Zero Hour!

FeverDog wrote on IMDB:

Oh. My. Gawd. TCM had a ZAZ-fest recently, with THE NAKED GUN, TOP SECRET, AIRPLANE!, and...a certain movie that I've never come across before.

ZERO HOUR! is the first time I've watched a movie I've never seen before but could quote the dialogue along with. Examples:

"Sluggish, like a wet sponge."

"I just want to say 'good luck'."

"You're a member of this crew. Can you face some unpleasant facts?"

"Flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle."

"You ever been in a cockpit before?" "No sir, I've never been up in a plane before!"

"The survival of everyone on board depends on just one thing: finding someone on board who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."   [ show more ]

Sound familiar? In addition to the verbatim dialogue (and the exclamation point in its title), AIRPLANE! contained many other similarities. The co-pilot played by a former Los Angeles pro-ball player. The female passenger in hysterics. Little Joey visiting the cockpit (where the pilot puts his arm around him with perhaps inappropriate affection before giving him a toy plane). The unmarried stewardess. A wife awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call telling her to come to the airport immediately. Ted Stryker flashing back to the war and recovering in a veterans' hospital. Newspaper headlines prognosticating disaster. Inclement weather. The plane landing while losing its wheels. I could go on, but, really, the only things missing were a jive-talking black duo and a crucial moment in which the heroine's bobby pin saves the day.

ZERO HOUR! was of course never intended to provoke laughs, but how can anyone watch this story now with a straight face? Try watching an old Leslie Nielsen drama without cracking up. It was actually a delight learning where the ZAZ boys got a lot of their material (and AMC occasionally runs AIRPORT 1975, which is where, if I remember correctly, the nun, sick little girl and singing stewardess originated).

If TCM ever runs ZERO HOUR! again, I implore every fan of AIRPLANE! to sit down for eighty minutes and watch it. It's an eye-popping experience, in a whole new way. [ show less ]

Tracer wrote on IMDB:

_Airplane!_ was so closely based on this movie that the list of DIFFERENCES between this movie and _Airplane!_ is shorter than the list of similarities.

Some of the differences between _Zero Hour!_ and _Airplane!_ are:

*) The only two characters with the same names are Ted Striker and Joey.

*) In ZH, Ted Striker's ill-fated air raid during the War was dramatized in its entirety at the beginning of the movie, not reconstructed piecemeal in flashbacks over the course of the film -- although Ted did have a couple of flashbacks in ZH at crucial moments.

*) The flight in ZH is a DC-4 carrying 38 passengers from Calgary to Vancouver, BC. The airspeed indicator for the DC-4 only went up to 250 miles per hour.   [ show more ]

*) In ZH, Ellen (the character that became Elaine in _Airplane!_) was Ted Striker's wife, and Joey was his son. Joey was among the unlucky passengers who ate fish (halibut) instead of meat (lamb chops), and he gets so sick that he symbolically breaks the toy airplane the pilot had given him.

*) The pilot in ZH succumbs to food poisoning slowly, and manages to keep the plane under control for an hour or so, thanks to a morphine injection administered by the Doctor, until he finally collapses. The automatic pilot (not inflatable, of course) was already engaged by then.

*) Nothing like the Knute-Rockne-based inspirational speech that the Doctor gave to Ted Striker in _Airplane!_ is anywhere to be found in ZH.

*) In ZH, the unmarried stewardess had a boyfriend on board who tried to cheer up Joey with a glove-puppet.

*) A tense moment happens in ZH where the plane's radio accidentally gets knocked off the proper frequency and Ted Striker is on his own, cut off from communication with the ground, until Ted and Mrs. Striker can find the frequency again. This sequence does not appear in _Airplane!_.

*) In ZH, when the air traffic controllers went looking for Ted Striker's old commanding Captain, they first had to call his babysitter at home (who had Elvis Presley turned up way too loud on the TV to hear them), and then had to call a nightclub where said Captain and his wife were dancing to an equally-loud jazz band. [ show less ]

wlsweather wrote on IMDB:

And you thought the dialogue and acting went over the top in "Airplane," huh? Thank you TCM for running this the other day. I had never seen it before, but wait a minute, sure I had... dozens of times. That's what made the ZH viewing such a hoot. ZAZ did such a fine job colorizing "Zero Hour!" I had the whole script memorized. If you have grown slightly weary from repeated "Airplane" yukfests, find a copy of its propellorized progenitor and enjoy the comedy anew. So true is the original to its parody (note the deliberate juxtaposition) I half expected Geoffrey Toone's (Dr. Baird) nose to grow as he attempted to calm the passengers. All that was missing was June Cleaver's "Jive Talkin'!"