catastrophe movies. This is
Speaker 7: more of the same. What does Elane say, I've got
Speaker 7: the strangest feeling We've been through this exact same thing before. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but we're going into space, and somehow this shuttle is
Speaker 7: able to fly however, many millions of miles it is
Speaker 7: to the Sun in a very short time.
Speaker 4: Very little fuel. Like the whole thing of the space
Speaker 4: shuttle is like so much of it was the fuel
Speaker 4: to break out of orbit. But yeah, and because they
Speaker 4: also show that other space shuttle that the kid controls
Speaker 4: and blows up. So I'm like, how many space shuttles
Speaker 4: are there at this point? Because they're talking about the
Speaker 4: may fol Hour one being this experimental shuttle, and I'm like,
Speaker 4: but wait, there's this other shuttle right now?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, yeah, that's the continuity here.
Speaker 4: Cinema, cinema.
Speaker 5: What kind of podcast did I wander into everything wrong
Speaker 5: with airplane two in fifteen minutes?
Speaker 4: Well, I'll tell you two things that are right with
Speaker 4: airplane two. One is the appearance of mister George went
Speaker 4: for a brief second, and the other one is Pat
Speaker 4: Sajack as well. Hell yeah, that was great when he
Speaker 4: shows up as the Buffalo fourteen news reporter.
Speaker 7: Yeah, crazy, you're young, like twelve years old. Man, Oh yeah,
Speaker 7: and the original Jeopardy host gets a gets a little
Speaker 7: appearance there.
Speaker 5: That's one of my favorite gags in the entire movies.
Speaker 5: The crew is in jeopardy or the passengers are in
Speaker 5: jeopardy and then it shows yeah and it shows oh
Speaker 5: my god. Some of those are like, the best gags
Speaker 5: of this movie are just h and there you go,
Speaker 5: and we're just moving on. Don't sit and linger. I
Speaker 5: appreciate that the movie doesn't linger because the mugging becomes
Speaker 5: too much later on.
Speaker 7: The literalism isn't over the top in this as well, though,
Speaker 7: like some of the later Police Squad episodes and the
Speaker 7: Naked Gun films where we get that literalism is the
Speaker 7: gag repeatedly. If like the what is it gag, it's
Speaker 7: the same. It's like, I you don't need fifteen examples
Speaker 7: of that in the film, give me something new.
Speaker 4: I like the use of the slow mo when Scraps
Speaker 4: is saving the day, but especially the guy who breaks
Speaker 4: and looks at his watch and then goes back to it.
Speaker 7: That's pretty good tricks for the dog. He's a boy
Speaker 7: dog too, and we don't get too much of that repeated,
Speaker 7: and I was expecting it, and I'm like, oh, the
Speaker 7: Poldergey's kid is in the cockpit, so we're gonna get
Speaker 7: some overgag here. And of course the over younger done.
Speaker 4: Which I thought that was nice.
Speaker 7: Repeated but different names so it works.
Speaker 4: And I'd like to see when Peter Graves is like
Speaker 4: and he's just like trying to figure it all out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was good. That's how you do the repeat
Speaker 7: joke is throwing something new where even he's confused now.
Speaker 7: And of course there's more of that in one of
Speaker 7: the deleted scenes as well, with the over Yes, the.
Speaker 4: Eggs over, et cetera. I'm sorry we don't do eggs over.
Speaker 4: Talking of dumb jokes, but I really like the whole
Speaker 4: thing that's going on with Chuck Connors and Lloyd Bridges
Speaker 4: with the cigarette cigarette coffee thing. It's so simple and
Speaker 4: so stupid, but I think they really pulled it off.
Speaker 4: And to see those two actors going at it together,
Speaker 4: I'm just like, yeah, I really like. Because that's the
Speaker 4: thing I like about these movies too. It's like to
Speaker 4: see the older actors where you're not used to seeing
Speaker 4: them play comedy. Of course, now after not now and
Speaker 4: not twenty twenty five, but back in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 4: it'd be like, oh, yeah, Lloyd Bridges, he plays the President,
Speaker 4: he plays in all of these movies. Now he's just
Speaker 4: he was Leslie Nielsen as Leslie Nielsen was just starting
Speaker 4: to lessen Nielsen.
Speaker 5: I would say Lloyd Bridges was more like the parody
Speaker 5: guy in a lot of ways, because if you think
Speaker 5: about it's Airplane one, Airplane two, then it's top Gun
Speaker 5: or not top Gun, hot Shots, hot Shots, Pardue, where
Speaker 5: he's in both of those movies, and then he's also
Speaker 5: in Jane Austen's Moth where he plays Vincenzo ARMANI Winbreaker Cortino,
Speaker 5: which is a hell of a name. I think Leslie
Speaker 5: Nielsen's stuff that ends up being not good are his
Speaker 5: like parody things like later parody, things like Dracula Dead
Speaker 5: and Loving It, that Exorcist movie, Repossessed Man. Leslie Nielson
Speaker 5: should have said to those movies, those movies are rough.
Speaker 4: And yeah, like I said, it's just the saddest thing
Speaker 4: to me that Shatner doesn't show up until one hour
Speaker 4: and eight minutes in the movie, and he's just so
Speaker 4: freaking good and he's again, he's slaying that Robert Stack.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I know, Striker. He cracked up, and he's
Speaker 4: even doing the same thing at the end. I think
Speaker 4: that Stack does where he's like still giving the instructions
Speaker 4: to Striker after the vehicle is landed kind of thing.
Speaker 4: And I guess there's just atmosphere on the moon. We're
Speaker 4: not going to go into all that stuff our way.
Speaker 5: Sure, but we're not cinema sins, guys.
Speaker 4: But I just love when Chattner is just like the
Speaker 4: blinking and the lighting.
Speaker 8: We've all got to switches lights and knobs a deal
Speaker 8: with Striker. I mean down here there are literally one
Speaker 8: hundreds and thousands. I'm blinking, beating and flashing lights, blinking
Speaker 8: and beating and flashing, flashing and the beating.
Speaker 5: I can't stand on him hard.
Speaker 2: I'm blinking and maybe I'm already I'm all right.
Speaker 4: He's just unhinged. And this is really the first time
Speaker 4: we get to see Schattner playing this level of comedy
Speaker 4: like we've seen him in things since then. Isn't he
Speaker 4: in one of those parody movies.
Speaker 5: Chitta ampoons Loaded Weapon won Loaded Weapon? Because he's got
Speaker 5: the fish in his mouth, right he bites the Piranha.
Speaker 4: We know he can do it, but this is still
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty two. This is the same year that Wrath
Speaker 4: of Kind is coming out.
Speaker 7: I thought, oh, SHOT's gonna be phoning it in, but no,
Speaker 7: he was like, zing, he's funny, and he's really funny
Speaker 7: in this movie. I have to admit that gag of
Speaker 7: him thinking the audience thinking that he's on screen and
Speaker 7: he's just behind a door got me good. I lolled
Speaker 7: as the kids say at that one.
Speaker 4: That is what the kids say. Every single one of
Speaker 4: them says that too.
Speaker 5: I've heard in whispered tones through the pine that is,
Speaker 5: in fact what the children are saying these days. What
Speaker 5: are you, Seymour Skinner?
Speaker 7: Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children
Speaker 7: whoever wrong?
Speaker 4: I love sandel Bergen shows up as one of the
Speaker 4: officers there, the one holding ted Strikers four hundred Polka favorites.
Speaker 7: Wish she had more to do.
Speaker 5: It's worse than we ever imagined.
Speaker 7: I've only seen her. I've only seen her in a
Speaker 7: couple of things, Conan and all that Jazz, and I
Speaker 7: love her in both, and so I wanted more.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I really feel like she probably had a lot
Speaker 4: more to do in this because yeah, I guess was
Speaker 4: shot after the break.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I'm whatever those deleted scenes were, I could
Speaker 7: have handled seen her like that, So whatever movie thinks
Speaker 7: a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the thing that there's a real mystery when
Speaker 4: it comes to these deleted scenes, because yeah, there's some
Speaker 4: that are known and some that I still cannot track down.
Speaker 4: So I'm very excited to talk about that. So I
Speaker 4: guess with that one, we should go ahead and take
Speaker 4: a break, and we are going to hear back from
Speaker 4: eight of people here. First, we're going to hear from
Speaker 4: writer director Ken Finkleman. We're going to hear from writers
Speaker 4: Al Jean and Mike Reese, and actors James A. Watson
Speaker 4: and Robert Hayes himself, and we'll be back with all
Speaker 4: of that right after these brief messages.
Speaker 11: Hello everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to
Speaker 11: say that this is a request to listeners of the
Speaker 11: Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Speaker 11: Patreon dot com, p A t R e O N
Speaker 11: dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 7: That's pretty simple.
Speaker 2: I think you can do that.
Speaker 11: It's a great show and Mike. He provides hours of
Speaker 11: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 11: little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
Speaker 11: a sip of the old Molocco, and then you'll be
Speaker 11: ready for a little of the.
Speaker 7: Old in Out, in Out Real Horror Show.
Speaker 2: Bye Bye.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the interview portion of the show. First up,
Speaker 4: we're going to hear from writer director Ken Finkleman. Please
Speaker 4: be warned that I recorded this all the way back
Speaker 4: in twenty eleven for a book project that I'll talk
Speaker 4: about a little bit later. So this was a little
Speaker 4: bit more conversational than I usually like, and the audio
Speaker 4: quality is definitely like that i'd like to present these days.
Speaker 4: Also note that the late PJ. Torokvey, i believe is
Speaker 4: how you pronounced it, was formerly Peter Torocvey. It was
Speaker 4: under this name that she wrote most of her work,
Speaker 4: including Caddyshack two.
Speaker 2: It was your first directing gig, right, Oh, it was
Speaker 2: a very unusual job. Wait, but I got that job.
Speaker 2: But there's one thing I do want to say about this,
Speaker 2: because when I look at at my girlfriend, this is
Speaker 2: a re that she she runs the effect what they
Speaker 2: call it anwfactual television neives reality in a big company here,
Speaker 2: and William Shatner is doing all these shows now, she's
Speaker 2: like everywhere. He's eighty, right, but he looks like sixty.
Speaker 2: And he's made a career out of out of satirizing himself.
Speaker 2: And he even wrote a biography in all it, and
Speaker 2: he never mentioned a biography. I was the first one
Speaker 2: in Airplane two to get him to do it the
Speaker 2: very first time he ever satirized his over the top
Speaker 2: Shakespearean Captain Kirk Pausing style too, and I gotten to
Speaker 2: do it for Airplane two, and he hadn't done it before,
Speaker 2: And he made an industry of it afterward, and never
Speaker 2: gave me credit because I don't think you ever liked
Speaker 2: I don't think we got along very well when we
Speaker 2: were doing it, but that was just my view of it.
Speaker 2: But that was the beginning of it. So he developed
Speaker 2: an industry out of that character.
Speaker 4: How did you get this job?
Speaker 2: I was putting in New York at the time, and
Speaker 2: I had done a CBC radio show a couple of
Speaker 2: years before this time that I was in New York,
Speaker 2: and a couple of voices that I used were characters
Speaker 2: from Second city in Toronto, and she gets a phone
Speaker 2: call while I'm sitting there talking to her, and it's
Speaker 2: from these two guys. And I think one of them
Speaker 2: is anyway, was a guy that I had used him
Speaker 2: as a I did a TV pilot for the CBC
Speaker 2: and he was a character on it. And lo and behold.
Speaker 2: These two guys are from Toronto, are Steve Campman and
Speaker 2: the Peter Torky were their names. Were working on a
Speaker 2: project in la which was a sequel to the Airplane movie,
Speaker 2: because the lookers didn't want to do a sequel, and
Speaker 2: Paramount then signed up three different teams of writers to
Speaker 2: write scripts and see what one would be the best
Speaker 2: for the sequel. Now to do this and put teams
Speaker 2: to writers in a race with each other, frowned upon
Speaker 2: by the Writers Guild of America and let you notify
Speaker 2: the writing parties, so everyone knew that they were in
Speaker 2: a bit of a horse race here, okay. And these
Speaker 2: two guys were one of the teams going for it.
Speaker 2: And they had gotten nowhere and then the phone rings
Speaker 2: in there and this woman's office, I'm there and she
Speaker 2: he said, oh, I got from the else in Toronto
Speaker 2: my office on and they cook me on the phone
Speaker 2: and say, oh yeah. We start chatting and they say
Speaker 2: what are you doing? And I say what are you doing?
Speaker 2: And they're doing this and they haven't made much headway.
Speaker 2: Would I work with them? They get the approval paramount
Speaker 2: to ship Neil Taile. So I go to LA and
Speaker 2: I start working with them at I think it was
Speaker 2: Peter Truckley's house by the pool, and we worked for
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks. We at nowhere, and so I said, well,
Speaker 2: I'll go go home and I'll start working on this thing,
Speaker 2: and you guys work here. And so I went back
Speaker 2: to Toronto and pecked away at get this a selectric.
Speaker 2: And then I get a phone call a couple of
Speaker 2: weeks later that from this one of them saying, my
Speaker 2: partner wants to bail. I think that. Were you right
Speaker 2: to stop and all? And I said, I was, I'm
Speaker 2: not that familiar with the industry in Los Angeles, but
Speaker 2: I wasn't born yesterday. Let me think about this. So
Speaker 2: I immediately phoned the executive in charge of the project
Speaker 2: after that phone call, who was Jeff Katzenberg, and I said,
Speaker 2: I came in late on this. I don't know what
Speaker 2: quite what to do, except I don't. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to get fucked over anyone, and I will continue on
Speaker 2: this if I continue on my own. And he said, okay,
Speaker 2: hang up, and then I hung up, and then look
Speaker 2: ten minutes of the re phone back, he said, okay,
Speaker 2: both those guys are gone. Send me what you've got
Speaker 2: and I said that son, I said, it's only cotton pasted. Now,
Speaker 2: this was the time of true cotton pasting, where you
Speaker 2: cut the paper and you took the transparent scotch tape
Speaker 2: and you tape one scene you organize to them, and
Speaker 2: I said, I should haven't know what I said anything
Speaker 2: notes the movie. I said, I got fifty pages of jokes.
Speaker 2: He said, just tennd it to aesthetics. So I sent
Speaker 2: it to them, and then a couple of days later
Speaker 2: I get a call they said, come to La finish it.
Speaker 2: When I led through the gate at Paramount to finish
Speaker 2: that script, I said, you're over the wall and it'll
Speaker 2: take all the King's horses and then to get you out.
Speaker 2: And that's when I knew I was in and I
Speaker 2: was in the movie business because I'm an ambitious character
Speaker 2: by nature, and I knew I was in nothing's going
Speaker 2: to get me out. And so I finished the script
Speaker 2: and then and then rewrite it, to rewrite and crazy
Speaker 2: and writing jokes. And then one day Michael Eifner comes
Speaker 2: into an office and I'm sitting there with another executive
Speaker 2: the name as Larry Marks, and I just scupped a
Speaker 2: script and and I'd done that, and at that time,
Speaker 2: the officer the office of Paramount are very small. They're
Speaker 2: in an old building from the old days, and all
Speaker 2: the executive the executives were first one the junior executives,
Speaker 2: then Caxenberg, who was still a junior executive, and then
Speaker 2: Don Simpson do you remember Don Simpson's since farmer fame?
Speaker 2: And then Simpson was president in production, and then Eisner
Speaker 2: was above him another office, and then Diller was at
Speaker 2: the end of the hall. That was what it was.
Speaker 2: That's what it looked like that and I said, and
Speaker 2: I'm tuning this office. And Eisler watched with who can
Speaker 2: you get to do the script? And look this guy,
Speaker 2: Larry Marks to him, think about and he's a reader tonight.
Speaker 2: So I read the script and it was a script
Speaker 2: that they wanted to do for John Belushi, and it
Speaker 2: was a joy effects and it was shitty, horrible, stupid, right.
Speaker 2: And so the next day I'm supposed to come to
Speaker 2: his office and I came an hour and a half late,
Speaker 2: and he was pressed off. But I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 2: what is I I was from? I was out of
Speaker 2: the sixties, seventies. I was a read doctor, baby, I was.
Speaker 2: I was. I didn't have any respect for authority of
Speaker 2: out of Winnipeg. I didn't give a fuck about these guys,
Speaker 2: right and how and but he was the secretary called
Speaker 2: what are you? What do I care? And so I
Speaker 2: moved into his office and he says to me, and
Speaker 2: I'm not being flip about this. I'd really had that attitude.
Speaker 2: I really did not. It was really a very defining
Speaker 2: thing for me in my mind, not to suck up
Speaker 2: to these guys, right. And the funny thing is, at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, you end up in the
Speaker 2: same position, whether you suck up to them or not.
Speaker 2: So I just didn't. And he said will you do this?
Speaker 2: And I said, I'm rewriting this. He didn't know. Will
Speaker 2: you directed? And I said what? And he said, Larry
Speaker 2: said that you could direct. I said direct. I said,
Speaker 2: I don't know. One of the camera from another. He said,
Speaker 2: you're not going to do this, and I said, no,
Speaker 2: I can't do this is crazy, so I kind of
Speaker 2: less so now in his mind this is I figured
Speaker 2: this whole narrative out later. I'm a director who's passed
Speaker 2: on him. So when Airplane two is finished, she says,
Speaker 2: see if I can get thinklem in and do it.
Speaker 2: So I did it. I get a screen like a
Speaker 2: cast of a couple of scenes which was pointing the
Speaker 2: camera who was talking basically, and then they said okay,
Speaker 2: do it. So then I did it, and I hated
Speaker 2: every second of it. I was shooting a picture on
Speaker 2: the Paramount lock and every day I wanted to walk.
Speaker 2: Every time I walked to the cam, which was outside
Speaker 2: the studio, there was like toilets outside to take a leak.
Speaker 2: I just want to keep walking. I just hated every decond.
Speaker 2: I don't think I was ever more insane in my
Speaker 2: whole life, being feeling the pressure. Every morning Castenberg calls me,
Speaker 2: there's off seven thirty to beat me up about the dailies.
Speaker 2: And I don't think I ever had felt so much
Speaker 2: pressure over something. It wouldn't have bothered me if it
Speaker 2: was important, but it was so trite. That's what drove
Speaker 2: me insane, the fact that it was meaningless. It was
Speaker 2: less than meaningless, and it drove me not. I hated
Speaker 2: every moment of it. I'd come from a left wing
Speaker 2: political background. I'm raised, go to school and university with
Speaker 2: all these guys kids, guys that are all We're all
Speaker 2: from Winnipeg, which is a hotbed of North American socialism.
Speaker 2: We're all opposed to the system. I'm right at the
Speaker 2: fucking belly of it, and it's driving me nuts. So
Speaker 2: it was a trying experience. But the thing is, I
Speaker 2: have this quirk, and it's a quirk. I guess a
Speaker 2: lot of that draws a lot of guys to Hollywood.
Speaker 7: I could write jokes, just the quirky thing.
Speaker 2: Somebody could say, write pen jokes about a glass of water.
Speaker 2: I can do it.
Speaker 4: Did you know going in, who is going to be back?
Speaker 4: Did you say, okay, for sure? Robert Hayes and Julie Haggerty, Right,
Speaker 4: they're back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And what's his name? Peter Graves, yeah, Richesihun and
Speaker 2: Lloyd Bridges yeah, Lloyd Bridges.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But then there's suggests.
Speaker 4: Briefly, Leslie Nielsen makes an appearance in here.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think he does. He's not in the movie.
Speaker 2: He didn't want to do the movie the sequel because
Speaker 2: the Zucker Brothers didn't do it. But he was a
Speaker 2: bit of a prick. I think.
Speaker 13: I didn't think I had a run in with him,
Speaker 13: but I got the understanding that he was an asshole,
Speaker 13: where his brother was a supreme asshole. He was the
Speaker 13: assistant prime minister to the prime minister, and you know
Speaker 13: the Canadians Lessie Nilsen and his brother was this real
Speaker 13: hard nose political creep.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 4: You just had him in here for two lines and
Speaker 4: that was it. Yeah, maybe I don't know. Yeah, he
Speaker 4: gives someone some water and that the controller says, what
Speaker 4: is a doctor? He says, two parts of oxygen, one
Speaker 4: part high.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Those all I know of going after the jokes
Speaker 2: that they did for the first one and that whoa,
Speaker 2: this is what. Oh. Now, I remember with the writers.
Speaker 2: I'm sitting at their pool and we were trying to
Speaker 2: write the strict and they want to do something completely different.
Speaker 2: And I said, you guys, I don't know anything about
Speaker 2: the movie business, but I think when they're doing a sequel,
Speaker 2: they want to come very quote to what was done before.
Speaker 2: I want something different, I said. And I'm this is
Speaker 2: my ultimate cynicism coming into play here. They want the
Speaker 2: same thing.
Speaker 4: Had they already had the shuttle idea?
Speaker 2: Or was that your idea? And I think that was
Speaker 2: a network as a studio. Yeah, that was a studio idea.
Speaker 2: She went to the fucking idea. That's terribly true, but
Speaker 2: it was their idea. What am I going to do?
Speaker 2: They're paying me money. I got a door open to
Speaker 2: being in Hollywood. And a number of years later, many
Speaker 2: years later, my wife we will go to law school
Speaker 2: together and then she becomes a judge here. And I
Speaker 2: used to say, I'm looking at my job in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: And that's why I got out of Hollywood.
Speaker 12: I said.
Speaker 2: My wife trying to decide here as a judge to
Speaker 2: put a young guy in jail or not. And I'm
Speaker 2: trying to decide whether dress to dress the guy in
Speaker 2: the bear costume or the gorilla costume. And I said,
Speaker 2: I got to get out of Hollywood. Gotta get out.
Speaker 5: I gotta get out of here. I've got to get
Speaker 5: out of here.
Speaker 2: You don't ask questions in Hollywood, you don't argue in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: In writers me, You don't. You just gnawd your head.
Speaker 2: They're paying you a shipload of money to do something
Speaker 2: that you don't have any connection to it all. You
Speaker 2: don't feel any pride in, you don't feel any connection,
Speaker 2: and you just do what they say. It doesn't make
Speaker 2: any sense to aren't you. I always said, if I'm
Speaker 2: going to be there, I'm never going to write anything
Speaker 2: that I will be in a position that I have
Speaker 2: to defend because I will lose the fight. And I
Speaker 2: won't do that. I will write stupid, silly stuff and
Speaker 2: take the money and run.
Speaker 4: I have to say, though, I've found myself laughing out
Speaker 4: loud at this script.
Speaker 2: That's great, I appreciate. Yeah. I just finished a show
Speaker 2: and I'm just waiting for my We've done ten episodes
Speaker 2: and I've seen the attende the first one. I'm waiting
Speaker 2: for the second one tonight to screen it in about
Speaker 2: five minutes. Oh nice, for ten minutes. Yeah, and people
Speaker 2: are laughing at that them, which makes you feel good.
Speaker 4: How did stuff change from the script until the final product.
Speaker 4: Did you have control all the way through or did you.
Speaker 2: I had control of nothing. I got two writers that
Speaker 2: come from the East were working for the Harvard Lamprun
Speaker 2: and they came and they stayed at my house in
Speaker 2: LA and they helped me with the script, but actually
Speaker 2: I did never use any of the mature One was
Speaker 2: that and then we became good friends, we lived together,
Speaker 2: and it was and that It was their first job
Speaker 2: in Hollywood. It was Mike Greece and Al Jean who
Speaker 2: became the producers of the Simpson.
Speaker 4: The one thing that I find fascinating too about the
Speaker 4: whole Airplane two story is how it changed from the
Speaker 4: theatrical version to the TV version. And apparently they have
Speaker 4: changed all of the references to Ronald reg all the
Speaker 4: references to Ronald Reagan have been taken out, or the
Speaker 4: way the gohead.
Speaker 2: Oh you mean to mean just for playing?
Speaker 4: Are you serious?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Are you serious? Because he's so worshiped in the US,
Speaker 2: isn't it because he was, say he won first election
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty Yeah.
Speaker 4: And yeah, you already had the jokes going in there,
Speaker 4: and then you had a good Gerald Ford joke in
Speaker 4: hair as well too.
Speaker 2: I don't remember that, but anyway, is that amazing? So
Speaker 2: I but I know the residuals are still good, so
Speaker 2: I guess they sell it around the Worldstone do.
Speaker 4: You had the one mental hospital for the mentally feeble,
Speaker 4: and then you had the Ronald Reagan Institute of Supply
Speaker 4: Side Economics and hospital for the criminally insane.
Speaker 2: Oh god, supply side economics, Oh god. Remember that guy
Speaker 2: that was Stockman, the kind of the guru of supply
Speaker 2: side economics. Yeah, and I'll tell you I remember being
Speaker 2: with eyes there once where I said, why can't we
Speaker 2: put that joke in because I don't want it? And
Speaker 2: it was I think that they were doing a poll
Speaker 2: that when the thing was about the crash, the flight
Speaker 2: attendants were pulling what the people wanted, and then one
Speaker 2: of the questions was the mayor get out of Nicaragua,
Speaker 2: and she said, I don't want that joke. So I
Speaker 2: had all these political jokes that came out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: and they were very extremely Kaptinberg violently right wing. The
Speaker 2: other thing that makes me said is that apparently there
Speaker 2: are a bunch of scenes that were shot and.
Speaker 4: They're not available anymore. Maybe they got shown on the
Speaker 4: television version and maybe they.
Speaker 5: Didn't like they roll.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the whole intro to Lloyd Bridges' character because you
Speaker 4: had him at the actually maybe that was where the
Speaker 4: gerald Ford home for the senile was. You've got him
Speaker 4: in his Sea Hunt outfit and stuff. Really yeah, and
Speaker 4: he's and then his line looks like a pick wrong.
Speaker 4: We to go to circle and Senile and then the
Speaker 4: other one is some Texan And you've got a recurring
Speaker 4: joke going on to the screen planet and they say
Speaker 4: that when it shows on television that there is part
Speaker 4: of the joke of he asked for something to read
Speaker 4: and the stewardess brings over like the entire Torah and
Speaker 4: he reads the Torah on the flight and becomes a
Speaker 4: acidic Jew as the flight was going along.
Speaker 2: I don't remember.
Speaker 4: And you've got him into to fill in and all
Speaker 4: that stuff.
Speaker 5: Wait, but Philin, are you Jewish?
Speaker 9: No?
Speaker 5: But you had that in the How did you ask.
Speaker 2: A good pronunciation of filling or a guy who's not
Speaker 2: a Jew? Holy Christ? And there's not in the film.
Speaker 4: That's not in the film.
Speaker 2: No, And then where do you find They showed it
Speaker 2: that way on Comedy Central and.
Speaker 4: I happened and.
Speaker 2: You found out what did you just a YouTube do?
Speaker 15: No?
Speaker 4: I looked all around and I finally I had to
Speaker 4: pay some guy twenty bucks who had a copy of it,
Speaker 4: and he sent it over to me. Then what I
Speaker 4: did yesterday was I went through and I took a
Speaker 4: video editor, and I opened up the theatrical or at
Speaker 4: least the DVD version of it, and then the TV
Speaker 4: version of it. And I went through and I compared
Speaker 4: the two and I made it that's where all the
Speaker 4: differences were. And I actually I cut all those TV
Speaker 4: scenes out and I put those as a just one
Speaker 4: file out on YouTube so that I could have it
Speaker 4: for myself so I can look at what was different.
Speaker 7: Even in the preview.
Speaker 4: There's a trailer out there for the original movie, and
Speaker 4: even in that, there's a couple of scenes that aren't
Speaker 4: in there, Like you had a like this Carl Maldon
Speaker 4: impersonator doing the American Express commercial thing, and that didn't
Speaker 4: make it in there. And that's where I'm running into
Speaker 4: some issues, because there's a couple names in there that
Speaker 4: of people that are in the film that never made
Speaker 4: it into it, including Aldo Ray.
Speaker 2: I think he was singing although new York, New York
Speaker 2: or something as well. Back then. I must the thought
Speaker 2: of him as a kind of guy that was like like.
Speaker 12: Crup like like she can play in the the American films,
Speaker 12: that the a guy would be what with p like
Speaker 12: he would like the bull jerk in the Second World
Speaker 12: War movie. I think he was so bad in the
Speaker 12: movie that he cut him out.
Speaker 4: How was it actually directing your first film? How was
Speaker 4: it working with the actors?
Speaker 2: I don't remember what's channel.
Speaker 12: I seem to remember baby, remember having a sense that
Speaker 12: I knew what I was doing in that area. Just
Speaker 12: let people do what they did. And I really have
Speaker 12: to change that much. Even dre deal about Jersey and
Speaker 12: do something completely wrong, trying to help him a lot,
Speaker 12: But you generally stuck people. I never Drewie Hagerty been
Speaker 12: very nervous, and and I was a complete novice, and
Speaker 12: I didn't involved in the pits costs in there, and
Speaker 12: and Bran had to choked around with her by faking
Speaker 12: of getting Babbage her on the fip and grabbing her
Speaker 12: and mining flapping her in the face, and she thought
Speaker 12: that was funny. And then I broke the eye because
Speaker 12: it was like something that I really didn't really have
Speaker 12: the right to do because she'd already been in the
Speaker 12: first movie and everything else. But but I never bring
Speaker 12: back and broke the eyes. And I remember that particular incident,
Speaker 12: but she's him to be a nice person.
Speaker 4: I will tell you. Robert Hayes had nothing but great
Speaker 4: things to say about you. He was just lavishing praise
Speaker 4: on you. When I talked to him.
Speaker 2: That it's pretty funny because somebody ran into him recently
Speaker 2: and he said to say hello and gotten old kind
Speaker 2: But where that was, but that's very nice to him.
Speaker 2: Ether life guy. He also talked about.
Speaker 4: A scene that you shot where he was in the
Speaker 4: French Foreign Legion and he's then you guys shot it
Speaker 4: down at La X and he's going through the sand
Speaker 4: and all this kind of stuff in a net fluin
Speaker 4: Oficello shows up and I'm like, this sounds like a
Speaker 4: fever dream. The way that he was talking about.
Speaker 2: He said, no, I swear to god it was shot.
Speaker 2: We shot that thing. I don't know why it's not
Speaker 2: in the bok. Yeah like that, I can't what was
Speaker 2: I don't think shot that shot that it could be
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: He was saying that there were some sand dunes at
Speaker 4: the foot of Lax, but then he did talk about yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: there were, that's right, yeah, because and then I was like, Okay,
Speaker 4: I believe you. It's just as Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think now how much interaction did you have
Speaker 2: with Howard Kotch on that?
Speaker 7: Well, I didn't really gone wrong with him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't like it, so I started to happens
Speaker 2: with it possible.
Speaker 4: Hayes was saying that you were having a hard time
Speaker 4: with all the big wigs there and stuff. Do you
Speaker 4: remember that He told me a story about how you
Speaker 4: came into the office one day and you said that
Speaker 4: getting the deal is like getting the girl to sleep
Speaker 4: with you.
Speaker 2: We were getting the deal with like the orgasm of
Speaker 2: the orgasm, and the refluent direction was like trying to
Speaker 2: get her out of the department once you'd finished. He
Speaker 2: remember that line, he remembers it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He says that he used to sit in the in
Speaker 4: the office with you while you were writing that some
Speaker 4: of the drafts of the screenplay, and he would just
Speaker 4: be there laughing as you were writing stuff. So yeah,
Speaker 4: he's got really fond memories of it.
Speaker 2: Writing the screenclip hurry pint too, Yeah, yeah, oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 4: He said that you invited him in just to I
Speaker 4: don't know, run lines or do something like that, and
Speaker 4: he said that he was having a great time. I
Speaker 4: have one more question for you. Some of them views
Speaker 4: that I've been reading, I've gone back to the old
Speaker 4: New York Times, and some of these reviews, they all
Speaker 4: make mention that they received a letter from the Zucker
Speaker 4: Brothers right before the movie came out to distance themselves
Speaker 4: from Airplane Too. Do you remember that.
Speaker 12: They didn't want to make it so that they didn't
Speaker 12: want to do with Pequel and they were opposed to
Speaker 12: the studio bad.
Speaker 2: But I didn't get along back with the recruits.
Speaker 10: I meant that they asked me to plot them up
Speaker 10: being a writer on them on a TV show was
Speaker 10: called called Naked Done without being the oh.
Speaker 2: With police Squad, Yeah yeah, police Yeah. I think that
Speaker 2: they agreed, but they were just opposed to making the movie. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I knew about that.
Speaker 12: They had a number of writers doing the whole thing.
Speaker 12: And when they did the first one, and I think
Speaker 12: there were a number, they were like three or four writers,
Speaker 12: and they this is material that they had packed it
Speaker 12: out on their Kentucky by Peter and everything else, and
Speaker 12: they get it over a number of years. I came
Speaker 12: in and I wrote he wrote it in about a
Speaker 12: number in about two months by myself. Yet one of
Speaker 12: the bad moment. They worked for the book their Baby,
Speaker 12: and that was there, and the studio wanted to make it,
Speaker 12: and I was being a hack writer doing work for
Speaker 12: the studio, and I think that I stood their issue
Speaker 12: with it. But at that time I was, although quite ambitious,
Speaker 12: and I be the gig, and I think that I
Speaker 12: remember having a certain qualms about it. But on balance,
Speaker 12: I think I took the job and accepted that the
Speaker 12: fact that they had an.
Speaker 2: Issue with.
Speaker 12: You made decisions in your life, and that was one
Speaker 12: that I operated my own self interest in that at
Speaker 12: that particular time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how was it.
Speaker 4: Doing the voice of the computer of Rock nine thousand?
Speaker 2: Well, even though I played the character on TV, I'm
Speaker 2: always felt that I was a shitty actor. I slightly
Speaker 2: in very effect that.
Speaker 4: Up next, we're going to hear from actor Robert Hayes,
Speaker 4: who talks about his role as Ted Striker, as well
Speaker 4: as an incredible cut scene that I've since found a
Speaker 4: photo proof for. So this thing definitely happened. Not to
Speaker 4: say that mister Hayes would be fibbing at all, but
Speaker 4: this sounds incredible. So buckle up. How did you get
Speaker 4: cass in airplane? I mean, were you always known to
Speaker 4: be funny or how did that happen?
Speaker 2: My agent, Arnie Solaway, had a woman named Beth Voyq
Speaker 2: that just it's a weird name. V I think at
Speaker 2: v o I ku BOYQ. And she had come to
Speaker 2: work for him just pretty recently, and she had worked
Speaker 2: for Howard Koch, who was the exec producer and on
Speaker 2: both of them, And so she called him up and
Speaker 2: they'd already been all over the place. They'd been in
Speaker 2: New York and Minneapolis and Seattle and La Dallas and
Speaker 2: everywhere from what I understand, and they couldn't find their
Speaker 2: Ted Striker. And she called him up and said, Hey,
Speaker 2: I got your Ted Striker and he said, great, bring
Speaker 2: him over. So I went over a net with him
Speaker 2: and with the boys, and we all got along. And
Speaker 2: then I read for him and they liked my reading,
Speaker 2: and then they had me screen test, and I screen
Speaker 2: tested with Julie, fortunately for me, and then they liked
Speaker 2: the screen test and they said that's it. He's the
Speaker 2: one that was how I got it. And then of
Speaker 2: course I was already Ted Striker by the time when
Speaker 2: we did the second one. Ken was really fun. He
Speaker 2: was a bit hyper at times, and I think he
Speaker 2: was probably under a lot of pressure. I remember he
Speaker 2: came into the office one day when we were working
Speaker 2: on before we started the film, and he looked very
Speaker 2: flustered and very like he'd been through just the ringer.
Speaker 2: He put his briefcase down and they looked at me,
Speaker 2: and I said it was the matter, and he says, finally,
Speaker 2: I think I figured out a definition of making a
Speaker 2: film in Hollywood. He said, making the deal is like
Speaker 2: having sex with the girl. Making the movie is like
Speaker 2: trying to get her out of your apartment. So that
Speaker 2: was ken. When we were doing the second, he would
Speaker 2: ask me to come in and help him out when
Speaker 2: he was writing it, because I already had the experience
Speaker 2: of the first one and just to help him with
Speaker 2: his getting the second one all in shape. So I'd
Speaker 2: go over there to the studio and then the offices
Speaker 2: and we'd sit around and I'd laugh my butt off,
Speaker 2: and he was a very funny guy, and I think
Speaker 2: he did a good job. I think it was really
Speaker 2: tough for him because the first one was so incredibly tight,
Speaker 2: is so good, and they had five years of writing
Speaker 2: and rewriting and polishing, and it was just and their
Speaker 2: sense of comedy is just perfect. It's just incredible. So
Speaker 2: it had broken the records everywhere it played, and because
Speaker 2: it was such a huge hit, that was a hard
Speaker 2: thing to follow. But there were some people that saw
Speaker 2: it that had never seen the first one, and they
Speaker 2: just loved it. And then they saw the first one
Speaker 2: second and they liked the second one because they'd seen
Speaker 2: it first, knowing only you know, just very few occasions.
Speaker 2: I can only think of two letters a fan that
Speaker 2: I got. There might have been a couple of other
Speaker 2: people that told me, but out of the thousands and
Speaker 2: thousands of letters I've gotten over the years, a couple.
Speaker 2: But it was fun. I wish they'd re release the
Speaker 2: second one with outtakes deleted scenes, like they did that
Speaker 2: with the first one, but I wish they'd do that
Speaker 2: with the second one. I wish they'd make a box set, actually,
Speaker 2: but I think having been two different writer director teams,
Speaker 2: that would probably make that difficult. But if that's too hard,
Speaker 2: I wish they would release the second Airplane with the
Speaker 2: deleted scenes. I think they'd probably sell a lot.
Speaker 4: I've read about a few deleted scenes, but it's very
Speaker 4: hard to track down what was actually shot versus what
Speaker 4: wasn't well.
Speaker 2: There was an entire scene that was shot when I
Speaker 2: was having my flashbacks, and there was one where I was,
Speaker 2: as usual, boring people to death, and I was telling
Speaker 2: them about when I had after all of the stuff
Speaker 2: happened in the first one, I told him that Julie
Speaker 2: and I are Elaine and I had gotten married, and
Speaker 2: I was just too antsy and I couldn't handle it,
Speaker 2: and finally I left, and I went off and joined
Speaker 2: the French Foreign Legion, and because of my prior experience
Speaker 2: being a command and meaning an officer, I was made
Speaker 2: an officer and put in command of a bunch of guys.
Speaker 2: And then it started doing that time rippy effect, and
Speaker 2: then it goes back to us going across the sand dunes.
Speaker 2: We filmed it at the foot of Lax, all the
Speaker 2: sand dunes down there, and it shows me out leading
Speaker 2: everybody with our French Foreign Legion outfits on, and everyone
Speaker 2: behind me, a long line of guys, and we're tramping
Speaker 2: along and I hold my hand up and we all stop,
Speaker 2: hold up my binoculars and I see a fort and
Speaker 2: a little small fort in the distance with palm trees,
Speaker 2: and I say, okay, come on, let's go signal with
Speaker 2: my arm. We all keep marching, and as we get
Speaker 2: closer and closer, we get right up next to it.
Speaker 2: And it's a little small fort. It's just totally about
Speaker 2: eight inches tall, and I stare at it. I'd i'd
Speaker 2: pick up my binoculars and look at it, and yeah,
Speaker 2: that's the one I saw. And though then we just
Speaker 2: keep marching, and then we have a run in and
Speaker 2: with the Bedouins or whoever it is. And because of
Speaker 2: my trier experience of coming in too low, you're too low, Striker,
Speaker 2: you're too low. So this time I swore I wouldn't
Speaker 2: come in too low. So I say charge, and we
Speaker 2: all you know, they have stock footage of all the
Speaker 2: Bedouin tribes fighting on horseback, and we all descend down
Speaker 2: down the side of the sand dune. And then I
Speaker 2: came in too high, and then I come crawling back
Speaker 2: up over the sand dune and I'm the only one.
Speaker 2: I lost. Everybody donkeys too, I mean everyone, And so
Speaker 2: then it's just me and I'm walking along and you
Speaker 2: see my face getting sunburned and parched, and all the
Speaker 2: crinkles on my lips and everything. And then it cut
Speaker 2: the sun burning with that sun sound, and then it's
Speaker 2: got pictures of my boot tramping and trample through the sand,
Speaker 2: all my boots, and then you see my rifle butt
Speaker 2: dragging in the sand. And they were filming this from
Speaker 2: about high mid thigh down. And then the rifle fell,
Speaker 2: and then the ammo belt falls, and now I'm defenseless,
Speaker 2: so it's really getting bad. And then you see the
Speaker 2: canteen fall and then you know, oh man, I'm really shot.
Speaker 2: And then an egg beater falls in a bowl falls,
Speaker 2: and then rolling pin falls. Somebody was taking stills on
Speaker 2: the set and there was me with an armload of stuff,
Speaker 2: and I was dropping things bit by bit, and then
Speaker 2: finally I collapse in the sand. And I get up
Speaker 2: to a watering hole and I collapse and it's all dried.
Speaker 2: And on the far side there's a Texas longhorn steer,
Speaker 2: which I'm wondering, what the hell's that doing in the
Speaker 2: middle of Soudan, And it's a steer skull down next
Speaker 2: to the water hole. And then I look up and
Speaker 2: there's a water jug, an office water thing, you know,
Speaker 2: and there are two skeletons dressed in tree piece suits
Speaker 2: with cups and they're all the water jugs bull of
Speaker 2: sand and the cups are full of sand, and they're
Speaker 2: standing there just like they're having a little conversation. And
Speaker 2: so I roll over on my back, like, oh god,
Speaker 2: this is it, this is the end, and the sun
Speaker 2: is beaming down with all that You're about to die
Speaker 2: from dehydration music, and I hear something and it was
Speaker 2: one of my favorite gots. It was shot up through
Speaker 2: my feet. The camera was down below my feet, and
Speaker 2: my head pops up between my What the hell is that?
Speaker 2: Love bet shot? And then I crawl over to the
Speaker 2: edge of the sand dune and there's the Pacific Ocean,
Speaker 2: there's the beach. There's a band, there's a combination. They
Speaker 2: look like the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and they're
Speaker 2: playing music electrified instruments. Where the hell does all that
Speaker 2: comes from? And there's everybody dancing then having a great
Speaker 2: time at the beach party. And there's Elaine in a
Speaker 2: big one piece bathing suit. And we had Annette Funicello,
Speaker 2: the real Annette Funicello, in one of those huge, old,
Speaker 2: big wide bikinis. You know, the bottoms are about a
Speaker 2: foot wide and the tops are about ten inches wide.
Speaker 2: And she's holding a big beach ball. And you go
Speaker 2: running up to Elaine and I say, Elne, I missed you.
Speaker 2: I was so wrong for leaving you. And then I
Speaker 2: suddenly realized. I said, what the hell are you doing
Speaker 2: in the middle of the Sudan And she says, oh, Tad,
Speaker 2: you're so square. She makes a big rectangle with her fingers.
Speaker 2: You know, you're so square. And then someone in the background.
Speaker 2: Now you can see in the background, just like the
Speaker 2: beach blanket Bingo movies, and see that there are maybe
Speaker 2: six inch waves, maybe one foot. You hear someone in
Speaker 2: the background yell surfs up, and all these people go
Speaker 2: running by her with surfboards and she puts her hands
Speaker 2: up to her face like and throws her hands up
Speaker 2: and goes running off. And I'm standing there in my stringy,
Speaker 2: ragged French foreign legion outfit that just shredded, and Annette
Speaker 2: Funicello comes up next to me and start singing one
Speaker 2: of those real sappy songs, like a beach blanket bingo song,
Speaker 2: but it was an original song. She starts singing, if
Speaker 2: you want her to go and get her And I'm
Speaker 2: looking at I look out of the lane, I look
Speaker 2: back at her, and I get this resolve in my
Speaker 2: face and with one hand, I grab my uniform and
Speaker 2: tear it off. It's all velcrode, so I tear it off,
Speaker 2: and I've got a bathing suit underneath, and I go
Speaker 2: out and the next thing you know is that there
Speaker 2: she is. Now we are in the studios, in the
Speaker 2: big tank with a projection behind us, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden you cut out there and they're these big waves,
Speaker 2: all these guys taken off. I'm like, maka ha, twenty
Speaker 2: your thirty foot days. So you cut out to her
Speaker 2: and it's a close uh waist high shot and she's
Speaker 2: surfing on a wave and suddenly I stand up next
Speaker 2: to her like I'm on a board surfing on the wave,
Speaker 2: and she looks at me like tad, and all of
Speaker 2: a sudden I fall and there's a big splash of
Speaker 2: water and she's oh. And then suddenly I stand up
Speaker 2: again like I may have fallen, but I'm not out
Speaker 2: of the wave, and it was just like oh, my
Speaker 2: ted And then it all kind of dissolves from that,
Speaker 2: and that whole thing was shot, the whole thing. I
Speaker 2: guess it just didn't fit her. It was too long
Speaker 2: or something. But I think if they put scenes like
Speaker 2: that back in you know her little you know, look
Speaker 2: at deleted scenes kind of a thing, it's really insane.
Speaker 2: It was really fun. It was really fun.
Speaker 4: Are any others any others?
Speaker 2: I can't even think of any other ones. I know
Speaker 2: we had other ones. They even put a gag reel together,
Speaker 2: scenes of outtakes and stuff, but it was I love gagreels.
Speaker 2: I wish they a gag reel together and put that
Speaker 2: in there too. It was so much fun.
Speaker 4: It must have been so hard not to burst out
Speaker 4: laughing on the set of those movies when you're delivering
Speaker 4: some of those lines.
Speaker 2: You know, Oh yeah, I came off theater. I was
Speaker 2: fairly fresh out of theater, fairly fresh ten ten years
Speaker 2: or a little less than ten years out of theater.
Speaker 2: But still I was still fairly trained, and I could
Speaker 2: keep a straight face. And we used to do that
Speaker 2: on stage. And you got a show that's running. I
Speaker 2: know it's very unprofessional, but when you're doing a show,
Speaker 2: you're doing three shows sometimes a day, nine shows a week,
Speaker 2: you have one day off and three shows in repertory,
Speaker 2: and you're just going nuts. And after a while, people
Speaker 2: will start pulling pranks on stage. The audience doesn't know
Speaker 2: what's going on, but you know, and it's trying to
Speaker 2: crack you up. I really learned how to keep a
Speaker 2: straight face, so that really wasn't the problem. But it
Speaker 2: sure was enjoyable because everybody else was laughing, so it
Speaker 2: was really fun. Were like the camera people and all
Speaker 2: the folks on set. Oh yeah, oh yeah. If I
Speaker 2: did get the crew to crack up, then that was good.
Speaker 2: I felt that I'd really accomplished something. And of course
Speaker 2: they'd messed the takeout, they'd screw up the take but
Speaker 2: still that was okay because we do it again. It
Speaker 2: was fine. But it was great fun. And all the people,
Speaker 2: the crew and the cast, they were all just really
Speaker 2: so wonderful. And Ken was funny. He's just got a real,
Speaker 2: really good, plenty sense of humor.
Speaker 4: It must have been so strange working on some of
Speaker 4: those films, because I mean, it's it's such a big
Speaker 4: cast and everything, but you're probably pretty limited to just
Speaker 4: working with a handful of folks really, you know, like
Speaker 4: you and Julie Haggerty of course have so many scenes together,
Speaker 4: but then you know, did you even see like shatting
Speaker 4: or bridges or some of these.
Speaker 2: They were all on other sets and we were just talking. Supposedly,
Speaker 2: you'd have the script supervisor reading the lines to you.
Speaker 2: I used to go over to when they were shooting
Speaker 2: that stuff. I would go over and read the lines
Speaker 2: off camera. I always like to have the actor there,
Speaker 2: and so I figured that they would appreciate having the
Speaker 2: actor there too, So I would just go into that.
Speaker 2: But we had the whole, the whole passengers, all that
Speaker 2: the crowd, so there were a lot of folks around, and.
Speaker 4: You got to work with Sonny Bono too.
Speaker 2: Sonny I knew Sonny. He was a great guy. He
Speaker 2: really was a fun guy, great sense of humor and
Speaker 2: just a real character. He was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: I'd like a candy bar, that magazine and the third
Speaker 2: bomb on the left. Yeah, yeah, And did you notice
Speaker 2: the poster behind him.
Speaker 4: Rocky thirty eight or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very good Rocky thirty eight with the old
Speaker 2: guy with a bald old guy. And if you notice,
Speaker 2: really it's really hard to tell, but if you were
Speaker 2: able to see very closely the credit have, it's everything's inverted.
Speaker 2: So do you figure the lowliest guy on the crew
Speaker 2: is usually the craft service person. And we had an
Speaker 2: old time guy who wasn't fancy. He just made coffee
Speaker 2: and threw out donuts. And his name was Klondike Jones,
Speaker 2: and he was just take it or leave it, and
Speaker 2: he was so funny. But he was like an institution,
Speaker 2: and Howard hired him and had him on the show.
Speaker 2: If you look it closely at the credits on Rocky
Speaker 2: thirty eight, you'll see the executive producer is Klondike Jones,
Speaker 2: and then it goes just on from there. The lesser
Speaker 2: jobs are all at the top as pro exec producers, writers, directors,
Speaker 2: all that, and then the lowliest one, the craft service
Speaker 2: to be Howard cut great all the little details.
Speaker 4: So were you ever afraid at any point that you
Speaker 4: were going to get typecast as like a Ted Striker
Speaker 4: kind of a person.
Speaker 2: Or oh yeah, I did. The press used to when
Speaker 2: I would go to this opening of a film or
Speaker 2: some event or something, they'd all be around, Hey, turn
Speaker 2: this way, and they say, hey, Robert airplane. Heyes, you
Speaker 2: think you'll ever do anything deside the airplane? Are you
Speaker 2: gonna be a real actor or you're just gonna They
Speaker 2: were rootless because back then it was. It was frowned
Speaker 2: upon to do sequels. Nowadays they call it a franchise.
Speaker 2: Now they looked for that, but back then it was
Speaker 2: really frowned upon. So that's why I turned down Airplane
Speaker 2: three because I was just being hounded by that. I
Speaker 2: wish I would have done. It had been fun to
Speaker 2: have the three of them. I don't know what it
Speaker 2: would have turned out like, but it would have been
Speaker 2: fun to do that anyway.
Speaker 4: So there really was talk of an Airplane three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had that's gripped and everything. There was just
Speaker 2: you know, but I wonder who would have been behind
Speaker 2: that one, because it doesn't sound like Ken was ready
Speaker 2: to come back and do another rule. Yeah. No, they
Speaker 2: would have had a new person.
Speaker 4: You made the sequel and you didn't get type cast,
Speaker 4: and then losing Nielsen isn't in the sequel and he
Speaker 4: ends up in all those movies.
Speaker 2: That's what he really I guess he really loved it,
Speaker 2: just being a looney.
Speaker 4: Was there any animosity between the Zucker Abram Zucker guys
Speaker 4: and the whole making of the sequel.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they didn't want to do it,
Speaker 2: but they told me, they said, you're gonna you can
Speaker 2: make the money. Because I didn't get paid. I got
Speaker 2: chicken feed for the airplane. When Airplane came.
Speaker 4: Out, I mean, there was no expectation that it was
Speaker 4: going to do the kind of business that it eventually did,
Speaker 4: was there, or I mean, did you guys know why
Speaker 4: you're doing this that you had because to run away
Speaker 4: wasn't it.
Speaker 2: If you knew you'd control the world. But actually, as
Speaker 2: things went along, I thought, maybe this will be it'll
Speaker 2: have a cult following colleges maybe or something like that,
Speaker 2: and then started thinking, wow, we all were thinking maybe
Speaker 2: it'll be a little more than I don't know, but
Speaker 2: we just got a feeling about that. But nobody talked
Speaker 2: about it because that would put the heck on it.
Speaker 2: And then somebody came up one day, someone came up
Speaker 2: that was just doing a little one day bit bart
Speaker 2: and he's all, hey, this is great. That thing's really
Speaker 2: gonna be a yet huh, And everyone turned and walked
Speaker 2: away from him. It was so fun. Gosh, it was fun.
Speaker 2: And then having it do what it did, just explode
Speaker 2: the way it did that was great, and all the
Speaker 2: people were just wonderful. Bob Stack, he was so great.
Speaker 2: We'd work together once before, and he was so great,
Speaker 2: and Lloyd was trying to he was a little uncertain,
Speaker 2: and the beginning on the first one and Peter Peter Grace.
Speaker 2: Peter told me that he read it, threw it down.
Speaker 2: What a pile of crap? What the hell is this?
Speaker 2: In his Asian colleague said, Peter, please take another look
Speaker 2: at it. I'd really want you to consider this because
Speaker 2: I think it's going to be something. So he did
Speaker 2: it without realizing, Okay, what's going on. Then he really
Speaker 2: figured out. He did his difficult, great job, and then
Speaker 2: who else read Lloyd and Bob and Peter and then Leslie,
Speaker 2: and Leslie said they opened the door for him to
Speaker 2: step into this kind of insanity and then they gave
Speaker 2: him a nudge, your gentle nudge threw the door. And
Speaker 2: once they did that, then he just took off when
Speaker 2: he was just the insane Leslie that we all came
Speaker 2: to know and love, either all the Naked Guns and
Speaker 2: Police Squad first about six episodes I think a police Squad,
Speaker 2: then all of the Naked Gun movies and then other
Speaker 2: things after that. It was just him being that goofy character.
Speaker 4: He became a franchise, you know, speaking of franchises. So,
Speaker 4: how many people ever come up to you and ask
Speaker 4: you if you have a drinking problem?
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, it happens still now, it still happen. I
Speaker 2: do a lot of golf charity golf tournaments, and they're
Speaker 2: very hesitant. They're worried to not overstepped anything. But that's
Speaker 2: what they always want to ask. If it's not a
Speaker 2: drinking problem, or you over macho grande or those different things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fine though, It's really fun get a kick out
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 4: I'm next, we're going to hear from actor James A.
Speaker 4: Watson Junior about his role as Lieutenant Done. Now, this
Speaker 4: is just an excerpt from a longer interview we did
Speaker 4: which is now available. Definitely check that out. He's got
Speaker 4: some great stories. I did want to ask you, what
Speaker 4: was your experience like working on airplane too, especially working
Speaker 4: with Ken Finkleman.
Speaker 1: Bob Hayes was I got that opportunity because my agent
Speaker 1: also represented him, so the catching people saw me as well.
Speaker 1: And there again there was a group of people that
Speaker 1: didn't know me initially, and but I went in and
Speaker 1: I was cast in the role and we got to
Speaker 1: the point and that was probably one of the most
Speaker 1: fun experience because it was a little bit like the
Speaker 1: Love of American style. It was a little not quite
Speaker 1: a silly, but it was a very stylish kind of
Speaker 1: point of view of humor.
Speaker 2: Ken was very open.
Speaker 1: He would he'd said he wrote a script, we'd shoot
Speaker 1: what he wrote, and then he would say, let's do
Speaker 1: another take, and if anybody got anything, if they want
Speaker 1: to bring into it or do, let's throw it in.
Speaker 1: So invariably I found some instinctive stick to do or
Speaker 1: do something, and it ended up in the film.
Speaker 7: He was very open to that.
Speaker 4: I don't know if you're here.
Speaker 1: There's a scene where I'm sitting in the cock that
Speaker 1: is the navigator and a guy comes in like he's
Speaker 1: cleaning the plane and he's vacuuming, and I'm looking at
Speaker 1: the command center and as he comes in, he's a
Speaker 1: black guy, and as he comes in, he's I do
Speaker 1: the high five.
Speaker 7: That was I put that in and I just did that,
Speaker 7: and I did that.
Speaker 1: Instinctively, and it was It's fun. It is fun, especially
Speaker 1: when they let you loose and having a theater background,
Speaker 1: in stage background, working with those people, you learn your craft.
Speaker 1: And I always young actors come and they ask me,
Speaker 1: and I tell them two things. Never give up number
Speaker 1: one and number two, be prepared, because so you never
Speaker 1: know when your opportunity will come, and you don't know,
Speaker 1: you got to be ready for it. When it does come,
Speaker 1: it's inably going to be something unlike what you expected,
Speaker 1: So you had to be able to stay in your
Speaker 1: toes and dance. Ken was an easy going guy. He
Speaker 1: made it very comfortable for all the actors. So we
Speaker 1: were like a stilly ensemble family of people that because
Speaker 1: they were all known as straight actors doing this stick,
Speaker 1: which was the whole joke. They too had backgrounds that
Speaker 1: made it work. On the contrasts of our styles and
Speaker 1: all that and the written word that they had worked out.
Speaker 2: And it was good.
Speaker 1: It was a fun experience. The only thing there's this
Speaker 1: at the end, and I extually seeing the Coppie and I.
Speaker 1: They had a problem the fire and we ended up
Speaker 1: going out in the outer space to find out what
Speaker 1: happened and ended up drifting into the atmosphere some place.
Speaker 1: So they put us on a belts and lifted us
Speaker 1: up in the ceiling on the studio. That was a
Speaker 1: little uncomfortable. They pinged on certain areas but we're all
Speaker 1: laughting and making the best of it.
Speaker 7: But kN was good.
Speaker 1: Ken was a nice guy, and the film obviously was
Speaker 1: over seen.
Speaker 4: It's such a different style of humor where you're having
Speaker 4: to play it serious, but then at the same time
Speaker 4: you have to be goofy just to find that right balance.
Speaker 1: Comedy is, yeah, Comedy is, as they say, is the
Speaker 1: hardest thing because it's about timing and you have to
Speaker 1: have an instinctive thing. And I've had opportunities to do
Speaker 1: some of the roles I've talked about that are broad,
Speaker 1: like that one and a couple of other things, but
Speaker 1: they rely on you having an understanding and a sense
Speaker 1: of timing so that you can make those things work.
Speaker 1: And I normally was considered a straight man, and people
Speaker 1: would play off in man that too. I was the
Speaker 1: fact when I did The Love American Style. One of
Speaker 1: my Ted Lange and I are woke from the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: and Ted and I were good friends, and the director
Speaker 1: was a guy named Norman Abbott, who was I think
Speaker 1: a cousin or something from lou Abbing Abbot and Costello.
Speaker 1: And he called us to his house one Saturday and said,
Speaker 1: I have this notion that you and Ted could be
Speaker 1: the next Martin and Lewis and I could get I
Speaker 1: have contacts in Vegas, and I think we could put
Speaker 1: together an act and take you guys to Vegas and
Speaker 1: make some serious money.
Speaker 4: And that started with me.
Speaker 1: I was a young man with a young family land,
Speaker 1: but I was game. Ted had other things going and
Speaker 1: he didn't want to do it, so it didn't happen.
Speaker 1: But I was surprised from the beginning when I started
Speaker 1: my career that I had too much success doing comedy
Speaker 1: stuff as I did doing dramatic stuff. And it was
Speaker 1: very a lot of those things where I remember with
Speaker 1: great fondness because I was having fun, but the timing
Speaker 1: was there, the things, the instincts were there and it worked.
Speaker 1: But again going back to training and whatever gift, you
Speaker 1: might have to shape it. But it's hard knowing, not strictly.
Speaker 1: There's different types of comedy, different levels of.
Speaker 2: It, and you can't.
Speaker 1: You have to know where the boundaries are and what
Speaker 1: your instincts are telling you about what they want me
Speaker 1: to do. In the big picture, you can't.
Speaker 2: You have to fit in.
Speaker 1: You can't do some big thing or some broad thing
Speaker 1: that's going to end up on the cutting room floor,
Speaker 1: because it's not consistent with the big picture.
Speaker 7: You're only part of the picture.
Speaker 1: And I think when I was doing the Organization, Sydney
Speaker 1: had just for fen the shooting Bucket the Preacher with
Speaker 1: Harry Bella Fonte and Ruby d and he invited me
Speaker 1: to he was editing the film. He invited me to
Speaker 1: come and watch him edit the film, and I was
Speaker 1: really bitten when I saw how you could take pieces
Speaker 1: and put pieces together. That really helped me with my
Speaker 1: acting too, because then I understood better what was going
Speaker 1: to be usable and what wasn't. And I did an
Speaker 1: episode of a show TV show and the editor and
Speaker 1: the director came up to me at one point and said,
Speaker 1: we really appreciate when because when I'm not having my
Speaker 1: own lines, I'm still at my stage background. You don't
Speaker 1: quit acting, even if I'm off camera. You stay in character.
Speaker 1: And if it's a broad a wide take, I keep working.
Speaker 1: And he said, we always can cut to you for
Speaker 1: a reaction because you're still in the scene.
Speaker 2: You keep yourself in the scene.
Speaker 1: So I learned how to do that too, and sometimes
Speaker 1: I would insinuate myself cleverly into a scene that on
Speaker 1: paper wasn't going to be established that way, but I
Speaker 1: was again a way of finding how to support the
Speaker 1: story and whatever was happening at that moment.
Speaker 4: And finally we're going to hear from writers Al Jean
Speaker 4: and Mike Reese all about their experience on airplane to
Speaker 4: the sequel. I know that Al grew up in Detroit.
Speaker 4: How about yourself, where did you grow up at?
Speaker 15: I grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, right outside of Hartford, Connecticut,
Speaker 15: and it was just a it was a blue collar
Speaker 15: factory town.
Speaker 4: And then you went to Harvard.
Speaker 15: Yes, I went to Harvard. I went to Harvard specifically
Speaker 15: to join the Harvard Lampoon. I just had read about
Speaker 15: a humor magazine there. I didn't really know much about it,
Speaker 15: and at the time, it was not considered this pathway
Speaker 15: to show business or entertainment. It was just a fun
Speaker 15: club out of college. And so that was why I
Speaker 15: went to Harvard. And I met Al Jean freshman week.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, so you guys have known each other for
Speaker 4: a while.
Speaker 15: From the beginning. Yeah, I always tell this. I told
Speaker 15: the story so much I don't know if it's true anymore.
Speaker 15: Which was I was sitting in my dorm room and
Speaker 15: Al was passing by. Al was sixteen when he got
Speaker 15: into college. I was a very brilliant guy, and he's all.
Speaker 15: We had a rocking chair in the room, and he said,
Speaker 15: can I rock in your chair? And I said okay,
Speaker 15: And it seemed a little weird, but he came in
Speaker 15: and just rocked in this chair. And I learned over
Speaker 15: the years Al loves a rocking chair, and he'll rock
Speaker 15: in a straight back chair. He likes the rock And
Speaker 15: for one of his birthdays, I got him a big
Speaker 15: bentwood rocking chair and I think he rocked.
Speaker 5: It to pieces within two or three months.
Speaker 15: But that's how we met, and we became very good friends.
Speaker 15: And I joined the Harvard Lampoon and he saw I
Speaker 15: was just having fun there, and I guess I told
Speaker 15: him you meet a lot of girls on the lampoon,
Speaker 15: which was not true at all. But so then he
Speaker 15: joined the lampoon and he'd been a very quiet guy,
Speaker 15: and then he just came in with this, you compete
Speaker 15: to get on the lampoon.
Speaker 5: You're right, a series of six.
Speaker 15: Pieces over eight weeks, and most people I don't get
Speaker 15: on the first time they try out.
Speaker 5: I didn't get on the first time.
Speaker 15: You have to do it multiple times and they take
Speaker 15: about seven people out of every hundred who compete. But
Speaker 15: I'll just he went in there, he got on right away.
Speaker 15: He was a slam dunk.
Speaker 5: And then that was it.
Speaker 15: From sophomore year on, we were roommates, and then we
Speaker 15: went to work together in New York and shared an apartment.
Speaker 15: And that's it's funny. It's a career that went from
Speaker 15: our partnership, that went from nineteen seventy eight to Last Friday.
Speaker 5: Which was my last stay at the Simpsons.
Speaker 4: So have you written comedy before you got to Lampun?
Speaker 4: He must have had some interest in that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 15: I always liked writing, and I didn't I never intended
Speaker 15: to be a comedy writer.
Speaker 5: I didn't know anyone in that business.
Speaker 15: But I just liked writing funny stories and I would
Speaker 15: write them and put them in my drawer. It would
Speaker 15: drive my mom crazy, and I guess I wrote humorous
Speaker 15: pieces for the school news paper, and the school also
Speaker 15: had a the local paper would print a high school
Speaker 15: page every month, and I would always have a humorous
Speaker 15: piece in that. So, yeah, I liked writing jokes and comedy.
Speaker 15: I really never thought of it as a profession. The
Speaker 15: closest I could imagine was I thought I might go
Speaker 15: into advertising.
Speaker 5: I thought that's what people with what we're creative do.
Speaker 12: For a job.
Speaker 2: What were some of your pieces for the Lampoon, Like
Speaker 2: the Harvard Lampoon.
Speaker 15: I wasn't great. I was really I really wasn't the
Speaker 15: best writer. There was one that was very popular. It
Speaker 15: was that it was called Samuel Johnson's Party Jokes, and
Speaker 15: it was a parody of Playboy's Party Jokes as if
Speaker 15: written by Samuel Johnson, and so they were written in
Speaker 15: eighteenth century pros but they were really dirty.
Speaker 5: That's the only one I can think.
Speaker 15: Oh, we did a big Mad Magazine parody when we
Speaker 15: were there that I oversaw.
Speaker 2: We did.
Speaker 15: We have at Harvard there is a pretentious literary magazine
Speaker 15: called The Advocate. So we did something called The Advocate,
Speaker 15: which was just a mashup of Mad Magazine and this
Speaker 15: pretentious literary magazine. And we did a kind of more
Speaker 15: Drucker parody of the Seventh.
Speaker 5: Seal and that kind of thing.
Speaker 7: It was good.
Speaker 5: I think it was really good.
Speaker 15: Al and I wrote a piece together called Spooky Magic.
Speaker 15: We wrote it was it was a parody of magic
Speaker 15: books you get when you're a kid, and in fact,
Speaker 15: we just I think we just stole the title. I
Speaker 15: think the book we had both read as kids was
Speaker 15: Spooky Magic, and it's the first thing we ever wrote together,
Speaker 15: and it got printed in the magazine, and a junior
Speaker 15: year of college, were contacted by National Lampoon, the National
Speaker 15: humor magazine, and they said, we love your work, but
Speaker 15: we want to bring you out here.
Speaker 5: And they took us and brought us to New York.
Speaker 15: And we were freelance right earning money as writers for
Speaker 15: a National Lampoon while we were still in college, and
Speaker 15: then we graduated right into the job. We just walked
Speaker 15: out of college and moved to New York and wrote
Speaker 15: for National Lampoon for a year.
Speaker 5: There's no struggle to it. We've been very lucky. And
Speaker 5: that was it in both of us.
Speaker 15: Once we started working, we never stopped. There was really,
Speaker 15: I think maybe six weeks and forty five years where
Speaker 15: we were out of work.
Speaker 4: I'm always fascinated by writing duos, like how do you
Speaker 4: split up the work? Who comes up with the ideas?
Speaker 4: How do you do what you do?
Speaker 5: In our case, we do it a word at a
Speaker 5: time and a line at a time.
Speaker 15: I know people work in different way, but we just
Speaker 15: we throw out different ideas, and once we both like
Speaker 15: an idea, we just start writing it.
Speaker 5: And pitch jokes to each other.
Speaker 15: And a lot of people think, oh, a comedy writing team,
Speaker 15: you should be you should compliment each other. And one
Speaker 15: guy good at this and one guy's good at that,
Speaker 15: and Alan I think eighty to ninety percent exactly the same,
Speaker 15: and if one of us pitches a joke, the other
Speaker 15: one goes.
Speaker 5: I was just thinking that.
Speaker 15: So we're just so we're like a man with two heads.
Speaker 15: We're just we can think twice as much, but we're
Speaker 15: always thinking the same things. It was a strange way
Speaker 15: to work, but completely effortless, and we never fought, and
Speaker 15: it worked out. When there's two of you writing, you're
Speaker 15: always a draft ahead. Our first drafts would read like
Speaker 15: other people's second drafts, and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Did you have similar comedy backgrounds to be able to
Speaker 4: bounce stuff off of each other so well?
Speaker 15: I was really immersed in comedy and I just loved
Speaker 15: it just.
Speaker 5: As a hobby.
Speaker 15: I knew the Marx Brothers inside out, and Woody Allen
Speaker 15: I knew inside in college, I had a big Woody
Speaker 15: Allen poster in the dorm room.
Speaker 5: And Al he this was not his career path.
Speaker 15: He was a math major, he was a pre med student.
Speaker 15: He probably would have gone on to be some brilliant
Speaker 15: medical scientists. And I brought him down the path a comedy.
Speaker 15: I got him into it.
Speaker 2: He's just so smart.
Speaker 15: Anything he would have set his mind to, he would
Speaker 15: have become the best at it. And it just happened
Speaker 15: to be comedy writing.
Speaker 4: You're working for a national lampoon for a year and
Speaker 4: then what happens.
Speaker 15: Okay, So here's the deal. There's these two guys named
Speaker 15: Max Prost's and Tom Gamble. They were two years ahead
Speaker 15: of us at Harvard Lampoon like Alan me. They were
Speaker 15: president and vice president of lampoon. And everybody loves these guys.
Speaker 15: They're wonderful writers and there's so much fun to be
Speaker 15: around and they're so funny, and so Alan I built
Speaker 15: a career taking jobs that they turned down. So our
Speaker 15: first show biz job was writing a movie for meat Loaf,
Speaker 15: the rockstar called Fatmin in Outer Space. Because Max and
Speaker 15: Tom turned down the job and recommended us, and years
Speaker 15: later they were offered the job on the Simpsons before
Speaker 15: it came on, and they turned that down and recommended us.
Speaker 15: And in between was Airplane two. They had worked with
Speaker 15: Ken Finkleman, the writer director at Saturday Night Live, and
Speaker 15: when he was doing Airplane two, he went to them
Speaker 15: first and they didn't want to do that, and they
Speaker 15: recommended us. And I think Ken read our articles in
Speaker 15: National Lampoon. We had never written anything like a script
Speaker 15: or anything professional, and he liked our articles. We would
Speaker 15: write stuff from New York like we'd work all day
Speaker 15: at National Lampoon and at night we would write him
Speaker 15: jokes for his Airplane two script. He had written a
Speaker 15: very funny script, and we'd send him jokes and then
Speaker 15: he brought us out for a week. We snuck away
Speaker 15: from our jobs and just spent a week in Hollywood
Speaker 15: writing jokes with Ken for the movie. And then finally
Speaker 15: about ten months into our National Lampoon job, where they
Speaker 15: really liked us. This is a terrible thing we did,
Speaker 15: but we get the call from Airplane two saying we
Speaker 15: need you out here tomorrow. We're shooting the movie. We
Speaker 15: want you on the set tomorrow, and Al and I
Speaker 15: walked into the office the next day and quit our
Speaker 15: jobs and we ran out on the lease and we
Speaker 15: flew to LA and if the call came Sunday night,
Speaker 15: we were on the set Tuesday morning.
Speaker 14: Yeah, did you tell him that earlier? We had worked
Speaker 14: for a week and they each had to make an
Speaker 14: alibi why we were going to La.
Speaker 5: Our whole career goes is based on this, and it's
Speaker 5: a real bad thing to do.
Speaker 15: They really liked us at National Lampoon, and I felt
Speaker 15: bad about it, but they forgave us, and we'd wind
Speaker 15: up quitting another job and they forgave us.
Speaker 5: And just one more quick story, which was we.
Speaker 7: Had a lease.
Speaker 15: We had to furnished the part in New York, and
Speaker 15: we just ran and we said, look, we'll keep paying
Speaker 15: rent and that kind of thing. And the woman said, no,
Speaker 15: don't worry about it.
Speaker 3: Just go.
Speaker 5: I'll ship all your stuff out to you. So we
Speaker 5: moved to LA.
Speaker 15: We're working on airplane two. The stuff never comes, it
Speaker 15: never comes. Finally she sent one box and it was
Speaker 15: full of winter coats that we did not need in LA.
Speaker 15: And then final we go, where's our other stuff? And
Speaker 15: she said I boxed it and put it in the
Speaker 15: hallway and it all got stolen. So we had nothing,
Speaker 15: and that is that one last thing I wanted to
Speaker 15: see if al remembers this, which was we were working
Speaker 15: so hard and so long on airplane two and just
Speaker 15: just we each had one suitcase full of stuff to
Speaker 15: get us through that, and.
Speaker 5: We had no time even to do laundry.
Speaker 15: So I remember going to We're at Paramount, going to
Speaker 15: the company store to buy socks and underwear because I
Speaker 15: didn't have time to do laundry.
Speaker 14: I remember our Tatch loan toes, each one hundred dollars,
Speaker 14: and then like after week, he was like, here was
Speaker 14: my one hundred dollars.
Speaker 5: Albo, do you remember this?
Speaker 15: We were in the company store of Paramount buying socks
Speaker 15: and Jim Brooks, James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks come
Speaker 15: in and they start cutting up. I just I'm watching
Speaker 15: them douche stick in the company store, having no idea
Speaker 15: that about ten years later less than that, we'd be
Speaker 15: working for one guy and writing for the other guy.
Speaker 14: And ironically, I'm recording Albert for a show tomorrow with Jim.
Speaker 14: Jim had done a taxi beer and then in terms
Speaker 14: of endearment, yeah, he was huge.
Speaker 4: Then when does the Fat Guy and Outer Space come
Speaker 4: in is that after Airplane Tour?
Speaker 15: Is that before Oh Fatmin and Outer Space? That the
Speaker 15: meat lop thing that was earlier. That was literally the
Speaker 15: first show biz thing we ever wrote, and it was
Speaker 15: a It was just a treatment based on a children's book.
Speaker 4: What was it like working with with Ken Finkleman and
Speaker 4: what were your responsibilities.
Speaker 14: The funniest joke in the movie, by all accounts, is
Speaker 14: the one where Shatner is behind the screen and then
Speaker 14: he just walks and it's the door that was Ken's
Speaker 14: that It's a great example of Ken's humor. And then
Speaker 14: I wanted also mentioned that the whole run about Buddy
Speaker 14: couldn't take it over Michell Grande. That was all pitched
Speaker 14: by Mike at one point, and I thought he had
Speaker 14: written down or something he couldn't believe. He just said,
Speaker 14: that's the two things I want to get on the record.
Speaker 15: Did the Jeopardy joke which was so popular? We were
Speaker 15: a lot of jokes, I think, by my estimate, Alan I.
Speaker 5: Wrote about a third of the movie. Third of the jokes.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean it was mostly Ken. But the writer
Speaker 14: of Gil had a policy that he didn't had a
Speaker 14: little bit in the original writer would get the credit
Speaker 14: unless you really have had a lot. And so went
Speaker 14: to Ken, who's very funny and what was a blast
Speaker 14: to be with. The Only thing was we were with
Speaker 14: him all the time, like we moved so fast, like
Speaker 14: we were and he said, oh, you boys can't live
Speaker 14: in this apartment that where they.
Speaker 2: Have to notify your next of kidd if.
Speaker 14: So he moved us into his house. And then I
Speaker 14: remember we were falling asleep and he goes, okay, now,
Speaker 14: think of some jokes before the morning. In other words,
Speaker 14: pitch in your sleep. But he's a really funny guy.
Speaker 14: Yeah he is.
Speaker 5: He is a libertarian or a communist or a socialist.
Speaker 5: He's Canadian.
Speaker 15: He had extreme left wing opinions, and yet he was
Speaker 15: a slave driver. He worked us so hard and was unbelievable.
Speaker 15: But on the flip side, and this is something that
Speaker 15: just occurred to me the other day, al was he
Speaker 15: brought us onto this movie. He introduced us to everyone.
Speaker 15: We were really aties on the set with the stars
Speaker 15: and the cameramen and friends with the producers. He brought
Speaker 15: us to meet the heads of the studio. Any Hollywood
Speaker 15: party he went to, he'd bring us. We met more
Speaker 15: big shots. It's not how you what you generally do
Speaker 15: with uncredited punch up people. So he really just opened
Speaker 15: every door for us, which he didn't.
Speaker 2: Have to do. The credit thing was weird.
Speaker 14: It was, as they say, it was like a writer's
Speaker 14: guild policy that I didn't understand in I have more
Speaker 14: understanding of it now, but I still think there should
Speaker 14: be a way that people get their names on them.
Speaker 14: But we did thanks to Ken.
Speaker 2: He put the special thanks credit in.
Speaker 15: So that was it so al and I we quit
Speaker 15: our job. We fly out to LA the next day.
Speaker 15: They were not only on set we are in. They
Speaker 15: put us in a wooden shed on stage. It was
Speaker 15: this windowless wooden shed with a typewriter in it, and
Speaker 15: they had us writing jokes on the set. They would
Speaker 15: just they'd be filming, and if they'd hit a spot,
Speaker 15: they said, all right, we need more of this.
Speaker 2: It couldn't be more pressure.
Speaker 15: It was so crazy, and I believe the very first
Speaker 15: thing we did on set it was again it was
Speaker 15: a sequel joke and this movie Peter Graves is.
Speaker 5: Hitting on a little boy.
Speaker 15: In the second movie he's hitting on a dog, and
Speaker 15: they go, we need more jokes for Peter Graves hitting
Speaker 15: on a dog, and it was so low.
Speaker 5: And vulgar or welcome to Hollywood.
Speaker 14: I remember there was a lot of stuff we wrote
Speaker 14: that wasn't used for the computer on the Ship Party
Speaker 14: in two thousand and one, and I think Ken wound
Speaker 14: up being the voice of the computer, which is funny
Speaker 14: because the original Hell was voiced by a Canadian. Wow,
Speaker 14: these Canadian computers that are taking over the world.
Speaker 4: There was a time limit on this, right the release
Speaker 4: date was set, so that's why there was so much
Speaker 4: pressure to get everything out.
Speaker 14: Yeah, Christmas, what year, eighty three, eighty two, eighty two,
Speaker 14: Christmas eighty two, same year as TOTSI, and we're going
Speaker 14: to do whatever. It was ten weeks and they're like, oh,
Speaker 14: two more weeks, two more weeks. You know, the movie
Speaker 14: was coming out in three weeks, so it's okay, that's it.
Speaker 10: It was.
Speaker 15: It was a real gamble we took with witting a
Speaker 15: steady job we liked for I think two months employment,
Speaker 15: but then we wound up being six or nine months work.
Speaker 5: They just kept bringing us back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was really fun.
Speaker 14: It's so weird when you're screenwriting, and honestly, the only
Speaker 14: other movie I've worked more on it was Simpsons movie,
Speaker 14: and you don't usually see like the Styers and the
Speaker 14: production first.
Speaker 2: It really takes years to get to that point. So
Speaker 2: we entered show business backwards.
Speaker 15: In I'm gonna say nineteen eighty Alan, I are at
Speaker 15: Harvard and there were posters up come see a free movie,
Speaker 15: and we a free movie, shure, and we go, and
Speaker 15: the movie that they're showing is this incredibly rough cut
Speaker 15: of Airplane. The movie I remember had no ending. It
Speaker 15: was hilarious, and we were on the Harvard Lampoon. A
Speaker 15: bunch of other lampoon people came and we shanghaied those guys.
Speaker 15: We brought Zucker and Zucker and Abraham's and just dragged
Speaker 15: them over to the Harvard Lampoon building and gave them
Speaker 15: a tour, and they were very nice, but they were
Speaker 15: a little baffled why they were there. So there we
Speaker 15: are just pawning over these amazing guys, and I would
Speaker 15: never guess, oh, two years that would become the biggest.
Speaker 5: Comedy of all time.
Speaker 15: And three years later we're on the set making the sequel.
Speaker 14: It's all crazy, and we were pretty sure they didn't
Speaker 14: want this sequel to be made, which I understand because
Speaker 14: they had worked on the first one a long time,
Speaker 14: but he'd sold the rights, so it was a weird
Speaker 14: thing going from like they were our heroes to now
Speaker 14: they're madadis.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was funny.
Speaker 15: They put out a press release, which again in hindsight
Speaker 15: makes perfect sense, but they put out a press release saying,
Speaker 15: we have nothing to do with Airplane two. And then
Speaker 15: I think that summer Top Secret came out and it's
Speaker 15: an amazing movie, but it bombed, and so we were
Speaker 15: going to put out a press release saying we have
Speaker 15: nothing to do with Top Secret. But they were a
Speaker 15: little antagonistic. And then two of them, Abraham's and David Zucker,
Speaker 15: both came to the office separately, just the wish as well.
Speaker 5: Very kind.
Speaker 14: I understand completely. It wasn't like you did sequels to
Speaker 14: comedy so much back then, so you know, things are
Speaker 14: like a one shot and they clearly was lifetime. Think
Speaker 14: Openawi said they had years to make that movie, although
Speaker 14: he did say one funny thing, you go there were
Speaker 14: three of them.
Speaker 2: There were three of them, and Ken, we're here with you.
Speaker 2: That's three what are we invisible?
Speaker 15: And that was it's just to put it in historical context.
Speaker 15: They weren't making a ton of sequels anyhow. A few
Speaker 15: years before had been Godfather, to which was people going, Wow,
Speaker 15: a sequel to a big movie. That's weird, and one
Speaker 15: right one. They were they would make sequels, but it's
Speaker 15: not a de facto thing. And I mentioned that all
Speaker 15: the movies of that era that were so big didn't
Speaker 15: have sequels. There's no Et two and there's no Animal
Speaker 15: House too.
Speaker 14: And I would say in the movie too that whatever
Speaker 14: the number Rocky thirty eight poster, that that's Ken's joke
Speaker 14: got a huge lass. It was you didn't think there
Speaker 14: were gonna be four more Rockies, And the idea of
Speaker 14: it was really funny.
Speaker 15: Sequels were a new thing, and Al, I don't know
Speaker 15: if you know this. The Zuckers, they did pitch an
Speaker 15: Airplane two which was called Airplane two the Godfather and
Speaker 15: was gonna have Robert.
Speaker 5: Hayes and Julie Haggarty.
Speaker 15: In a big Godfather parody, and Paramount turned that down
Speaker 15: and they just wanted the same movie all over again
Speaker 15: and again, how do you parody a movie that's all jokes,
Speaker 15: And so they said, just do the same jokes again
Speaker 15: but a little different and bring back the same extra
Speaker 15: as you had. They didn't know what the formula was,
Speaker 15: but they just took as much from the first movie
Speaker 15: as they could to put into the second movie.
Speaker 14: Charlie bluehorn Man tear them out then and was always
Speaker 14: trying to get a Godfather three made, which he eventually did.
Speaker 14: I bet that's one reason they didn't do the Zuckers idea.
Speaker 5: I think that's absolutely I think that's what they say
Speaker 5: in the book.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, were there any jokes that you guys were really
Speaker 4: trying to get in there that just didn't fit.
Speaker 14: A lot of times? This was true Kara Shanling too.
Speaker 14: It was more like convincing Ken that stuff that was there.
Speaker 14: His stuff was great. He was always like worrying, is
Speaker 14: this not good?
Speaker 2: Is that not good?
Speaker 14: And I don't think the movie is great because obviously
Speaker 14: it's derivative. But there was stuff that it was really
Speaker 14: funny that you kind of had to just remind him, No,
Speaker 14: this was funny when you first saw it.
Speaker 2: It's still funny. It was funny.
Speaker 15: He didn't want to shoot the not fun stuff. I
Speaker 15: remember there's a scene where they have to they go
Speaker 15: into the.
Speaker 5: Back of the ship to blow up the computer core,
Speaker 5: and he just didn't want to film it. He was
Speaker 5: a hard thing to make funny. And I saw some
Speaker 5: cameras weren't even pointing in the right direction, and.
Speaker 15: Alan, Alan are just going, Ken, you gotta do this.
Speaker 15: There is the whole thing, too, the idea that here's
Speaker 15: the greatest comedy ever has come out. And and for
Speaker 15: the sequel they hire a guy, a writer who's never directed,
Speaker 15: and two twenty one year old kids who haven't done anything.
Speaker 15: So I guess the miracle is that it came out okay.
Speaker 14: Talking about the first one, a story I heard is
Speaker 14: that Doug Kenny, the lampun genius who co wrote Animal
Speaker 14: House and the Aarbook, payer, I mean, when he saw
Speaker 14: Airplane he was ashen. He was like, oh my god,
Speaker 14: we'll never be able to do this good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 14: Fortunately he was passed away so it couldn't cheer him up.
Speaker 14: But by the way, I've always thought, I wish someone
Speaker 14: could have told that Kenny how loved Kaddy Shack would be,
Speaker 14: because he didn't know. And it's one of the people's
Speaker 14: favored comedies. Now it's really it's nuts.
Speaker 5: Notice there's no Airplane three.
Speaker 2: There was one.
Speaker 14: There were They were going to hire us to work
Speaker 14: on one, and there was a script. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 14: I think it made money because I think it was.
Speaker 14: Ken was very good with the budget. So it only
Speaker 14: costs seven and a half million. I think it grossed
Speaker 14: maybe thirty Yeah, which after Reynolds taken out. It made
Speaker 14: my money and it's played a long time. It definitely
Speaker 14: wasn't profit.
Speaker 15: A strange cheap thing about the movie is it didn't
Speaker 15: have a score. Nobody scored it. I think they just
Speaker 15: recut the score of the first movie for this one.
Speaker 15: Little strange things about the movie, I should say too.
Speaker 14: Ken went on to become the Canadian Ricky Gervais. He
Speaker 14: did The Newsroom, which was this fantastic show before The
Speaker 14: Office that was a lot like The Office, and he's
Speaker 14: won numerous award. I mean, he's really a comedy hero,
Speaker 14: especially in Canada.
Speaker 5: He also played Grease Too, which again was just a
Speaker 5: major flop and disappointment that same summer, and now that
Speaker 5: is beloved and there are Grease Too sing alongs and
Speaker 5: that kind of thing.
Speaker 14: Paramount they made that and they said, oh, got it
Speaker 14: failed because we didn't have the start. So with the
Speaker 14: Airplane Too, they turned and then they put in stuff
Speaker 14: that ken and we all got went at the end.
Speaker 14: Oh God, just making us do the same jokes at
Speaker 14: certain points that were in the first one, which I hit.
Speaker 14: My brother said airplane too much like the first one,
Speaker 14: and he was fine, I understand that I'm playing completely.
Speaker 4: Robert Hayes told me a story about a whole sequence
Speaker 4: that he swears was shot and just never happened.
Speaker 2: Was it in the desert?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it became like a beach movie almost.
Speaker 14: Boo yep, I want to By the way, both Robert
Speaker 14: and Julie were wonderful to work with, really nice, funny, great.
Speaker 2: Almost everybody that we worked with was really nice. Those
Speaker 2: two in particular couldn't have been better.
Speaker 5: They were really and Steven Stucker also it was very
Speaker 5: fresh to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Even the big venerable stars were mostly very crazy.
Speaker 2: It's really nice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Raze Lloyd Bridge.
Speaker 15: Is very nice.
Speaker 5: So it's sunny. Bono's in the movie, and he wanted.
Speaker 7: To hire us.
Speaker 5: He wanted to hire us.
Speaker 15: He said, I want to do a Sicilian Cluseau, which
Speaker 15: would have been a nice thing for him.
Speaker 5: Sunning Bone an interesting.
Speaker 15: Character because the joke figure in Hollywood who somehow achieved
Speaker 15: so much and wound up in Congress. And when you
Speaker 15: met him, he was the most magnetic man I ever
Speaker 15: met in my life. He just was so sweet and
Speaker 15: charming that it suddenly all made sense.
Speaker 14: He had worked for Phil Spectors too, And when I
Speaker 14: said Phil was a genius and Sonny had handle a
Speaker 14: lot of that amazing stuff in the early sixties, but
Speaker 14: really brilliant, you didn't answered your question. Yeah, we did
Speaker 14: shoot that thing. We had Annet Flinicello, we met her,
Speaker 14: and then it was another case where Finkelman, maybe correctly,
Speaker 14: just said I'm suddenly too nervous of veering too fire
Speaker 14: from the original, and the whole thing got cut.
Speaker 5: I'll say this.
Speaker 15: Al doesn't have to agree with me on this because
Speaker 15: they just watched the movie again and after thirty years,
Speaker 15: I go, oh, this is edited so badly. And Alan
Speaker 15: Ten was very kind bringing us to editing. We were
Speaker 15: very friendly with the editor, who was a charming character.
Speaker 15: He's an Oscar nominated editor for The Hunt for Red October,
Speaker 15: which was not a comedy.
Speaker 5: But I watched the movie. The timing is so bad.
Speaker 5: The jokes.
Speaker 15: You know, there's running jokes that go a beat too
Speaker 15: much where it just jumps out of you. I think
Speaker 15: there's a much better movie in there that you could
Speaker 15: copple together from footage in about three weeks.
Speaker 14: Well, the editor was Dennis Burkler, and I agree with you,
Speaker 14: but I would say that the final edit was gone
Speaker 14: by the studio, you know, in their notes. In my opinion,
Speaker 14: Dennis said this really funny thing where he put the
Speaker 14: word fucking me before everything. You go again, you want
Speaker 14: to fucking cookie in one of the the ways can
Speaker 14: we do be snecky in Kennonis and we tape like
Speaker 14: you know, fucking editing machine, fucking coffee cup labels on
Speaker 14: every thing in Dennis's office. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: It feels like the movie did a lot for you guys.
Speaker 4: But your next gig was that nine to five, the
Speaker 4: TV show?
Speaker 8: Was it there?
Speaker 15: Not necessarily the news, not necessarily the news first, but
Speaker 15: by the way, Ken it had brought us out for
Speaker 15: Airplane two and got us a movie assignment too, so
Speaker 15: we had a backup job and we did that afterwards,
Speaker 15: and then I even turned that script into a TV pilot,
Speaker 15: so he kept parceling out the work to us.
Speaker 5: He was very good that way.
Speaker 2: But here's the big deal.
Speaker 15: We're working on Airplane two, and I'm excited, and I
Speaker 15: remember one night we're out to dinner and I'm telling
Speaker 15: people Airplane two is gonna be funnier than Airplane. And
Speaker 15: now just afterwards said I don't think you should be
Speaker 15: telling people that, and he was right.
Speaker 5: In the movie just fizzled.
Speaker 2: It came out.
Speaker 5: It was okay.
Speaker 15: If it had been another hit, and especially we'd gotten
Speaker 15: writing credit, I think we'd be movie writer right now.
Speaker 5: Instead of TV guys. But it just didn't give us.
Speaker 15: The career boost that could have, and we wound up
Speaker 15: in TV, which has been just fine.
Speaker 14: I just remember I thought then and still think Airplane
Speaker 14: is really one of the funniest movies. I always think
Speaker 14: nothing I do will match up what else I can say.
Speaker 14: There was a writer's assistant, lydd Oblinger, who was really
Speaker 14: funny and creative. She became a producer once she went
Speaker 14: to work on the movie. Don Simpson, the head of
Speaker 14: Paramount If she was his assistant, and he said, you'll
Speaker 14: never work again, But she's worked plenty. She was really
Speaker 14: fun and that was back when An would do these
Speaker 14: rewrites with us all night, and then he would she
Speaker 14: would tape it in type and cut and paste, and
Speaker 14: then we would go to I think it was called
Speaker 14: Barbara's Script Service to something in Hollywood. They would come
Speaker 14: back with the script completely done, ready for the morning
Speaker 14: shoot at eight am.
Speaker 4: Sounds like you guys were running a marathon.
Speaker 15: Is exhausted as I've ever been, as hard as we
Speaker 15: ever worked, and we've had some pretty tough jobs.
Speaker 2: But it was fun. It was really weird.
Speaker 14: It was exhilarating. And then the thing where the big
Speaker 14: comedy that that winter was Tootsi and the big paramount
Speaker 14: hit was shooting at the same time. It was forty
Speaker 14: eight hours and it was funny. His rumors about it were, Oh,
Speaker 14: they don't know this movie, isn't it? Is it a
Speaker 14: comedy of the drama, And of course Eddie Murphy was fantastic,
Speaker 14: so you just never know. I read much later Bob
Speaker 14: Fossy had a great piece of advice, which is always
Speaker 14: getting your next job before the movie comes out. Has
Speaker 14: he learned that with Sweet Charity, which is a great
Speaker 14: movie but it didn't do well.
Speaker 15: Eddie was supposed to do a cameo in Airplane Too.
Speaker 15: Is he shooting forty eight hours right next door and
Speaker 15: at the last minute he sent his friend. It was
Speaker 15: another black comedian. It's the guy hustling shovel tickets in
Speaker 15: the airport. So he's in the movie watching it again.
Speaker 15: George went from Cheers is in the first five minutes
Speaker 15: of the movie. There's a couple of name actors and
Speaker 15: very small roles in the.
Speaker 2: Movie, as well as General burk Alter from Hogan's Here.
Speaker 14: Yeah, and.
Speaker 15: You know the long scene shot with in the White
Speaker 15: House with rip Torn playing Ronald Reagan. Courses Ripped Torn
Speaker 15: another big star in the movie, playing whatever, the head
Speaker 15: of NASA or something. But he also did this extended
Speaker 15: Reagan imitation and I met him years later and he
Speaker 15: was so mad they had cut all that stuff.
Speaker 14: I think because they didn't want to do the political jokes.
Speaker 14: I think it started where he was holding the hands
Speaker 14: of two black guys and then you widen and it
Speaker 14: was just shake hands. Did he There was no dated
Speaker 14: dish and I think that they were like, oh, no,
Speaker 14: this is gonna ruffle feathers, and yeah, it's amazing for
Speaker 14: a seven and a half million dollar movie.
Speaker 2: How much was cut?
Speaker 15: And I think what I saw on Amazon, which the
Speaker 15: cut that's out there, is not what was in theaters,
Speaker 15: but I can't put my finger on it.
Speaker 14: It would be really hard to remember because stuff went
Speaker 14: in very late, like when they put in the scene
Speaker 14: with people slapping the woman on the plane or to
Speaker 14: get her from stop her from panicking. I think that's
Speaker 14: in my memory of the movie was it was not
Speaker 14: in for most of the time.
Speaker 15: We cut and finished the movie and then went back
Speaker 15: for I think a week of reshoots when we did
Speaker 15: extra jokes and Hervey villages wound up in the.
Speaker 5: Movie, things like that the little breather, yeah breather joke.
Speaker 14: By the way, it actually they did it in an airplane.
Speaker 14: The first one too, the cup we saw at Harvard,
Speaker 14: which was fantastic. When I saw it in the theater
Speaker 14: it was even better, I think, like the Israel Airlines joke,
Speaker 14: and the first one was added after we saw it.
Speaker 14: It couldn't believe that it's as good as it was.
Speaker 14: They made it better, Like when we saw it, you
Speaker 14: were really laughing and then you peed it out a
Speaker 14: little towards the end, but they fixed that.
Speaker 2: When they finally released it. It was great.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was funny.
Speaker 15: It did with a half baked parody of the Wizard
Speaker 15: of Oz and that changed because they ended with Auto
Speaker 15: the Autopilot, but then Top Secret ended with parody of Wizard,
Speaker 15: the Wizard of Oz. They always knew, Oh, I guess
Speaker 15: that's how we're gonna end something, which.
Speaker 4: Was also in a Kentucky Fry movie, The Fistful of Yen.
Speaker 5: That's right, du Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 14: It's funny because when you're working on the Simpsons movie,
Speaker 14: what Jim Brooks always said is it can't just be
Speaker 14: like you laugh and you laugh. There's got to be
Speaker 14: a point that it makes, or some emotional conclusion that
Speaker 14: comes to. And it's true, like Top Secret was really funny,
Speaker 14: but it didn't quite have that ending that the Airplane did.
Speaker 15: Yeah, even the Jim Abraham said that it's just it's
Speaker 15: not about anything, and that's what her because Wow, the jokes,
Speaker 15: it's so worth another watch because the jokes are so
Speaker 15: they're like jokes you've never seen before, jokes from another planet.
Speaker 5: I really right.
Speaker 14: The other thing, too, is has always pointed out Airplane
Speaker 14: was based on the serious movie Zero Hour, and that
Speaker 14: had a great story. The whole thing about a guy
Speaker 14: as going on a plane, you know, is really compelling.
Speaker 14: So you gotta have that at the bottom, I think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can see it on YouTube.
Speaker 15: They cut the two movies together, and it's just how literal,
Speaker 15: how faithfully they followed this old movie nobody's ever seen,
Speaker 15: almost seen for see and line for line. It's always
Speaker 15: been like a kind of Miss three science theater vibe
Speaker 15: to it, where they were clearly watching the movie and
Speaker 15: then shouting the jokes at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I thought that was a little unfair that you guys
Speaker 4: didn't have that framework to hang your jokes on, other
Speaker 4: than your framework was the first movie correct exactly.
Speaker 14: What happened and the tragic flaw. Yeah, but when you're
Speaker 14: making something called Airplane too to see it be so.
Speaker 15: What I can tell you that we can gossip a
Speaker 15: little about the cass I remember Lloyd Bridge. I can
Speaker 15: say this because everybody's dead. Every movie is dead.
Speaker 2: That Robert and Julie thanks exceptely.
Speaker 15: But Lloyd Bridges, who was again very kind to us,
Speaker 15: was very tantankerous. It's a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 15: were serious actors who were in a comedy and suddenly
Speaker 15: think they're really funny.
Speaker 5: So Lloyd had a bunch of jokes he wanted to do,
Speaker 5: and they weren't good and.
Speaker 15: It got very antagonistic with Ken Finkleman, and at one
Speaker 15: point it looked like they were gonna fight. They were
Speaker 15: gonna fight on the set and Ken is thirty eight
Speaker 15: and Lloyd was probably twice his age, but it looked
Speaker 15: like it.
Speaker 5: Was gonna be a pretty good fist fight.
Speaker 15: And John Vernon was so great an animal house is
Speaker 15: in the movie, and that guy was a jerk, and
Speaker 15: he had a lot of bad comedy ideas.
Speaker 14: I remember like he looked at us and said, you writers. Anyway,
Speaker 14: he wanted to pitch some stuff, but it really was like, oh,
Speaker 14: it's Dean, He's gonna double suspend me.
Speaker 15: And Chad Everett also he seemed like a really nice
Speaker 15: guy who somehow and just didn't like him, didn't like him,
Speaker 15: didn't want to film him. And we I thought he
Speaker 15: was really funny and it's good in the movie. And
Speaker 15: he again had a bunch of joke pitches that didn't
Speaker 15: really go anywhere. It was nice, it was nice, everyone's
Speaker 15: making an effort. There's a couple of bloopers fans can
Speaker 15: watch for all the way through. Again, Al was almost
Speaker 15: always right on things like this where they're doing some
Speaker 15: technical stuff and Ken said to the actors just say
Speaker 15: some technical jargon, and one of the actors is going
Speaker 15: technical jargon, technical bullshit and out there. I don't think
Speaker 15: he should do that, and I said, don't worry, it'll never.
Speaker 2: Be in the movie.
Speaker 15: And of course it's in the movie. And there's also
Speaker 15: some lots for where Peter Graves cut himself in the
Speaker 15: middle of the shooting. I think on the cockpit equipment.
Speaker 15: He has a band aid that pops on and off
Speaker 15: of his hand during a couple of scenes, so you
Speaker 15: can watch that.
Speaker 14: One joke I did fight for was the Jeopardy joke,
Speaker 14: and then when it stayed in ken Mad it'd be like, Okay,
Speaker 14: you got it, good for you.
Speaker 2: So I was happy.
Speaker 4: And Mike, you wrote the whole Overnacho Grande stuff just
Speaker 4: off the top of your head.
Speaker 15: I think I had worked it out in my head.
Speaker 15: I love that kind of stuff, and Al's nice about it.
Speaker 15: It never gonna laugh. It never gonna laugh at readings
Speaker 15: or at screenings, but I'm hoping people like it.
Speaker 5: It's clever. It's clever, it's not funny, and I hope people.
Speaker 15: I've seen it pop up as a meme on Twitter,
Speaker 15: so I guess people like that bit well enough.
Speaker 5: The entrance of William Shatner, that is a definite meme.
Speaker 15: I've seen that pop up on lists of best sight
Speaker 15: gags of all time, and that it was Ken Fingleman's joke.
Speaker 15: It was the three day job Alan I and Ken
Speaker 15: we're just working on it for days. There are certain
Speaker 15: things we put a lot of work into, including the
Speaker 15: opening joke with the Star Wars crawl.
Speaker 5: We worked so.
Speaker 14: Hard and Shatner we only had for three days. That
Speaker 14: was cool that we got him, but he would shoot
Speaker 14: for three days and he showed up with a mustache
Speaker 14: and we're like, but now he doesn't look like Captain
Speaker 14: Kirk and he'd actually just a fake mustache. He said, sure,
Speaker 14: I'll take it off. But he was also shatnery. There
Speaker 14: was a thing where he has the scripts advisor. How
Speaker 14: was that Senior just shot and like because it was good? No,
Speaker 14: it was perfect, It was good.
Speaker 2: It was perfect. He was as Shatonery as you'd like.
Speaker 14: And the joke where he looks through the scope and
Speaker 14: sees the enterprise, he didn't know we put that in
Speaker 14: that we were first to do any Star Trek references,
Speaker 14: but can put that editing so that got a huge laugh.
Speaker 15: I guess it doesn't exactly get credit. There's a couple
Speaker 15: of great calls they made in cast things, Shatner.
Speaker 5: Being one of them.
Speaker 15: He'd never done any comedy, and now since then, I
Speaker 15: would say he's made a great second career.
Speaker 2: Her parent zone, Oh he's super funny.
Speaker 15: Yeah, absolutely, by the way, I think because Alan I
Speaker 15: he was difficult on the movie and so we never
Speaker 15: loved him.
Speaker 5: But watching the movie thirty years later, I go, oh,
Speaker 5: he's great.
Speaker 15: He's so funny at the film. And the other one
Speaker 15: is Raymond Burr, who again had never done comedy, and
Speaker 15: it just tickled Pink to be there and be doing
Speaker 15: this movie.
Speaker 5: He's so happy.
Speaker 14: And that's my other favorite joke of Ken's in the
Speaker 14: movie is where Julie goes. He used to laugh and
Speaker 14: laugh all the time.
Speaker 2: Do you know what that's like? And remember Gouse, Yes
Speaker 2: I do, and.
Speaker 5: That was it. He would do a scene like that
Speaker 5: and then we would break and he was just got
Speaker 5: was it funny? Was it funny? Was it good? Did
Speaker 5: you like it?
Speaker 14: Lanzel and I had one last little story about how
Speaker 14: great Ken was. My family comes to this set, I go,
Speaker 14: oh God, please don't do anything. And I leave to
Speaker 14: go in a little room with Mike and right and
Speaker 14: I come back and Ken is so accommodated. He's got
Speaker 14: my five year old brother looking through the lens. It's
Speaker 14: just so so nice and such a He gave us
Speaker 14: our start, Ken and I've always appreciated it.
Speaker 5: It's an amazing thing.
Speaker 15: Both our parents showed up on the set. And I
Speaker 15: lived in southern California. My parents we're in LA My
Speaker 15: parents are two hours away. That's the only time they
Speaker 15: ever came to visit me was when they that and
Speaker 15: my mother just couldn't control herself.
Speaker 5: Richard Jacob is in the movie, who was a hard
Speaker 5: crop to her.
Speaker 15: When she was young, and she's touching him like it's
Speaker 15: an object and he's just taking it.
Speaker 2: I didn't mentione that. And my brother's had some of
Speaker 2: the best scenes. It was really fun. It was great.
Speaker 2: I wish the movie had done a little better, but
Speaker 2: it was an experienced that you couldn't matche well.
Speaker 15: Very famously, Quinton Tarantino as a fan of the movie
Speaker 15: on this podcast where He's Going. I was working a
Speaker 15: movie there and I would watch Airplane two and I
Speaker 15: loved it. And the host of the podcast keeps going,
Speaker 15: you mean airplane and he goes, no, I mean airplane too.
Speaker 2: And if anybody knows this too, it's Quentin Tarranteeth.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, guys, Thank you so great, and
Speaker 4: I hope we can do it again sometime.
Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thanks Mike A. Putt.
Speaker 4: That's why we're back. And we're talking about Airplane two,
Speaker 4: the sequel, and we're talking about the deleted scenes, and
Speaker 4: there are a onun for this movie. Did you guys
Speaker 4: have any particular favorites from the ones that you were
Speaker 4: able to see.
Speaker 7: I watched the ones that you provided us, and then
Speaker 7: I clicked on the link in the notes to the YouTube,
Speaker 7: and that water Coool of Films guy, I've seen a
Speaker 7: lot of his stuff before, where he's doing the compare
Speaker 7: and contrast and showing the difference between basically the TV
Speaker 7: version and the original version, and or the extended and
Speaker 7: or deleted scenes which I've sum probably appeared in the
Speaker 7: TV version. I'm assuming I think most of those in
Speaker 7: that YouTube video appeared on TV.
Speaker 4: The stuff that didn't. So in the trailer, there's a
Speaker 4: sequence where this guy who looks like Carl Malden is
Speaker 4: there and this couple comes up and they're like, we
Speaker 4: lost our travelers checks and he says, well, did you
Speaker 4: have American excess or something like that. We even made
Speaker 4: it to the poster to the quad poster for Airplane two,
Speaker 4: so the British poster of it has that Carl Malden
Speaker 4: guy on there. It's interesting because there's a newspaper from
Speaker 4: the San Francisco Chronicle December fifth, nineteen eighty two Nancy Mills,
Speaker 4: and she writes about a scene where Aldo Ray shows
Speaker 4: up as a sergeant major who during an emergency, leads
Speaker 4: the passengers and songs such as pack up your troubles
Speaker 4: in your old bag. She also references the clothesline joke,
Speaker 4: which is in those deleted scenes where I think it's
Speaker 4: McCord is trying to come back through the door because
Speaker 4: he's been jettisoned by Rock and I can't remember the
Speaker 4: name of the one the poor Testa, thank you for
Speaker 4: Testa gets really her role gets cut the hell yeah,
Speaker 4: So with Testa, she grabs onto the sleeve and starts
Speaker 4: pulling and it becomes this whole clothesline thing and no
Speaker 4: person at the end of it. So that was in
Speaker 4: whatever screening. Nancy Mills saw, but I've never seen that.
Speaker 4: Although ra scene whatsoever.
Speaker 7: There wasn't anything that seemed completely necessary. You get a
Speaker 7: fairly extended scene of Sonny Bono with his spouse, and
Speaker 7: I couldn't place the actress's name, and I didn't. I
Speaker 7: was like, oh, I know her from something, but I
Speaker 7: had I doubt she's in the movie credits for this,
Speaker 7: so that was rying me crazy. But anyway, you get
Speaker 7: more of his impotence, and it's funny. She's pawing the
Speaker 7: guy next to her. She's saying, it's okay all that stuff.
Speaker 4: And we haven't had sex and five years and just
Speaker 4: as all pawing on that guy.
Speaker 7: Uh, he's just throwing his tie and everything.
Speaker 4: I don't know what I've done to deserve this, but
Speaker 4: I'm very excited.
Speaker 5: So the whole thing with this movie then becomes what
Speaker 5: we will never know. What version of the movie was
Speaker 5: seen by some of the people who was screened for early.
Speaker 7: Was it Airplane or was it Naked Gun where they
Speaker 7: took it to like UCLA and showed it to I
Speaker 7: think that was Naked Gun and monitored the gag popularity
Speaker 7: that way. Let's not take it to a screening let's
Speaker 7: take it to college kids and show them and gauge
Speaker 7: it that way. And again there's, like we've said multiple times,
Speaker 7: there is a gag a second in this and you
Speaker 7: can probably toss a good number of them. And the
Speaker 7: couple of bits that are funny is the guy making
Speaker 7: the donation to the heart charity, the cardiac thing and
Speaker 7: the guy having an heart attack. Is it really necessary? No,
Speaker 7: because there are so many gags at that opening of
Speaker 7: people entering the airport, some of the deleted stuff that
Speaker 7: they're showing in that is odd to like with family,
Speaker 7: the priest and.
Speaker 4: The oh yeah, the little priest and the little nun.
Speaker 5: Is that the gag that they were I guess they
Speaker 5: have kids that are part of the church.
Speaker 7: Yes, I guess I had a priest and anne children
Speaker 7: or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, babies that are just like them.
Speaker 5: There is a four K coming out of Airplane really
Speaker 5: from Keno Larber. It was announced last month.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they didn't contact me to do the audio commentary,
Speaker 4: that's for sure.
Speaker 5: It was announced to March ninth of last month. Keno
Speaker 5: Larbert are preparing a four K release of Ken Finckelman's
Speaker 5: Airplane two.
Speaker 7: Maybe we'll finally get to see the I mentioned the
Speaker 7: William Shatner stuff because there's pictures that you share of
Speaker 7: William Shatner and the two gals that are on the
Speaker 7: moon base in completely different outfits.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're dressed up. It's almost like a native kind
Speaker 4: of thing. And Shatner's Vuana sitting in between them. I'm like,
Speaker 4: where the hell is this? And then another shot of
Speaker 4: him in a dentist's chair. I guess it is. He
Speaker 4: looks very intense, like he's about to start spitting, and
Speaker 4: you can see the dentist next to him. I'm like,
Speaker 4: where is this stuff coming from?
Speaker 5: And they were doing Marvel Cinematic Universe shit before Marvel
Speaker 5: was doing And.
Speaker 4: Then I don't know if you guys had a chance
Speaker 4: to listen to the Robert Hayes story, but he tells
Speaker 4: this whole story about how there was this surfing dream
Speaker 4: slash flashback where he's going through the desert and he's
Speaker 4: wearing his French foreign legion type outfit and he thinks
Speaker 4: that he sees this oasis up ahead, but then it
Speaker 4: turns out to just be like super tiny, just there
Speaker 4: was a force perspective thing. But then he keeps going
Speaker 4: and he sees this beach and all of these surfers
Speaker 4: and a lane is out surfing, and Annette Funicello was
Speaker 4: actually in the movie, and he has lines within net
Speaker 4: Funicello and it's like, where the hell's that? And the
Speaker 4: way he described I'm like, you shot that?
Speaker 2: This is real?
Speaker 4: Like you And he's, oh, yeah, no, we shot this thing.
Speaker 4: I'm like, what that hell, man, that's a huge number
Speaker 4: that you're doing. And they just cut it out altogether.
Speaker 5: In my mind, when I heard that story, it reminded
Speaker 5: me of what would have happened in the first movie
Speaker 5: if they cut the discos. That scene is such a
Speaker 5: memorable scene in the first movie that it's like, why second,
Speaker 5: guess yourself? I guess is what I don't understand about
Speaker 5: Airplane two. And this movie has a reputation for a reason,
Speaker 5: like this movie's reputation does precede it, and it's because
Speaker 5: of the deleted scenes and the possibility that there was
Speaker 5: a version of this movie that is more than just
Speaker 5: eleven minutes longer. There's a version of this movie that
Speaker 5: is seemingly like possibly fifteen to twenty minutes longer, because
Speaker 5: that scene is not just two or three minutes there's
Speaker 5: no way, not with the amount of what he is
Speaker 5: talking about, possibly and again having clearly been shot, because
Speaker 5: he's speaking about it like it exists.
Speaker 7: So and it's a short film. The theatrical release is
Speaker 7: under ninety minutes correct, right, so it's like you didn't
Speaker 7: really have to take a hatchet to it. It's a
Speaker 7: tight eighty four minutes or whatever, and it moves at
Speaker 7: a great pace. But you probably could have kept a
Speaker 7: couple of those gags.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: The flashback that happens when he's talking with the old
Speaker 4: woman who is in the first movie, she's the one
Speaker 4: that hangs herself, but in this one she says, oh,
Speaker 4: I've got an iron stomach, and then when he starts talking,
Speaker 4: she starts reaching for the airsickness bag and starts vomiting.
Speaker 4: Right after that, or like in the middle of that discussion,
Speaker 4: it says, production number Grease parody to come. So apparently
Speaker 4: we're supposed to have Grease parody at some point in
Speaker 4: this movie, and that's all it says, and then it
Speaker 4: just goes from it says, flashback starts, production number, flashback
Speaker 4: ends atier cabin, him saying anyway, I don't want to
Speaker 4: go on forever, and then it's her and Gray. She's
Speaker 4: covered with cobwebs and his comatose, so it's like the
Speaker 4: skeleton gag that we get. That's okay, yeah, there's And
Speaker 4: then was that a grease parody because there is some
Speaker 4: surfing stuff in there with Sandy?
Speaker 10: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Second guessing yourselves is a weird thing with comedies, because
Speaker 5: you know, when you watch The Eliteeds, you're like, oh,
Speaker 5: these kind of worked with this movie, they kind of work,
Speaker 5: And with the movie being as short as it is,
Speaker 5: it's like, why did we have to come in under
Speaker 5: ninety minutes? Was that a requirement from somebody?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 5: Why ninety minutes? That's fairly a goddamn feature length film.
Speaker 7: I'm not gonna argue against keeping it short, but yeah,
Speaker 7: I think you probably could have squeezed a couple of
Speaker 7: those deleted scenes and maybe they were no not if
Speaker 7: they were traditional.
Speaker 4: Even the conditioned Green thing would have been interesting in
Speaker 4: that little shot of Earl Bowen though that was originally
Speaker 4: supposed to be Leslie Nielsen, when they just had that
Speaker 4: one little short flashback when they're like conditioned green and
Speaker 4: then they cut over to the guy and his face
Speaker 4: is all green and it's ket Roll Bowen, the guy
Speaker 4: that plays a psychiatrist from the Terminator movies. Take two
Speaker 4: of these and call me in the morning kind of thing,
Speaker 4: and I was like, Wow, that was nice to see
Speaker 4: him show up. But that's it. By the way, I
Speaker 4: think that the wife is Lee Percell because there's also
Speaker 4: those credits. There are let's see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
Speaker 4: eight characters that are completely cut out according to the
Speaker 4: end credits, because our end credits on the real movie
Speaker 4: stop at smoking man played by Ronald House and then
Speaker 4: it goes into Lee Percell wife. Yeah, and then a
Speaker 4: few more people after that. No aldough Ray though, And
Speaker 4: I'm sad about this four k of Airplane two because
Speaker 4: then I'm just like, who the hell's doing the commentary
Speaker 4: for this night?
Speaker 5: Not Mike White, which is the biggest shame because the
Speaker 5: amount of the amount of legwork that you've done. I
Speaker 5: want to keep a little bit of praise on you, Mike,
Speaker 5: like you are the reason that we are doing this episode,
Speaker 5: and you masked all of this kind of as we've
Speaker 5: been doing these comedy things the last couple of years.
Speaker 5: Because when we did the Airplane episode, was a year
Speaker 5: and a half ago.
Speaker 4: I did this article about Airplane two. I don't even
Speaker 4: know how many years ago. I was asked by Ben
Speaker 4: Omard over at bear Manner Media, our friend's Bear Manner, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and he asked me to write about a few films
Speaker 4: that have never been At that time, they were never
Speaker 4: released with extras, and so he was like, oh, can
Speaker 4: you do something about it was a ninety seven six
Speaker 4: Evil Too, Airplane two North Avenue of regulars, and then
Speaker 4: he wanted me to do Halloween three, but then that
Speaker 4: came out with a shit ton of extras, Thank goodness.
Speaker 4: The other ones never have except maybe now Airplane two
Speaker 4: will fingers crossed. I did these interviews with the Finkleman
Speaker 4: and as forever ago, so that's one reason why they
Speaker 4: sound kind of shoddy. Hopefully people will be able to
Speaker 4: get through those without a problem. But yes, So those
Speaker 4: interviews were just sitting there and I was like, I
Speaker 4: really want to revisit this, and that's when I started
Speaker 4: looking for other folks to talk to and being able
Speaker 4: to talk with Alan, Mike and then mister Watson. That
Speaker 4: was fantastic.
Speaker 5: Again, I'm impressed by the amount of leg work that
Speaker 5: you've done, and once again, I think if anyone is
Speaker 5: listening to this episode, this is probably the definitive singular
Speaker 5: thing about Airplane two that you need to listen to,
Speaker 5: especially given the amount of interviews that you know you
Speaker 5: got for this episode. So I hope we get to
Speaker 5: see something more with that four K, but Jesus it
Speaker 5: would be nice, But they haven't announced what's going to
Speaker 5: be on the Kenolorber four K yet, so that's the
Speaker 5: only kind of question. Maybe it'll be nothing again.
Speaker 7: I just looked down on my notes and I saw
Speaker 7: something I circled. What's proper spelling of war.
Speaker 4: If you don't want to get if you don't want
Speaker 4: to speed tuned by Roddenberry?
Speaker 2: Have you? O?
Speaker 14: Yes?
Speaker 7: Okay?
Speaker 2: Is that why?
Speaker 4: I would imagine?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 4: I think warp is actually a copywritten word from Paramount Pictures.
Speaker 7: It's not a science term. I don't think, so swarp
Speaker 7: speed that's Star Trek related Star Trek Okay, Okay, that
Speaker 7: makes sense then, because I'm like, why and the fuck
Speaker 7: is it misspelled in this?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I've heard other people say warp speed before.
Speaker 4: I've heard people say ludicrous speed, but they might have
Speaker 4: just spelled it weird.
Speaker 12: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It could be one of those Canadian spellings.
Speaker 2: Have you ever even been to Canada?
Speaker 5: It's pronounced Canada and no, I haven't. It looks like Mike,
Speaker 5: You're right, it looks like Star Trek. It would be
Speaker 5: the warp phrase. Is where that originated from?
Speaker 2: Here you go?
Speaker 7: Well, thanks pop culture for destroying my brain and thinking
Speaker 7: that was a scientific.
Speaker 4: Turn real quick. The other person who I didn't have
Speaker 4: a chance to interview but who was very nice to me,
Speaker 4: was getting at Tavy Dad. She was married to russ Meyer, right,
Speaker 4: rus Meyer. Yeah, while yeah, it's her that's in the
Speaker 4: T shirt that says Moral Majority. Oh, I shouldn't know
Speaker 4: how I found out about that, and I reached out
Speaker 4: to her because we were friends on Facebook, and she
Speaker 4: was like, oh, yeah, that was me. And then she
Speaker 4: like even sent me a hi res image behind the
Speaker 4: scenes of her in the Moral Majority T shirt with
Speaker 4: somebody sitting next to her. And I'm not sure if
Speaker 4: I was a producer or who that was, but I
Speaker 4: was just like, that's awesome. So if you buy that.
Speaker 4: The book that my Airplane two Pieces in is called
Speaker 4: and I hit this title, get that cat out of
Speaker 4: here and he spelt it oh U t A and
Speaker 4: I'm like, no, it's out.
Speaker 5: I read that book. Read that book back in the day,
Speaker 5: and for this episode, Mike. And by the way, so
Speaker 5: warp was popularized by Star Trek. It was invented like
Speaker 5: a couple of years before. But it's a Star Trek thing,
Speaker 5: like you could talk about John W. Campbell's book, But
Speaker 5: warp is a Star Trek thing.
Speaker 7: Yet Shanner in the movie, they couldn't ask him for permission.
Speaker 4: And then yeah, the only other person that I would
Speaker 4: shout out that I recognized from those deleted scenes was
Speaker 4: John Paragon in the No Girl's Airline sequence where he's
Speaker 4: good and he's like pushing all those people out. So
Speaker 4: another he was a part of the Groundlings, wasn't he?
Speaker 7: I didn't recognize him. Oh he's Johnbie from Peewey's Playhouse.
Speaker 7: Oh okay, yeah interesting, Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 4: Then he was also, wasn't he also in uhf.
Speaker 3: Ah you hf stage many This is an embarrassment on
Speaker 3: a space?
Speaker 5: What do you saying? Cards Fightcher Senior would be saying,
Speaker 5: if he were alive today, help let me into this box.
Speaker 4: I can't breathe in here.
Speaker 10: Help let me out.
Speaker 7: I liked that scene the discount airline, Like, to me,
Speaker 7: that was a successful gag too, and didn't take up
Speaker 7: too much time, and they could have actually edited it
Speaker 7: down a little bit so we don't have to see
Speaker 7: five people getting jettisoned off.
Speaker 4: One of which is the stewardes who doesn't have a parachute.
Speaker 7: After her getting pushed off, that could be the end
Speaker 7: of the joke, but we still have a few more
Speaker 7: people to go.
Speaker 4: The thing I liked the most was the Texas guy
Speaker 4: who's like, you got anything to read? And she goes
Speaker 4: through all the magazines and says, we have the Talmud,
Speaker 4: the ancient text of Jewish thoughts. Let me try that
Speaker 4: tall mood. And then apparently later on in the script
Speaker 4: they cut back to him and he got the locks
Speaker 4: and the hat and fill in, like he's covered interfillin
Speaker 4: and stuff and he's just has converted completely. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 4: that's so good.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's a good callback.
Speaker 4: And then that nice appearance too. You mentioned Rip Torn
Speaker 4: actually playing a double role also as President Reagan, and
Speaker 4: I love that he's got those fake black hands and
Speaker 4: it's one more for the NAACP and he's just got
Speaker 4: that stupid look on his face and then he puts
Speaker 4: the fake hands down, like I couldn't touch black people
Speaker 4: in real life.
Speaker 7: No good stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was very good, a little bit more pointed
Speaker 5: than what we ended up getting in the actual.
Speaker 4: Move, especially since they're trying to cut all of those
Speaker 4: Reagan things out, and that we were talking before we
Speaker 4: serve recording that it was Alexander Agig on that Psycho
Speaker 4: magazine that Sonny Bono's reading.
Speaker 5: And again they have the Nixon metabolic joke as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that was all coming from the Canadian who
Speaker 4: was making fun of us quite a bit. And I
Speaker 4: think ken Finkleman, one of his earliest gags was on
Speaker 4: like a news program, so I think it probably got
Speaker 4: a lot of practice there.
Speaker 5: I think this movie is better than its reputation gives
Speaker 5: it any credit for it. And if you enjoy The
Speaker 5: First Airplane, this movie is definitely worth checking out. And
Speaker 5: maybe when you hear this episode you'll be able to
Speaker 5: go and find a Keno Lrber four K that features
Speaker 5: the things that we've talked about that you have not
Speaker 5: been seen before. That might be unrealistic, but who knows. Hey,
Speaker 5: I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I remember
Speaker 5: enjoying it, and again in comparison to something we recently
Speaker 5: watched like Caddie Scheck too, this movie is wow, height
Speaker 5: and day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I quite enjoyed it and was wasn't least surprised
Speaker 7: by that I broke it up into pieces because you
Speaker 7: just don't know, and I just basically watched each act.
Speaker 7: I made it to twenty five minutes the first time,
Speaker 7: and like you said, Mike, right when the trial starts,
Speaker 7: it's the twenty five minute mark, and that's basically an
Speaker 7: exact third of the film almost, and was not hesitant
Speaker 7: about moving forward. I did it more for time and
Speaker 7: work schedule, but I was like, ooh, I get to
Speaker 7: watch the next twenty or thirty tomorrow and then I'll
Speaker 7: finish it up the last day and easily could watch
Speaker 7: it in one fell swoop. It's a quick joke, a
Speaker 7: minute more of the same stuff, but the same stuff
Speaker 7: was so good.
Speaker 5: Why not it worked the first time working the second time.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm really glad that you guys liked this. I
Speaker 4: had a horrible feeling that you'd be like, oh, geez,
Speaker 4: it just re tries the first one. It's okay, I'm
Speaker 4: glad that you found something a merit from this one,
Speaker 4: because yeah, this is still a favorite of mine. When
Speaker 4: Ben asked me all those years ago to write about it,
Speaker 4: I was like, Fuck, yeah, let's do it, because I
Speaker 4: remember this movie very fondly, didn't remember it being better
Speaker 4: than the first one. I don't think anybody in the
Speaker 4: right mind would ever say it's better, but I think
Speaker 4: that it actually can hold the candle to it, and
Speaker 4: I think they really managed to capture a lot of
Speaker 4: that zaz magic when so many people can't get anywhere
Speaker 4: near it. I feel like they didn't crack the formula.
Speaker 4: They had something that was really close. It's like the
Speaker 4: mister Pib to their doctor Pepper.
Speaker 5: And honest to God, what fucking comedy needs a sequel
Speaker 5: to begin with? And how many comedy sequels are good?
Speaker 5: Anchorman two not great? Super Troopers to actually somehow good?
Speaker 5: Let's see trying to think of there are any other
Speaker 5: Wilfarell movies that have sequels. Caddy Shack too not great.
Speaker 4: All right, We're going to take another break and play
Speaker 4: a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages, he.
Speaker 2: Married the girl of his dreams she's great, She's the best.
Speaker 16: And that's when his Nike nail began.
Speaker 3: How many people you've brutally murdered?
Speaker 2: Love this evil?
Speaker 16: I can't, oh, Mike Myer, So I Married an Axe
Speaker 16: murder premire Friday at eight on Cinemax.
Speaker 4: We'll be back next week with so I'm Married an
Speaker 4: axe Murderer. Until then, I want to thank my co
Speaker 4: host Mark and Chris. So, Chris, what is the latest
Speaker 4: with you, sir?
Speaker 5: It's working on podcasts over the Culture Cast, where I'm
Speaker 5: back in the swing of things finally, which is nice.
Speaker 5: So yeah, if you want to listen to me talk
Speaker 5: about movies that are not specifically one thing at the moment,
Speaker 5: that's where you would go to find that. If not that,
Speaker 5: everything over at weirding Way Media is pretty great and
Speaker 5: worth checking out, including Mark Begley's show Cambridge Ed, Wake
Speaker 5: Up Heavy, or eighties TV Ladies or Twisted and Uncorked,
Speaker 5: or the Projection Booth. What did you show you're listening
Speaker 5: to now? Or the one thing you can't find which
Speaker 5: is over at Patreon, My patreon or Mike's Patreon, which
Speaker 5: is ranking on bond. We're once a month with our
Speaker 5: friend Richard Adam, we talk about James Bond, and we
Speaker 5: are careening towards the end of that podcast. They're going
Speaker 5: to have to start thinking about what we're going to
Speaker 5: do next, because we'll be done sooner rather than later
Speaker 5: because we're coming up on the James Bond. A lot
Speaker 5: of people my age no which are the Timothy Dolton
Speaker 5: and Pierce Bras in the films. So that's where you
Speaker 5: can find the stuff that I work on. What about you,
Speaker 5: Mark Begley.
Speaker 7: You can find my two shows Cambridge and Wishawan and
Speaker 7: Wickup Heavy over on weirdenwaymedia dot com and you can
Speaker 7: listen to Chris and I talk about Midsummer over at
Speaker 7: the Culture Cast.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much guys for being on the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 4: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 4: of the other shows that I work on. Like you
Speaker 4: guys said, they are all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com.
Speaker 4: Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to
Speaker 4: join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth.
Speaker 4: Every donation we get helps the Projection Booth take over
Speaker 4: the world.
Speaker 9: A