I watched Zero Hour on Canadian TV a few years back and laughed heartily at the start of every scene.
I loved Nielsen as a member of the RCMP in Due South. Of course, that series couldn’t have been anything other but funny just because of the way it was written.
And no one has mentioned Nielson as the handsome, brave, resolute Commander J.J. Adams in Forbidden Planet.
The precursor of James Tiberius Kirk!
And Forbidden Planet. Which I didn’t see until this century, well after he’d been cemented in my head as a comic, which made his serious role somewhat jarring.
From what I remember, Stack, Neilsen, Bridges and Graves , all dramatic actors at that point, were instructed to treat the insanity as deadly serious.
I’ve been watching them all-- what a hoot! TCM was showing them all during June.
Interesting fact: Maureen McGovern sang sappy songs in The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Airplane!.
Oh - saw thread title and thought John McEnroe would be the OP.
Time to pick nits: Maureen McGovern had the hit single with The Morning After, but did not sing the song for the movie (Carol Lynley didn’t, either). The singer was Renee Armand, who sang on several John Denver albums and toured with his group, among other gigs during the ‘70s.
And now I feel we should all take a moment to listen to Killdozer’s tribute to Irwin Allen.
To nitpick further, I think McGovern appeared in Airplane! as a nun, and sang a brief snippet of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” (leading to one of the jive dudes throwing up), but that was all.
Indeed, one of the central conceits of Airplane was to hire aging dramatic actors–exactly the sort of actors who would have been cast in one of the disaster movies of the time–and have them give exactly the sort of performance they would normally give, despite all the ridiculousness happening around them.
It’s interesting that Nielsen is the only one who was able to parlay that into a career renaissance.
Lloyd Bridges famously didn’t get it. There’s a story that he was very confused during the entire shoot, saying that he didn’t understand the jokes. Robert Stack finally said to him, “Lloyd, we are the joke.”
In the book mentioned above (which I bought immediately after seeing it here), Lloyd Bridges’ son, Beau, says his dad’s career was “reinvented” by Airplane!
We were so happy to see it happen, my brother and I and our family, because we always felt he had a real funny bone in there. Rarely did he get a chance to show his comic chops. Airplane! really started it for him in that arena. It was wonderful, because he did have a great sense of humor, and it finally came to light with that wonderful movie. I just loved it.
The Towering Inferno. I waited for decades to see that one again, and it didn’t age well. It was awesome on a big movie screen, but lost something on my small tv.
Lloyd was great as the befuddled USN Admiral in Hot Shots.
Especially not after 9/11. None of the movies in that Killdozer clip have.
Oh, for sure, it was unnerving watching it again for that reason alone.
A few years back, my younger daughter (who is now 30) came home after seeing Airplane! somewhere for the first time. As I talked with her, I realized she missed the real joke about “the old woman speaking Jive” and had to explain who Barbara Billingsley was and why that scene was so goddamned funny.
When I first saw the movie in 1980, the cinema was of course full of Baby Boomers like me, and they all shouted “Hey, that’s Beaver’s mom!” and laughed heartily when Barbara came on the screen.
And then the president in Hot Shots II.
Not all. I had no idea that old lady was the same actress as had played Beaver’s Mom 30 years prior. And yes, I had watched at least some LitB when it was current and I was 6-10yo.
To me all the humor was the idea of Jive in the first place, and that any grayhaired white woman could speak it. And yes, the movie came out at about the time of peak Jive / ebonics, etc.
Yes, but Barbara was the ideal 1950s American housewife and mother, not just “any grayhaired white woman.” Ward Cleaver would have been spinning in his grave if he had heard her speaking Jive to the Soul Brothers (if I may be allowed to use that term).