10 Things About 80s Movies Everyone Misses Today
8. Parody Movies
In 1980, brothers David and Jerry Zucker gave the world one of the funniest and most quotable comedy movies of all time.
Airplane! told the story of a commercial flight that gets into trouble in the air, leaving the passengers' fate in the hands of an assortment of eccentrics, caricatures, and straight-up wackjobs.
It's the film that gave Leslie Nielsen his big break in comedy, the film that brought a new meaning to the phrase "drinking problem", and the film that heralded the arrival of dozens of other parodies.
The Zucker brothers made excellent use of trends found in old disaster movies, and other '80s filmmakers also found success in aping existing genres.
This Is Spinal Tap took the premise of music documentaries to the extreme. Mel Brooks ripped into Star Wars with Spaceballs. Leslie Nielsen also got a crack at playing a wacky police officer, first in the TV show Police Squad!, and then in the first Naked Gun movie.
You don't really see this sort of thing done anymore, and if you do, it's never usually done very well. You're really saying the '80s spoofed everything there was to spoof? Surely you can't be serious...