When the plane taxis a young man stands in the door of the plane yelling good-bye to has girlfriend running alongside, a satire of a scene from the movie Since You Went Away where the girl is running alongside a train.
In some foreign releases, such as Australia, Airplane! was entitled Flying High.
The plot of Airplane! is a well known. The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, was a CBC TV movie called Flight Into Danger. In 1957 Paramount Pictures used this plot in the movie Zero Hour!. Airplane! is the fourth remake of the Arthur Hailey novel Runway Zero-Eight. Arthur Hailey, ironically, also wrote the novel Airport. This novel led to the movie by the same name, which spawned several sequels with Airplane! is also said to spoof (and, some say, killed).
Airplane! also has elements based on films in the Airport series, especially Airport '75. The elements lifted from Airport '75 include:
· A guitar playing nun (played by Maureen McGovern in Airplane! and Helen Reddy in Airport '75), and
· A sick little girl that the nun's guitar is played for (played by Linda Blair in Airport '75 and Jill Whelan in Airplane!).
Some critics have claimed that the movie's most important achievement was in bringing to an end the Airport series of movies, which could no longer be taken seriously. But the blame for the demise of the Airport movies can be laid at the feet of the Airport creators as much as at the feet of the Airplane! creators. The Airport series had taken on high levels of credibility gaps. Seriously, can a 747 be submerged underwater without damage for several hours and the passengers having no ill effects?
Several actors were cast in order to spoof their established images. Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges had played many adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guys. Leslie Nielsen claims he played "more cops, doctors, and attorneys than you could shake a nightstick/stethoscope/law book at." Barbara Billingsley, the mother on Leave It To Beaver, offers to translate for a pair of hip African-American passengers whose jive talking is incomprehensible to the stewardesses. Ethel Merman has a memorable cameo as a shell-shocked fighter pilot who thinks he's Ethel Merman. Nielsen probably made the best of his new-found stereotype as he has since specialized in playing clueless deadpan bumblers (who can forget Lt. Frank Drebin in Naked Gun?).
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