MetaChat - Airplane! vs. Zero Hour

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10 July 2007

Airplane! vs. Zero Hour Huh. You learn something new every day: The movie AIRPLANE! is actually a scene-for-scene remake of the 1957 film ZERO HOUR, with the original plot and much of the original dialogue played for laughs. Here is a comparison of some bits from the original and their equivalents in AIRPLANE!

post by: ColdChef at: 22:49 | 12 comments

Awesome find. I can't believe I didn't know about this. I love this kind of movie trivia.

posted by arse_hat 10 July | 23:05

I had no idea, that's really cool.

posted by doctor_negative 10 July | 23:34

Wow, that's got my day off to a great start.

posted by essexjan 11 July | 00:48

From what I remember, Zucker Abrahams Zucker bought the rights to Zero Hour so they could do this. Airplane! is one of the funniest films ever. I love Police Squad and the first Naked Gun was pretty good as well.

posted by TheDonF 11 July | 00:54

That is fantastic. Great find.

posted by greycap 11 July | 01:19

I've always known that it was a remake, I just had no idea how faithful until now.

Hilarious that the stew ended up in the cockpit, and the now-ubiquitous catchphrase "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking" was played straight.

posted by stilicho 11 July | 02:01

Wow, I had no idea. Interesting how much humor was generated by playing the lines with the same over-earnest delivery as the original -- it's just the contexts which were different.

posted by treepour 11 July | 03:19

I did know that Airplane was based on an old movie but I didn't realize how literal it was. I love that movie but I hate that it's spawned all those awful generic movie parodies (Scary Movie, Date Movie, etc).

posted by octothorpe 11 July | 08:06

From the audio commentary on the DVD (yes, I listened to all of this, Airplane! was my first Netflix movie), I thought I remember it being a mix of a bunch of old movies, but I must be thinking of Top Secret.

posted by Hellbient 11 July | 09:53

I had no idea. And Airplane is one of my favorite movies EVAH.

posted by jrossi4r 11 July | 09:59

I didn't know that, either! I love Airplane!

posted by chewatadistance 11 July | 13:52

I didn't know it was a remake/spoof. Thanks for the post, ColdChef!

posted by deborah 11 July | 17:53

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