Airplane II: The Sequel
Airplane II: The Sequel is an American comedy film, first released on December 10, 1982, produced by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, Chad Everett, William Shatner, Rip Torn and Sonny Bono. It is the third of a number of movies produced and directed by the trio, and the sequel to the 1980 film Airplane!.
In some foreign releases (including Australia), Airplane II was entitled Flying High II: The Sequel.
Just like the Original, Airplane II spoofs airline disaster stories such as Zero Hour! and Airport (movie). This time, however, they add an element of the science fiction film genre, with elements specifically from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also makes light of the wave of aircraft hijackings that had occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Plot Synopsis
A Lunar Shuttle known as "Mayflower One", which looks very close to the Space Shuttle, is being rushed to launch. The head of the ground crew, The Sarge (played by Chuck Connors), does not like what's going on, but defers to the airline's management. On-board as computer officer is Elaine (Hagerty), who has long-since left Ted Striker (Hays) and is now engaged to one of the flight crew, Simon Kurtz (Everett).
Captain Clarence Oveur (played by Peter Graves) returns as the Captain. On the flight crew with Oveur and Kurtz are First Officer Dunn (James A. Watson, Jr.) and Navigator Dave Unger (Kent McCord).
Striker has been committed to an insane asylum, having been declared incompetent in a lawsuit brought after the events of Airplane! The lawsuit was used to silence him because he knew there were problems with the Lunar Shuttle that made it unsafe. Now he is ever more haunted by actions in "The War", specifically the events referred to as "Macho Grande" where he lost his entire squadron, but his psychosis is more related to post-traumatic stress disorder than a fear of flying this time. When he reads of the Lunar Shuttle launch, he escapes the asylum and gets a ticket for the flight.
Mayflower One suffers a short circuit and the computer develops a mind of its own, sending the ship toward the Sun. Unger and Dunn try to deactivate the computer room, but end up getting sucked out of an airlock. Oveur also tries to stop the computer, but gets gassed to death. Again, Striker gets called upon to control the craft, but first he has to figure out how to make the computer relinquish control.
That's when Steven McCroskey, the air traffic controller played by Lloyd Bridges, comes into play. He reveals that somebody, Joe Seluchi (Bono), had boarded the plane with a bomb, intending to commit suicide so that his wife could collect on insurance money (the policy, it turns out, was for car insurance, and therefore worthless). He was originally supposed to fly to Des Moines to get treatment for impotence, but boarded the Lunar Shuttle instead. Striker manages to wrest the bomb from him and uses it to blow up the computer and head for the Moon as originally intended. Kurtz abandons Elaine and leaves in the only escape pod before they take control.
On the way to the Moon, control of the flight is shifted to a lunar base, commanded by Cmdr. Buck Murdoch (Shatner). He has a low level of esteem for Striker because of Macho Grande, but agrees to help anyway. They manage to land the craft. Ted and Elaine fall back in love and get married at the end.
Gags
A lot of gags are included in this movie, in the tradition of the original:
- Oveur, Unger and Dunn engage in a lengthy verbal exchange in pre-flight checkout that amounted to a string of puns on their names. For example, Unger says "He was under Oveur, and I was over Dunn."
- McCroskey turns back to drinking during the crisis, and before relinquishing mission control to the Moon, he remarks to the ground crew, "Striker has more guts in his pinky finger than most men have in their large intestines, including the colon!" He then passes out.
- There is a movie poster for Rocky XXXVIII in the airport.
- When the spacecraft goes to warp 0.5 to race back to the Moon, the indicator says "Worp 0.5" in an intentional misspelling. When the flight attendant suggests to the passengers that they may experience metabolic changes, all the passengers are wearing Ronald Reagan masks.
- When McCroskey says the passengers are in jeopardy, Art Fleming, in a cameo, appears in the cabin and the passengers are playing '70s-style Jeopardy! This was two years before the game show was revived with Alex Trebek hosting. A passenger selects "Famous Airline Disasters" for $50 and the answer given is "The Mayflower".
- When several international TV news anchors report, they all lead in with some sort of fire, and then report the Mayflower incident. The Moscow anchor has a gun to his head.
- When Murdoch looks in his periscope, he sees the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, a play on the fact that he's played by William Shatner, who played James T. Kirk in that series.
- A guy opens a window on the airplane to throw out a cigarette, and it starts to suck the air out of the cabin temporarily.
- When Striker looks out the window after Unger and Dunn are sucked out into the vacuum of space, he sees their dead bodies float together and appear to "dance" in zero gravity.
- Before landing, Mayflower One crashes through the lunar base in a gag similar to the Boeing 747 crashing into the terminal during taxi in the original movie.