You see, both the movie Airplane and Epic Movie use basically the same technique -- sending up many other films in an exaggerated, overblown fashion. But I've never understood why Airplane managed to be so hilarious and this movie just fails to get the same laughs out of the audience. Does anybody have an answer, please, because I can't put my finger on it.
shareNo idea i dont think it was funny either. maybe nostalgia value?
shareA few ideas.
1. Airplane actually has a proper plot. This is quite important as it is nearly impossible to keep laughing at random jokes for more than an hour. It follows a classic movie storyline in that someone needs to face up to their fears in order to save the day, which gives a firm structure to hang the jokes off.
2. Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker know the way to direct this sort of comedy which is never lean too heavily on the jokes. Essentially they let all the random occurences drift by and you either find them funny or you don't. If you don't find a joke funny, you know it won't stay on that joke too long and another one will be along in a minute.
3. Allied to 2, they don't lampshade their references. Take the bar room brawl which turns into a scene from Saturday Night Fever. If you don't know Saturday Night Fever, you might find the scene quite funny. If you do, you might find it very funny. However, it wouldn't be any funnier if Ted Stryker suddenly announced 'Hey I'm John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever'
4. They make sure that they parody serious genres, not films that are already parodies. By amping up the seriousness of disaster movie tropes to 11, they point out how ridiculous they are. Whereas Seltzer & Freidberg seem to enjoy parodying films that are already comedies, how the hell is just repeating scenes from Nacho Libre and Snakes on a Film supposed to be funny?
She's really Tyler Durden/Keyser Soze/A Man/A Ghost/Dreaming/His sled
Great analysis, culfy. Reading it was certainly a lot more fun that watching this extraordinarily unfunny film.
I would also add that Airplane was played dead straight. Every line was delivered as though the actors were in a real disaster movie.
Also, Airplane lacked awful song & dance numbers.
--
Be true and faithful like your dog; but don't eat vomit like your dog
The two people above me hit the nail on the head,
id also add that Airplane humour is ageless, Airplane has jokes that even after 30 years are still brilliant whereas with modern spoof movies less than 1 year after they come out I don't know what half the jokes are meant to be because they were written specifically for when the movie came out and they age badly.
Sisko: "Major, shut that thing off! Commander Worf, prepare to launch Torpedoes!"
Yeah, I totally agree with the above posts. Great comedies understand the need for subtlety. E.G:
"oh stewardess I believe the man next to me is a doctor."
"excuse me sir, are you a doctor?"
[Leslie Nielsen sitting with a stethoscope] "That's right."
Epic Movie:
"mmm chocolate, delicious, mmm this chocolate's great. MMM this chocolate's so good" .... 3 miutes later... "That's actually the sewage pipe". Original!
One thing to add. Much of the dialogue in "Airplane" was lifted directly from the movie "Zero Hour." It was basically a remake of that movie with some jokes worked in.
It was like when Tina Fey mocked Sarah Palin. It was funny at the beginning, but it became even funnier when she quoted her verbatim.
Oh man, can you imagine people attempting to watch this POS in 30 years? The references NOW already don't make any sense. Half the time in these movies they parodied a movie TRAILER of something that didn't even come out yet.
shareI actually can't, because I expect that whatever video format is used thirty years from now will not be wasted on new copies of this. There are tons of films that never made it to VHS, tons of films that were on VHS that never made it to DVD, and fewer still that are now on blu-ray. Can you remotely imagine that Epic Movie will continue to be updated with however many more new dominant formats will come and go in three more decades? Somewhere out there, there's a landfill with the negatives already dumped inside.
-There is no such word as "alot."
You really can not see the difference in quality between these two films.Airplane is how a spoof movie should be done.I was stoned watching epic movie and i still ended up turning it off because I did not find it funny.It was a bucket of piss.
shareYou really can not see the difference in quality between these two films.Airplane is how a spoof movie should be done.I was stoned watching epic movie and i still ended up turning it off because I did not find it funny.It was a bucket of piss.
This Exactly.
Airplane wasn't funny, no movie of that form is exactly 'smart' humour.
Intuition...takes me anywhere.
Yes, Airplane was funny.
http://culfycavy.blogspot.com
To sum up, Airplane parodies,uses satire, puts a comedic spin on subject matter. The excrement that the Epic Movie guys pass off as cinema is simply dropping a recognizable reference to another film.
I normally try to reserve judgement, different tastes for different folks, but only very, VERY stupid people enjoy the Epic Movie and similar productions from that Writer/Director duo.
Well I'd certainly say Airplane has far more witty humour, but...
It still has a lot of slapstick and ridiculous scenes like Epic Movie does. However, Airplane nailed those type of scenes, e.g. the flashback to the 70s dance scene, because it was such a relatable incident (meeting the love of your life on the dance floor, whether it be real or fantasy, it doesn't matter), and the two characters performed some absolutely outrageously funny moves while doing so, such as Russian dances while juggling, the woman carrying the man by the legs... It was also the way that he told the story with a straight face, like that night really meant more to him than anything, which added to the funny factor.
It was the same with the whole disaster feeling. One second the characters were showing a sense of fear with that was going on, then they suddenly include a joke like "Roger Roger, Vector Victor scene", or "Two hours til I can have a guess?"
Epic Movie on the otherhand, completely failed with this. They went for farts, people being hit with arrows, stabbing and pirates of the carribean raps w/ sexy dancing. They tried too hard to be funny and felt they had to keep including these cliches, but it just didn't work at all IMO.
You see, both the movie Airplane and Epic Movie use basically the same technique -- sending up many other films in an exaggerated, overblown fashion. But I've never understood why Airplane managed to be so hilarious and this movie just fails to get the same laughs out of the audience. Does anybody have an answer, please, because I can't put my finger on it.
"Airplane" was an original. It was brilliant for its time.
shareAside from "Because it is"
There is "Unlike Airplane it just doesn't make me laugh."
And ther more detailed approache
Take away all reality shows/stars joke.
Take away all disgusting jokes. i.e everything that includes throwing up and other bodily fluids
Take away all refernces to small and mostly unknown movies
Also take away the repat of jokes that didn't work the first time.
And actually there isn't much movie left.
Airplane has jokes. (Very few of which were parodies as it goes.)
Epic/Date/Disaster Movie just has references.
Having a lookalike come on and go "Hey I'm Borat/Napoleon Dynamite/Willy Wonka" is no reason to laugh.
(On the subject of "Willy Wonka"... Crispin Glover refused to be in Back To The Future 2 but signed up for this turd?!)
Also, as someone said above. You can't spoof a comedy. It NEVER works.
Don't you find it funny that these awful comedies even attempt to send up decent comedies like Borat and to a lesser extent Napoleon Dynamite. I mean even Scary Movie, which I quite enjoy, sends up Scream, which in itself a satire of the horror genre.
shareI mean even Scary Movie, which I quite enjoy, sends up Scream, which in itself a satire of the horror genre.
No one ever accused Crispin Glover of being sane, so that would explain this.
"Oh Benson, dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence."
Airplane has a sense of sophistication to its humour. Where it works with the humour of the audience and being like the joke:
US Ship: Please divert your course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course.
CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course!
US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA*, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!!
CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
What do you call a boomerang that doesn't back?
A stick.
chirp chirp chirp chirp