That reminds me of the Police Squad episode where Drebin and Sally Decker are firing at one another from behind barriers.
The camera pans out and they’re only like 10 feet apart!
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First movie I ever saw because I loved the trailer. I’ve never laughed so hard, before or since, at a movie. My favorite bit: taking off the sunglasses to see another pair underneath.
I will never forget Johnny. What a fantastic, fantastic character…!
We’ve been rewatching Mission: Impossible on Amazon Prime streaming. There’s a couple of episodes where Phelps gets the tape with his assignment at a playground where children are playing. I half expected him to ask one of the kids if he likes gladiator movies.
Bumped.
A nice 2010 interview with the actor who played Joey, the innocent little kid in the cockpit: Interview: Ross Harris, a/k/a The Little Kid In Airplane!, Reminisces About Peter Graves, a/k/a The Creepy Pilot Who Asked Him If He'd Ever Seen A Grown Man Naked - The Village Voice
Good read. Thanks!
I missed this one first time around. When I saw the movie back in 1980, pretty much *everyone in the theater knew who Barbara Billingsly was, and the reaction was immediate: “Hey! It’s Beaver’s mom! HAW!” 
*Note that around this time there had just been a big revival of Leave It to Beaver on TV, which ultimately led to the short-lived series Still the Beaver.
I was misremembering about this one. It actually happened a few years later, in 1983. Everyone who reacted in the theater knew Barbara from the original 1957–63 TV series. (I get the feeling her segment in Airplane! provided some impetus for the revival.)
Listen, Betty, don’t start up with your White Zone shit again.
Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
Oh! You have a guitar! 
Golly!
Jim never vomits at home.
Just yesterday, a co-worker said “Good luck.” I replied, “Are you all counting on me?”
It’s hard to get my younger friends to enjoy this film because they don’t get those little pop-culture references. But those of us who lived through the 70’s remember those coffee commercials (“Jim never gets a second cup at home”).
“I’ve gotta get outta here!”
“I’ve gotta get outta here!”
We’ll cut you some slack, Jack.
About the time of Airplane! I read a joke where animals were given punny names, like calling a donkey “Ho-tee”. I got almost all of them, except for one - they named a pair of egrets “Miss Otis”. It took me 35 years to get that one! “Miss Otis Regrets” just wasn’t a song that got played on the radio at all in the 70s-80s-etc. Zoomed right over my head it did.
Wonder what else I missed over the years.
I just had a connection in LA and when I heard the overhead voices all I could think of was “The red zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only, there is no stopping in the white zone”