EDITOR’S NOTE: Airplane was on USA Up All Night on March 12, 1994 along with Airplane II.

If you combined Zero Hour! with Airport 1975, you get Airplane, a movie that changed lives. Seriously.

The ZAZ team — Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker — were part of the Kentucky Fried Theater and they’d often record late night TV and watch the tapes to get ideas. They recorded Zero Hour!  and thought that it was the perfect structure for them to do jokes around. Originally calling the movie The Late Show, their script borrowed so much got the rights to create the remake from Warner Bros. and Paramount for about $2,500.  They couldn’t get it sold but learned how to make movies when they made The Kentucky Fried Movie with John Landis.

Eventually, the script found its way to Paramount through Michael Eisner. They made the ZAZ team shoot it in color instead of black and white and on a jet instead of a plane. If they followed those rules, they would be allowed to cast serious actors for the film rather than comedy performers.

The ZAZ casting is what changed lives. Or careers, really.

David Zucker said, “The trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. These were people who, up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were.”

It wasn’t easy. To get Stack to play the role the way they wanted, they showed him a tape of John Byner impersonating the actor, so in effect, Stack was doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack. While Bridges’ children advised him to take the part, Graves rejected the script at first, as he thought so much of it was tasteless.

As for Neilsen, his career has been serious leading roles but he wanted to work in comedy forever. He was just looking for a film to help in the transition. For years, he had pranked actors with a fart machine on set and he took to being in the film quite well. He’s lucky Christopher Lee turned the role down to be in 1941.

That’s why this movie works. No one is acting like it’s a comedy, no matter how ridiculous it gets. Even the Elmer Bernstein score gets the joke and plays its part.

It’d be stupid to just recount the movie and every joke, but let me tell you, this is a movie I can watch from any point and just not be able to stop watching. I think I watched it hundreds of times as a kid and my love of stupid humor comes from this. Any time Stephen Stucker was on screen, I’d laugh like a maniac, the same as everything Bridges does.

In fact, my love of the original Airport movies comes directly from how much I adore this movie.