10 Incredible Movie Parodies Nobody Noticed
6. Airplane!
Unless you were already an adult in 1980, it probably flew clean over your head that the legendary comedy Airplane! wasn't just a hilariously absurd farce from the minds of Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers.
Rather, Airplane! is a parody of the glut of disaster movies that flooded cinemas throughout the 1970s, but draws most explicitly from the 1957 film Zero Hour!, using the same central aerospace catastrophe premise, many of the same characters, and even identical lines of dialogue.
But these facts were largely lost on anyone young enough to first watch Airplane! as a child and simply find amusement in the brilliant slapstick comedy, ludicrous sight gags, and unforgettable performances from Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges.
Yet for older viewers, it was a parody so brilliantly effective that it more-or-less scared Hollywood off from making any serious-minded plane-centric disaster films for years afterwards.