Airplane!: 5 Ways It’s The Zuckers’ Best Movie (& 5 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second)

Kings of spoof cinema, the Zucker brothers made a certified comedy masterpiece with Airplane!. But The Naked Gun deserves recognition, too.

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If your parents or grandparents watch a comedy made in recent years and say something along the lines of “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” they’re probably referring to the gleeful anarchy and timeless laugh-out-loud hilarity of the Zucker brothers. After establishing their particular brand of zany, absurdist humor with The Kentucky Fried Movie, the duo tried their hand at directing with Airplane!, arguably the greatest comedy ever made.

Among other projects, the Zuckers followed up Airplane! with Police Squad!, a TV series spoofing police procedurals that was canceled after six episodes, which they later adapted for the big screen with The Naked Gun. While Airplane! is undoubtedly the Zuckers’ finest film, The Naked Gun is a close second.

10 Airplane! Is The Best: They Spent Six Years Perfecting The Script

It’s been a long time since comedies had great scripts that writers worked on for years to get painstakingly perfect. It’s been a long time since comedies even had a real authorial stamp, ever since lightly edited improv and studio meddling took over the genre.

Between the fateful night that the Zuckers and Jim Abrahams discovered Zero Hour! on TV to the day that their parody of it arrived in theaters, six long years passed. The team took their time to make sure the Airplane! script was as well-crafted as possible before rolling the cameras.

9 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second: Ira Newborn’s Theme

Ira Newborn’s theme from The Naked Gun is one of the most iconic and recognizable in film history, standing alongside John Williams’ “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones franchise and Danny Elfman’s Batman theme.

It has the same zany quality as the movie. It’s catchy, but the true greatness of Newborn’s theme is that it captures the outrageous spirit of Frank Drebin’s absurdist adventures.

8 Airplane! Is The Best: The Quotable Lines Are Endless

“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.” “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.” “The cornfields, Ted! The cornfields!” “Flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle, just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.”

There’s an endless amount of quotable lines in Airplane!, perhaps more so than any other comedy — although it faces stiff competition from movies like Ghostbusters, Anchorman, Blazing Saddles, Caddyshack, and The Big Lebowski.

7 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second: The Inventive Opening Titles

The Zuckers never miss an opportunity for a joke, and a lot of their movies have jokes in the opening credits. Airplane!’s opening titles spoofing Jaws with a plane in the sky is a doozy, but The Naked Gun boasts their most inventive title sequence.

After Drebin beats up America’s enemies in the opening fight scene, Ira Newborn’s iconic theme kicks in and we see Drebin’s squad car driving through various ridiculous locations like a roller coaster, a locker room shower and a suburban home.

6 Airplane! Is The Best: It Spoofs One Movie To Satirize A Whole Genre

The Zuckers took the plot, characters, and much of the dialogue in Airplane! from a black-and-white disaster movie from the ‘50s called Zero Hour! that they happened to stumble across on late-night TV. They took so much from Zero Hour! that Paramount had to buy the rights to it.

But the Zuckers used that one ludicrous movie as a microcosm to satirize the entire disaster movie genre that had taken over the American cinema of the ‘70s with movies like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.

5 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second: It Parodies Multiple Genres

While Airplane! was a spoof of one specific disaster film, The Naked Gun drew its satirical targets from a number of different genres for a broader lampoon. Despite casting a wider net, the Zuckers still nailed all their genre parodies.

Drebin’s rambling voiceover narrations hilariously parody those found in film noir; when he’s getting chewed out by the mayor, he emulates an absurdist Dirty Harry. Furthermore, the actual plot was loosely inspired by the Charles Bronson spy thriller, Telefon.

4 Airplane! Is The Best: It Works As More Than Just A Spoof

Airplane! is often called the best spoof movie, and the simple explanation for that is that it transcends the trappings of a spoof. Spaceballs is only funny if you’ve seen Star Wars; Blazing Saddles only works if you’re familiar with the western tropes it subverts — but Airplane! is something else.

There are so many different kinds of jokes — sight gags, wordplay, slapstick, comedy of manners etc. — that the spoof elements just blend into the crowd. Airplane! is called the best spoof movie ever made because it’s also the best comedy movie ever made.

3 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second: It Has Some Of The Best Slapstick Of All Time

To some comedy purists, the term “the best slapstick of all time” won’t hold much weight, because slapstick requires using physical gags like a character falling over for cheap laughs.

But the genius of The Naked Gun is that it has slapstick humor in every scene, but it never feels lowbrow. There’s always a smartly crafted joke engine that elevates it.

2 Airplane! Is The Best: The Jokes Keep Coming After The Credits Roll

After Airplane!’s end credits have rolled, the jokes keep coming. The movie has one of the greatest post-credits scenes in movie history, putting every Marvel movie to shame.

It reveals that, after the whole movie has taken place, the passenger that Ted left in his cab at the beginning is still sitting there, waiting for him to come back. He says, “Well, I’ll give him another twenty minutes, but that’s it!” Talk about paying off a joke.

1 The Naked Gun Is A Close Second: Frank Drebin Is Leslie Nielsen’s Best Character

When the Zuckers were casting Airplane!, they decided not to cast comedians, but instead cast dramatic actors to play completely straight. The dialogue was so ridiculous that it didn’t need embellishment, so playing it straight was the funniest way to do it.

Leslie Nielsen was a dramatic actor before the Zuckers cast him as Dr. Rumack and completely changed the course of his career. After turning Nielsen into a comedian and unearthing one of the greatest comic personas in film history, the Zuckers gave him the perfect role for that persona as bumbling detective Frank Drebin.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/airplane-vs-naked-gun-zucker-brothers-best-spoof-comedy/