Okay, like Monty Python films, my friends & I have always loved and constantly quote lines from the first Airplane! film. We went and saw the sequel in the theater and loved that one too. I know it not only didn’t have Leslie Nielson in it, but that the original creators (Abrahams & Zuckers) weren’t involved. Yet, unlike almost every sequel made by others, we’ve always found Airplane 2 to be almost as funny as the first. It certainly has as many quotable lines as the first. And a self-parodying William Shatner more than made up for Leslie Nielson.
I’m not so interested in box office figures or professional reviews, but do diehard fans of Airplane! (and say Police Squad) find the sequel to be almost as good, just ok, or terrible?
I haven’t watched it in ages, and when I first saw it I was but a kid, the perfect non-discerning age for it, but I’ve always thought of it being almost as good as the original. It has more of a Science Fiction parody element to it, which for me is a big plus.
The sequel was funny enough but it borrowed too many gags from the first film to rank along side one another. The first film was groundbreaking in the unsubtlty of the humor. No film using that style (like the countless Scary Movie spinoffs) will ever seem as fresh or funny as the first Airplane!.
I’m somewhere between good as the orginal and just okay. I think the sequel mostly suffers due to comparision to the original. If the orginal didnt exist the sequel would take its place among the funniest movies ever.
By the way, when’s the last time Airplane 2 was aired on TV? It was pretty common on broadcast and cable TV in the 90s but I’ve haven’t seen it in years on TV.
One of the funnier aspects of the movie is a meta-gag. If you see the first movie, almost all the jokes are take-offs from that, only even more insane. Which is half the point, because it’s riffing on sequels as a whole.
I am amazed by how good the sequel is, considering that it’s not by the same team (although it used the same actors). Normally when one tries to copy an idiosyncratic comedy like that the result is a dismal failure. But Airplane II managed to tap into the same surreal vein of throw-a-joke-at-you-if-it-doesn’t-work-here’s=another, combined with off-the-wall pop culture references with an easy abandon.
The whole “Macho Grande” court scene, with its constant running jokes switching phrases with names, could’ve come ftom the first “Airplane” film.
Or the scene where Striker, havimng escaped the asylum, arrives at the airport in a truck carrying pods from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, jumps off the truck as a flash goes off, then passes a newsstand having front-page newspapers showing him jumping off the truck is so in keeping with the whole Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams style that I was dazzled.
Even being good and noted in your own right, however, is no guarantee that you can capture someone else’s style, and b damned good at it. Compare the “fake ads” and general style of roboCop II with the original RoboCop, for instance. I find the sequels painful to watch. It’s a common complant that sequels not by the original team aren’t up to sbuff (The Fly II. Or Son of the Fly, for that matter). There are a few cases where they’re very good, but extremely different in stryle and tone (Aliens). To have a sequel be both good and similar is rare and impressive.
This is true. I suspect that a lot of folks think that some of the lines from Airplane II were really from the original, and say that the sequel wasn’;t as good simply because it was a sequel, or because someone else did it.
Honestly – how many of you thought that “Macho Grande” was from the first Airplane film?