Hacker Cinema
Zero Hour!
1957 · Film · 81 min
Directed by Hall Bartlett
In 1950s Canada, during a commercial flight, the pilots and some passengers suffer food poisoning, thus forcing an ex-WW2 fighter pilot to try to land the airliner in heavy fog.
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9 comments on Hacker News
I absolutely love his performance in Airplane, the facial expressions are perfect and the way he looks around after “the hell I don’t” shows he really has great comedic timing and movement.
Incidentally, for anyone that didn’t know, the film Airplane was an almost shot for shot remake of a film called Zero Hour [1] and the copilot in the original film was a famous NFL player (Elroy ‘Crazy Legs’ Hirsch), hence why they’ve got Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to play the copilot in Airplane.
We have clearance Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's our vector Victor?
[1] https://youtu.be/8-v2BHNBVCs?feature=shared
I am sure it adds another layer of ironic, wry, situational comedy to that movie as many other layers of it are.
When I learned about how it was basically a shot for shit remake of Zero Hour, AND the story of how and why they basically got to remake it, it tickled me even further.
Sorta reminds me of the infamous official "Ghost Stories" dub, which is....uh.... something else. Er. Lol.
Yes, movie sounds are intended to sound like viewers expect, not how they actually sound. See Airplane! where the action all takes place on a passenger jet but the background sound effects are all for a propeller airliner, because it evokes the sound and feel of Zero Hour, the movie it’s parodying. (https://www.google.com/search?q=zero+hour+movie&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=vclbx)
Ya, that's a really good example of exaggeration comedy. Also Airplane! was directly made as a reaction to the overly serious action/drama films of the time (literally a shot for shot remake of Zero Hour!) And those films definitely were a product of the 70s, but honestly that analytical line is just overwhelming.
But still, direct parody movies are a mostly dead genre on mainstream delivery channels, for reasons described in the article.
Zero Hour? What is it?
I've seen Airplane! many, many times and I just found this out recently. There are a dozen or more videos on YouTube comparing the two movies.
Did you know Airplane was a remake of an earlier film ‘Zero Hour’? Most impressively, Zero Hour was a serious film that had a script adjusted and combined with directing, acting, and visual gags to create this comedic masterpiece.
Fun Fact: Airplane! is a spoof of the Paramount film Zero Hour (1957) which is itself a clone of the wildly famous John Wayne Classic "The High and Mighty" (1954), which was the first disaster film and a breakout hit. Robert Stack, who plays the captain in The High and Mighty, also plays the captain in Airplane, as a parody of his previous role.
It's pretty cool to watch The High and Mighty after Airplane and recognize so many of the scenes, including the sweating pilot, the little life stories of the characters, the operations manager (Regis Toomey) pacing back and forth in the control room, etc.
Airplane was not strictly an original, it was a remake/spoof of Zero Hour from 1957 and more broadly spoofing the "disaster" film concept.
The plot of Airplane! was lifted verbatim from a non-comedy 1957 movie called Zero Hour!, specifically because AZZ knew they couldn't write plot.
They were up-front about it - paid for the rights - but it does suggest that writing comedy and writing plot are very different things.