ZUCKER, ZUCKER AND ABRAHAMS EXPOSED!

          Fact: 1980 will always be remembered as the year we learned Barbara Billingsley could speak fluent jive.

          Fact: Robert Stack wears multiple sets of sunglasses, so that when he removes one pair for emphasis, he's still got another pair of shades underneath.

          Fact: In his spare time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pilots commercial jet-liners...with one-liners.

          And how do we know these things? Why, Airplane! off course.

          Written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the original title of the screwball spoof was Flying High.

          Loosely, Airplane! parodies disaster films of the '70s. Specifically, it parodies the B-movie drama Zero Hour! (1957), starring Sterling Hayden. Dana Andrews plays Ted Stryker, a pilot with a past flying as a passenger on a jet where members of the crew suffer food poisoning.

          By contrast, in Airplane! Robert Hays plays Ted Striker, a pilot with a past flying as a passenger on a jet where members of the crew suffer food poisoning. The filmmakers couldn't get Sterling Hayden. So they got the next best thing: Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and Leslie Nielsen.

          From the opening titles high in the sky with the theme from Jaws playing as the plane's tail fin cuts through the clouds, sight gags, puns, and cartoonish silliness abound.

          Old lady to nervous guy fastening airplane seat belt:

          "Nervous?"

          "Yes."

          "First time?"

          "No, I've been nervous lots of times."

          Like a live-action version of "The Simpsons" before "The Simpsons" existed, Airplane! packs the laughs into a well-stuffed Samsonite of cinema.

          Zucker, Zucker, and Abrahams grew up together, seeming perfectly normal, with a loving childhood, and then they made Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), which consists of irreverent sketches and is delightfully tasteless.

          The trio followed the commercial smash hit of Airplane! with Top Secret! (1984), which stars Val Kilmer and combines Elvis Presley musicals with Cold War spy films for double-barrel parody hilarity. When asked why his name is Nick, Kilmer replies it's just something his father thought of while shaving.

          It might be their funniest movie, but it wasn't commensurately successful. Two years prior, they had a show on ABC for six episodes called "Police Squad!" Starring Leslie Nielsen (this time as a detective), the show largely parodied a Lee Marvin cop show years prior called "M Squad." In 1988 the trio re-packaged the TV for the film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

          Nielsen's straight-man dead-pan delivery works in perfect contrast with the zany sight gags and puns of The Naked Gun, just as in Airplane! In subsequent films where he is no longer being a totally serious baritone authority figure, but instead acting silly, then there is nothing funny at all. Here though he is in his element, turning his career as a B-movie heavy completely inside-out.

Stewart Kirby writes for