Back in 1980, she’d have been much too young to play the part.
So cute.
That had to put a real smile on your face. Or at least in your head behind your professional poker face.
My opinion, as a resident of those days: “Jive” is mostly neutral. It conveys “black culture” without (to this white person) being condescending or insulting. Jive is happy, friendly. “Ghetto” sounds like “violent, bad”, and more than a little derogatory. Ghetto invokes drugs and gangs and all the things that frighten white suburban people.
IMO, Jive struck the right balance.
The same character in Zero Hour was played by Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch. He would have been as familiar to audiences as Pete. But Kareem was better. You don’t see many 7’2" pilots! And you can’t make the insult about lack of defense to Pete.
“You don’t try very hard, except in the playoffs” would have been even funnier with Rose.
The way I heard it, they originally wanted Harriet Nelson IMHO Billingsley was a better choice..
In 1980, he had a cameo appearance in the film Airplane!, playing an incredibly patient taxicab passenger. His character apparently spends the entire movie sitting in an empty cab waiting for the driver (played by Robert Hays) to return, with the meter running all the while. Jarvis has the final line in the movie, which he says after the end credits; he looks at his watch and says “Well, I’ll give him another twenty minutes, but that’s it!” The inside joke was that Jarvis would never have paid for such a charge in real life.[14]
Being canine-centric, to me one of the funniest scenes was when the young intern arrives at the home of Captain Kramer (Robert Stack) to give him a ride to the airport …
Nobody has mentioned the “Radar Range” guy in the control tower, so I will.
That’s Jonathan Banks, who we all know from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
I used to wonder why he was wearing a leather flight jacket. I still don’t know, but the original character in Zero Hour had one, too.
That’s another joke that might be lost on younger viewers. The Amana Radarange (spelled that way) was the first commercially available microwave oven, and for awhile many people used that term for any microwave.
“You’re all over the place. Talkin’ about basketball. Then talkin’ about jive. What assholes!”
I have a fantasy of meeting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and saying to him, “I know you! You’re Roger Murdock! You’re a pilot for Trans American Airlines!”
One joke people often miss is when Rex Kramer/Robert Stack is putting on his uniform while looking at a full-length mirror, and then what should have been his reflection walks out of the space where the mirror had been.
Does anybody under 50 get the “Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home” joke?
I didn’t get it as a kid, but I didn’t think I needed to: I just figured it was something that, well, yeah, she might blandly observe to herself right about then — setting up the joke where, later, she blandly observes that Jim never vomits at home.
A few years ago I had some sports talk show on TV and the guest was Kareem. After a bit the host grinned and said “And you were in Airplane!”. He clearly had been waiting to talk about it and it was going to be the highlight of his day.
It’s from a series of TV commercials in the '70s. Husband and wife are out, someone offers husband a second cup of coffee, husband says yes, and then the voiceover. It’s the same actress from the commercials in the movie.
And then they extend the joke later with the “Jim never vomits at home.”
(At least, I remember it as a series of commercials, and not just that one. They were recent enough and popular enough that most people would have recognized that reference when the movie was new.)
I was familiar with the commercial(s) that the movie was parodying, but I didn’t know that!
I missed that reference completely! DUH! 
And quit calling me Shirley.