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"Ted, I have the strangest feeling we've been through this exact same thing before."

1982 PG / Comedy Spoof Directed by: Ken Finkleman Starring: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, William Shatner

Tagline

For the ride of your life... All you need for Christmas are your two front seats!

Summary Capsule

Outer space isn't safe from parody, either. Jokes will be mined, gags resurfaced, and Ted will continue to have a drinking problem.

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Amazon.com: DVD

Justin's Rating: Ah, I could really go for a good "Rocky sequel" joke right about now.
Justin's Review: Bad sequels have two ways of going: either they're forgotten like Crystal Pepsi, or they become darkly notorious like New Coke. The notorious ones latch their reedy, decrepit bodies around their successful parent, dragging them down kicking and wailing into the lake of eternal fire. Remember when we all thought The Matrix was the hots? And then 2003 happened and we all ditched wearing sunglasses inside and politely moved on with our lives? You get the picture.

"A bare-chested Ken spent most of his writing hours flogging himself with phone cords and sacrificing many a suckling pig in vain to Thalia, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry."

Forgettable sequels, like Airplane II: The Sequel, lack major strikes on their record - it's usually just a mishmash of barely adequate failures (is that possible?) that can't strike the perfect balance of elements that a sequel needs to survive in the wild. Airplane II isn't a horrendous film, and even contains enough laughs to make it passable entertainment on a Saturday afternoon cable TV spree. It's just that there's really no new meat here that Airplane! didn't already serve up.

Mostly this is the fault of director/writer Ken Finkleman, who found himself cut adrift from the comedic trio of Abrahams/Zucker/Zucker and immediately descended into arm-waving panic. We weren't there, being only six years old at the time, but our imagination is usually accurate, and it tells us that a bare-chested Ken spent most of his writing hours flogging himself with phone cords and sacrificing many a suckling pig in vain to Thalia, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. In the end, he merely dusted off the original Airplane! script and started scribbling in the margins. And it goes without saying that he ate a crapload of ham sandwiches.

Ergo, it's disconcerting to see many of the familiar faces of Airplane! back - Ted, Elaine, Captain Oveur, McCroskey, Jacobs/Johnny - and hear them bomb second-rate jokes and mine old Airplane! gags for pity laughs. You know the "Hospital? What is it?" "It's a big building with a red cross for sick people, but that isn't important now." joke? That got about one good laugh from me, on a rainy day in 1989, a follow-up grimace, and stony stares ever since. There's no reason in the world that Airplane II found it necessary to break it out of the nostalgia vault for a good dozen more retreads (and don't think I'm exaggerating, here).

In "the future" where wood-paneled station wagons and polyester threads exist in spades, commercial flights to the moon are viable and routine. Except, of course, for a brand new lunar shuttle made out of substandard parts and carrying a mad bomber, a psycho computer and the usual Airplane! suspects. Beat for beat, Airplane II follows the flight path of the first movie: the crew is incompacitated, Ted has to find his courage, and Elaine proves to be a monumental waste of space with a voice tweaked from decades of helium sucking. In fact, the only grand new addition to the cast is one Mr. William T. Shatner, who arrives about two-thirds of the way through the movie as the off-kilter lunar base commander. And trust me, "off-kilter" was no far stretch for the man who would give us Star Trek V.

Still, if you like your gags as physical and optical as all get-out, and don't mind a huge amount of naked breasts for a PG film ("Mommy! Mommy! Can we rent this? And then can you explain where our 2% milk really came from?"), it's not quite as bad as, say, Caddyshack II. If that's how you're going to lower your standards, then you might as well start here.

"Yes, but how will our nation's children learn about Tekwar?" In the year 2008, this carries with it a new definition of irony. When zombies fly

Didja Notice? [some sources: IMDb]

• An African-American man in an blue jumpsuit vacuums the rear of the cockpit in one scene, listening to "Car Wash", representing a character from the 1976 film of the same name.
• The Battlestar Galactica theme, played over and over
• Star Warsy scroll… and kinky!
• Boob detector?
• E.T.'s cameo
• Rip Torn! With red hair!
• Rocky XXXVIII
• 2001 parody
• "Give them the lead!" That made me laugh hard.
• The window behind the "Transcendental Air" desk shows the cityscape from Logan's Run
• William Shatner's character orders a profile on everyone who's seen The Sound of Music more than four times. That film was directed by Robert Wise, who also directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which starred William Shatner three years earlier.
• The truck that Ted leaps out of to get into the skyport is named "Ken's Trucking" and has a Canadian maple leaf on it. This is an inside joke since "Ken" is Writer-Director Ken Finkleman who is from Canada, hence the Maple Leaf.
• The sound effects as the boy in the control room is "playing" with the incoming plane's radar are from the Atari 2600 game Yars' Revenge
• he car they used to jump-start the Space Shuttle prior to launch is a 1958 Ford Edsel, noteworthy as one of the biggest marketing flops in automotive history.
• This is the first film to use the "starstreak" patterns that later became a familiar sight in the later Star Trek series and films. They appear when Stryker activates the Warp Drive.
• Sonny Bono's briefcase is covered with stickers from his previous destinations, which are all cities destroyed by bombs: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and Dresden.

Is It Worth Staying Through End Credits?

After the end credits, a teaser trailer appears saying "Coming soon: Airplane III" and a scene of William Shatner saying "That's exactly what they'll be expecting us to do!"

Groovy Quotes

Simon: Gentlemen, I'd like you to meet your captain, Captain Oveur.
Clarence Oveur: Gentlemen, welcome aboard.
Simon: Captain, your navigator, Mr. Unger, and your first officer, Mr. Dunn.
Clarence Oveur: Unger.
Unger: Oveur.
Dunn: Oveur.
Clarence Oveur: Dunn. Gentlemen, let's get to work.
Simon: Unger, didn't you serve under Oveur in the Air Force?
Unger: Not directly. Technically, Dunn was under Oveur and I was under Dunn.
Dunn: Yep.
Simon: So, Dunn, you were under Oveur and over Unger.
Unger: Yep.
Clarence Oveur: That's right. Dunn was over Unger and I was over Dunn.
Unger: So, you see, both Dunn and I were under Oveur, even though I was under Dunn.
Clarence Oveur: Dunn was over Unger, and I was over Dunn.

Prosecutor: Dr. Stone, would you give the court your impression of Mr. Striker?
Dr. Stone: I'm sorry, I don't do impressions... my training is in psychiatry.

Jimmy: Mister, can I ask you a question?
Striker: A question? What is it?
Jimmy: It's an interrogative statement, used to test knowledge. But that's not important now.

Steve McCroskey: Jacobs, I want to know absolutely everything that's happened up till now.
Jacobs: Well, let's see. First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes. I couldn't believe it.

Elaine Dickinson: Ted, I have the strangest feeling we've been through this exact same thing before.

Steve McCroskey: And I can sum it all up in just one word: courage, dedication, daring, pride, pluck, spirit, grit, mettle, and G-U-T-S, *guts*. Why, Ted Striker's got more guts in his little finger than most of us have in our large intestine, including the colon!

Buck Murdock: Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Mr. Hammen: And how about the time we hopped in the family car and drove all the way to Woodstock?
Mrs. Hammen: Oh, that was a time. You got hold of that bad acid and didn't come down for two weeks, you kept telling everyone that you were Jesus Christ and then you jumped off a roof 'cause you thought you could fly!
Mr. Hammen: What a bummer.

Buffalo Anchorman: Our top story Tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Buffalo. Also in the news, Lunar Shuttle heads for the Sun, and certain disaster.
Tokyo Anchorman: Our top story Tonight, Four-alarm fire rages through Downtown Tokyo. Also in the news, American Lunar Mission locked in death struggle.
Moscow Anchorman: [with a gun pointed to his head] A Four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory. And on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are soon to perish in Shuttle disaster.

If you liked this movie, try these:

• Airplane!
• Dr. Strangelove
• Kentucky Fried Movie