Meaning a light Man like this man letting butterfly flapping and wan big down in the forest.
Man, it gonna cause the tree fold, letting five thousand miles away.
Man, nobody seen nobody else. You don't need no man.
They liked you, followed another story and.
You got back in like that. That's when man got blackly dag on the Panama Man.
Man, you don't don't matter. Man, all right, the Prudentialist. Welcome back to the Jay Burden Show.
How you doing, Man, I'm doing good.
You know. It's we're just we're off the heels of a of a certain conference. So it's good to talk to friends. I was just talking to in person again.
Yeah, it's funny not to be too modeling about it. Uh, but I just hit episode five hundred, and you know, so I've been reminiscing a little bit. And very very early in my pot casting career, you gave me some
phenomenal advice. This is like single digit episodes. And you and I were talking and I had sent you an outline for the show, and you were like, man, that's great and all, but if you consider just talking and not being weird and autistic and following an outline, and genuinely I hadn't, and so, honoring your advice, I haven't planned really a damn thing about the show ever since, and so I appreciate that.
Well, I'm glad that the advice I gave you led to your meteoritic rise and success that I should have followed myself. So I'm glad I can help others but not me.
Yeah. Oh yes, that's the what is it, you know, a profit in their own land and all that. That's right here, not to talk about really anything serious at all, but we're here for a movie review, the nineteen eighty classic Airplane, which this this is me kind of exposing my I zoom her self. I'd actually never seen this before today. Matt just completely missed it.
Oh man, well, I hope you enjoyed it.
So I had the great pleasure of about I want to say, two weeks ago, I told we were going through the TV just scrolling, I think, because I think every married couple at some point just becomes someone who just likes to scroll through what's available on their television. And I was like, oh, Airplane, I haven't seen that forever. This will be great. She's like, I've never seen it before and I was like, oh, well, then you're in
for a royal treat. So I subjected my wife to watching this for the first time and she was like, that was great, but why are there a pair of tits in like the middle of the film. And I'm like, why are you complaining?
I mean, to be fair, uh valid question, although it is far from the only uh non sequitur joke right, just kind of out of nothing.
All of them.
I was so a couple of things. One not to get two chin stroking, because let's be honest, this is a fun movie and it's fun to talk.
Oh yeah.
But I was struck by how they genuinely don't make movies like this anymore, and not in the like, oh they make the joke folks that you can't get away with in Whoe Hollywood, but just like the actual structure of the movie, like a ninety minute comedy movie, just does not exist anymore. They're practically extinct, especially a sincere one.
Yeah, I think everyone's trying to relive that because I know that there's the what is it Scary?
Movie?
Six is still in movie theaters right now, and they're still banking, of course off nostalgia from the early two thousands comedies that they were obviously making fun of, and those were parody movies, which we only really get those because of you know, Zucker Abrams and Zuckers. So, I mean,
Airplane is their first directorial debut. They have like a shoe string budget of like three and a half, like million dollars, and this thing just it sells like hotcakes, Like this is one of the funniest movies that's kind of brought on into pop culture history. It kind of brought Leslie Nielsen's career away from being a dramatic, more serious actor who's done like science fiction and television to now just sort of being the straight man who plays
a completely dead pan in a comedy. So yeah, I mean, we don't get scary movie and all those other things without airplay and Sucker Abrams and Sucker.
Yeah. Well, it is interesting. I can't remember if you were at the table for this conversation or not, Prude, but at the conference, one of the things that came up was the sort of bizarre situation Hollywood has found itself in where they can't seem to make money back with big tent poles. Obviously, exceptions to the rule. But if you look at the Juggernauts of ten years ago, they're flounder. Look at the suite of Disney products. But also,
you know, the recent spat of remakes. Funny enough, I mean, I don't think the Naked Gun remake did particularly well, but Hollywood Inc. Is flounder, and so there's been a move. And I know friends who are on the receiving end
of this right who've been approached. But also just look at the box office sort of a return to we would call kind of micro budget films, you know, five million dollars in down basically just as a financial decision, like a chase man, like we can't keep losing, you know, one hundred and eighty two hundred million dollars every film. We got to have something, and so you know what, even if it only makes five million dollars back, at
least we broke even. But also they're pushing young talent, you know, guys who aren't established screenwriters, who aren't established properties. Really I think, in an attempt to regain some sort of authenticity and relevance, and so that kind of chin stroking aside prude, It is interesting to see a very much kind of before times film obviously just in the kind of construction and funding of it, but also it's
a silly movie, but it's pretty sincere. There's none of that kind of like you know, would get the camera. Like all of the actors are playing their silly roles seriously, like they're they're selling out, which I think makes it really refreshing. It's a lot of fun.
Yeah, Like the closest equivalent I can think of is the I want to say it's the mid nineties, you know, Muppet Christmas Carol, where Michael Caine plays a Benezer Scrooge completely straight despite being surrounded by you know, the Jim Henson Companies Muppets and just you know he's He gives one of the best performances. It is one of my top like three favorite Christmas Carol adaptations, so I always
recommend it to people. But it is nice to see something like this exists, because you're right, there is so much meta commentary in a lot of comedy these days.
Like even when they were trying to market the Naked Gun remake with Liam Neeson, you know, Liam Neeson is basically parodying an ASPCA commercial saying like, you know, comedy films in Hollywood are dying, but like you can save them by like going to our film and it's like, well, it sounds like a pity party at this point, because you know, we've gone through such a tumultuous you know, culture of what wokeness, whatever you want to call it,
just like where comedy is not something that's acceptable unless you're somewhat being brash and edgy, which has led to I think the uh rye of people like Shane Gillis and others for being funny. But I mean that's really in stand up that's not so much in film.
Well, and I think it's such a refreshing change. You know, really in the last two years we've witnessed the birth of this term millennial writing. The examples would be like that, well, that was awkward, you know, the kind of like deliberate release of tension through kind of you know, undercutting the core premise of the scene. And look like, I'm not gonna pretend this is an Oscar winning film. It's a comedy.
It's genuinely funny, and as we've said, there are a lot of it's sort of non sequitors, right, just throw away jokes that aren't essential to the pot. It's a comedy movie, but there's none of that sort of obnoxious millennial smirking going on like that. You know, A large portion of this is a romance. It is a classic comedy in that sense. And of course there are jokes
in it, you know. There there's sort of these like you know, I guess you would say, sort of cutaways, you know, where each party to the romance is, you know, imagining how they met each other moments from their relationship. And of course they're ridiculous, but it is sincere yeh, and I've found that to be just like a very
refreshing tonic. So the other thing this movie does very very well is that there are a number of repeat gags that just genuinely made me laugh and again brutal I'll throw it back to you in a second, But as someone who's been on the Internet for a while, I was astonished by how many memes and famous like you know, images or gifts or whatever were from this movie.
So there were certain parts where like, oh, I remember that, you know, like I've seen that before, and so I feel like I finally have context for a lot of these things.
Yeah, I think that modern meme culture has certainly made a lot of previous movies either unwatchable or ten times more enjoyable because of the meme culture around it. Last year in twenty five in May, a friend of mine sort of dragged me to the twentieth anniversary like re release into theaters of Star Wars Episode three, Revenge of the Sith. And I was ten years old when that
movie came out. I remember going to the like late night premiere with my dad on bass and we did like a trivia contest and everything, and so like now it's twenty years later, and like Hayne Christiansen's like doing the memes when he gets his little clip off before
the film begins. But it was kind of funny for me because I'm sitting there and then I'm watching people who are clearly younger than me, who probably grew up with like are slash the prequel memes, and like they're just like scrolling through the phone during every scene and like pointing to the phone when like a meme moment
gets quoted. So for me, I did you know, I watched this movie probably a little too early in life before I was like really an overly online person, maybe when I was just beginning to become on the Internet.
But yeah, no, there's a lot of quotable, memeable moments in there, and I think people forget that, Like before social media, there would just be like those three or four movies that you and your friends would quote in reference to each other because they were such a universal Everyone's seen this and everyone knows that this is funny moment, regardless of the context. And Airplane is certainly one of those movies.
I'm actually I'm curious to get what those movies were for you, because for me, it was Napoleon Dynamite. This sounds really stupid listing about Napoleon Dynamite, MONI just all of Monty Python and then Shrek, which it kind of neatly places exactly what culture I was in. But what were those movies for you, prude?
Yeah, so Shrek was definitely one of them, absolutely for sure.
I don't know.
I was always I didn't wash a lot of this stuff when I was when they came out, in part because I just my parents. So it's like I have the honor that I only know of the Simpsons through cultural osmosis because I've never seen a full Simpsons episode. I know, I'm one of the weird people I guess who's not completely exposed to culture. I think it also has to do with like growing up overseas, so I have a lot more of British television references I can.
I do a lot of Faulty like Faulty Towers was something I would reference a lot, as well as Father Ted and things like that. But I mean for my friend group and those around me, it would definitely be things almost any Will Ferrell movie that came out in the early two thousands, whether you know, quoting Talladegan Knights or step Brothers. Those were always really popular. And then like you had said, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail I think was the one that was cited almost
all of the time. But for me, yeah, that's sort of how it was. And then TV shows I think really started taking off once you found something to do that. But now it's kind of been relegated to like a woman thing where they'll they'll quote TV shows all the time, especially with a certain generation like I work with a lot of gen X women and for them it's friends that they quote constantly.
Yeah, I mean it does sort of and I can even think of, you know, the kind of video game equivalent, right, obviously, like the early Valve games. Like honestly, I sort of instinctually cringe anytime I hear a portal reference because it just sort of takes me back to being eleven.
Right you remember the cake being a lie?
Oh yes, yes I do, And just hearing those words the song starts to go through my head and I just feel this kind of like sense of self revulsion. You know, it's probably.
Relatively universal, but at the Halo theme where you'd get a bunch of guys to like it in a choral arrangement in a bathroom or a gym. And people are still doing that because I know that they're making the second remake of Halo Combat of all that comes out next month.
Time is a flat circle. And somehow this is even
more grim than true to Decative. But to return to the film again, one of the sort of repeat, I guess kind of gags that really got me in this is the running into the airport being waylaid by random religious groups and political activists asking for like to pin a flower on you, And of course you know it's ridiculous at first, and then there's a scene kind of two thirds of the way through whereas you know this airplane disasters continued, this kind of weathered you know, like
war veteran turned airline pilot has to storm into the airport right to go to air traffic control and land the plane, and there's just a John Wicks style fight scene, which was so far from what I expected, even seeing the joke run again. And this movie does a very good job of repeating a joke but amplifying it so it becomes funnier. Another example is the you know, the
air traffic controller. He starts off with the classic eyecots the wrong you know, I picks the wrong week to quit coffee, and basically every ten minutes that gag is repeated, but whatever substance he's recently quit gets more and more extreme. Untiled by the climax of the movie, he's just huffing glue in the corner and I don't know, maybe I'm a child prood, but that made me laugh.
Yeah, there's always consistency, escalation and follow through and the glutt The gags throughout this film are so viscerally physical. One of my favorites that never fails to get a chuckle out of me, despite the time I've seen this movie probably like five or six times. Is Shit's gonna hit the fan? And then just it immediately cuts to just like a fake pile of fece he's slamming into like one of those little tiny office fans that oscillates, and it's just like, this is exactly what I expect
out of this movie. It consistently sets up, it delivers. I think my favorite repeating gag is that every time, you know, Striker is trying to talk about Elaine and how he met her and how they fell in love, like whoever's listening to him just kills themselves. Yeah, And it finally stops right before like the the the Buddhist prepares for self immolation.
It's it's incredibly unexpected the first time because he's talking to this like nice old lady, and then when the flashback is done, the camera pulls back and it's just her feet dangling. Such a simple joke, but it genuinely got me. One are the other elements of this, which is very much of another time, is uh the racial humor, Like there are multiple elements to this. Uh you know, of course you have you know, the two black guys on the on the plane and they're speaking in Jive
and the film translates it for you. They have subtitles and like very proper Queen's English decoding what they're saying, which that made me laugh. And then of course the follow up is, you know when another one of these kind of you know, uh, you know, floral hat wearing old ladies comes forward to translate and drops into perfect aa ve and uh yeah, man, it got me. What can I say?
It's a funny appreciated that she was speaking.
There were no subtitles and it was just left entirely up to the imagination of the viewer to understand. And I mean it was played out so perfectly because of their tone and facial expression.
I mean, it worked out great. And it's you know, it's funny.
We were talking about remakes and reboots, you know, just a few minutes earlier, and it's like, this is the one time. You know, so many shows get adapted from say the Greater Anglo sphere into America, and they usually are not as good, but this is one of the few times where a Canadian film is adapted for American audiences and it just blows it away. Airplane is sort of a plot for plot remake slash parody of Zero Hour or you know, Striker as a Canadian fighter pilot and here Striker's American.
Well that's one of the other things that's just completely nonsensical is the relative timeline of this, right, because of course this is a film in the eighties, but most of the callback are sort of dripping with like like World War two Americana, you know, like the kind of c D bar that he meets his uh, you know, the love interest in right, it's sort of you can imagine it out of something like South Pacific, you know, the kind of you know bar in the Pacific where
you know, all the sailors and pilots are you know, enjoying sort of a you know, beer and some music. And then of course it's completely ridiculous, right, the people fighting in the back, it's basically like two women mud wrestling. The one joke I will say that and maybe this is just my zoomer attention span that didn't age great was the disco number just because of how long it went on, Like it was still funny, but you know, look like I can't watch a film with up subway
surfer at the bottom. That's a very tepid point of criticism.
I did appreciate that it's like there it's two girl scouts, or at least they look like girl scouts that are like cheating at cards, and they just keep fighting the
remainder of the scene. But I mean, like, this is what makes it to me, what I appreciate abut it is is that like this is clearly riffing off of a World War two, you know, kind of like flashbackstory, but you know, this is disco and we're in the sixties now over an unknown and it's just as the war, which of course, you know, we're thinking World War two, the big one, and then of course there's like you know, Kennedy's Peace Corps, and I don't know, just the whole
thing is fine with me because it's just like this is so out of place and out of time despite the fact that this is nineteen eighty that it kind of has a strange sense of timelessness for a film. Now that's what forty six years old.
Yeah, plus or minus. I mean, the there's another it's this tiny, little like throwaway gag, but you know, obviously the drama is that our main character was forced to land the plane dude to you know incapacitation of the crew, and he's got it, you know, a bad experience from the war and when he's having this sort of dramatic flash.
It starts out first with kind of you know World War two combat footage, you know, playing over his you know, sweating face, and then over the course of it, it gets to more and more primitive airplanes, until it's the kind of like multi winged bicycles falling off clips. And I don't know why, but for some reason I found
that incredibly amusing. What are the other, if we're talking about kind of gags in this that you see constantly is the brief aside when he and his girlfriend are in the Peace Corps and they go to a tribe in Africa, which is an image I've seen, prude, Do you remember that part? Yeah?
Yeah, and they're doing the whole well, we're trying trying to teach them American culture and they have no sense of calisthenics and they're just naturals in basketball.
Yeah. Again, it's funny. The uh. There's also a bunch of you know, cultural references. Some of which I got, some of which I didn't, you know obviously, just you know, I'm not familiar with h you know, the specifics of whatever basketball team Kareem Kareem abdul Jabbar was playing with in nineteen eighty. But the cutaway gag to you know, the heroin in this movie trying to sell tribesmen tupperware.
It's just such a ridiculous idea, and the gag goes on for long enough to make it much funnier than that is any right to be.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not you and I are both well past the time of I think the original Tupperware and the emergence of multi level marketing, But I think there is still sort of this timeless quality of just like now, remember you know, like if you get like, if you sell X number of things, that's you you're going to get to hear because I like, when I was in college, like, there were certain MLMs that were incredibly predatory to guys that needed extra cash, and they
always kind of just got burdened realizing that they were basically screwed no matter what they did trying to get out, whether they were selling knives or working for like a shifty insurance company or something thing like that. So that part was funny, Like this is this is I guess what you would call like white woman culture circa nineteen eighty nineteen seventy nine. It's it's it's something that's a little beyond our time, but it still works, honestly.
Yeah, and I mentioned the Kareem Abdul Jabbar joke. The joke is, of course that he is the co pilot of this plane and he is actually Kareem Abdul Jabbar just trying to make extra cash. And he's not in much of the movie. But that is a very funny idea for a you know, at the time kind of like top level sports star to play that role. It's oddly self deprecating, right from like the guy on the Ladies box.
Yeah, and I mean he's played I think in everything I have ever seen him in on television, because I mean he'll do guest cameo appearances and for as long as he's had a he had a film career, TV career, he's always played himself. So it's like, oh, that's Kareem Abdul Jabbar, I say pointing out because I think he made an appearance on I think Seinfeld. I think he made an appearance on Scrubs at one point in time.
So my millennial brain is like, oh, I know who this is by the TV aspect of his celebrity, not whatever basketball career he may or may not have had, but just does not totally apply to me.
Well, and really the the moment that it's revealed, because again, like I know who that is, and I know what he looks like, again primarily as an older actor, but I'm not familiar enough with him to instantly have picked
out the celebrity cameo. And uh. One of the chores of the most shocking source of comedy in this is uh is the children in this because there are multiple seeds with kids that of course, you know, Jabbar's identity is revealed when a kid comes up into the cockpit, which okay, you know what, let's just take an aside as someone who just had a relatively hellish airline experience pre nine to eleven, air travel looks magical. Like that is the most outlandish aspect of this.
The world grow up no longer exists.
Yes, yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, of course, it's like a stupid movie but the idea that it was not completely improbable for a kid to just ask to go see the cockpit, or that someone could just walk in and buy an airline ticket, you know, minutes before a flight left off, or that you would get I don't know, something recognizable as food on an airline. It's like, again,
stupid movie. You know, this isn't exactly like an insightful bit of cultural analysis, but you look at it, here's like, what why did we have to stop living like this?
Yeah, it's it's really bad when a nineteen eighties disaster film parody is showing you how good you had it back then without knowing it. I was surprised by just the seating arrangements and the leg room and the spaciousness of it all. It's just like, oh wow, this was a much nicer time to fly. And my recent flight experience have not been pleasant at all. Like, I will never tell anyone to fly United just because of the terrible flight experiences I had when going to Tim Poole's studio.
It was just not a good time, and it's just yeah, airports would become completely hellish. And although the one time I've seen anyone schill religion. At an airport was a group of Black Jehovah's witnesses having a little stand and talking to me about true worship and true God. And I was like, Oh, it's just like airplane, not you know, weird bizarre heretical sex trying to shill me their bizarre backwards idea of so teiology.
That's actually a really great response to when the LDS guys come knocking on your door is just to open door. Oh, it's just like airplane.
And then immediately it's actually really nice to the LDS guys that come knocking on my door because I know that like, Okay, you're nineteen, You've known this thing your entire life. You barely have any diem money, your partner or whoever you're with like changes every six weeks, and you have little contact with anybody outside of the world. And they kind of like encourage you to like report
on each other. So I just let them in and I let them give their spiel for twenty minutes because I'm like, you guys can take a break, would you like something to drink? And then I always just ask towards the end, I'm like, so, who is Jesus And sometimes I get wildly different answers, Like I had someone confess that Jesus was God, and I was like, Okay, we're on the right track.
But I just let them have a good time.
But the next time someone knocks on my door because I've had Jehovah's witnesses, I'm just gonna say, oh, this is just like airplane. That's a great I'm doing that from now on.
Jay. End of discussion.
Well, prude, are you aware that, uh one of the people you met at the conference is a deeply committed Mormon?
Did I?
Yeah? Thomas Wayne Riley is the most serious Mormon I've ever met. Now, putting that aside.
I didn't have a chance. I didn't talk religion with anybody, which was kind of nice. But that's that's good to know.
Well, I'll let me tell you Thomas Wayne Riley, he is incredibly serious about the whole thing, the magic underwear, all of it. He may deny this, but deep in his heart he is bring him young, strongest soldier. The children in this again, like I've said, produce some of the most shocking moments in this The pilot of our plane is just a gay pedophile. There's really no way
to sugarcoat that. And when this kid comes up to the cockpit, the questions he asks him are so completely over the top that I could barely control myself, like he The first thing he asks him is if he's ever been to a changing room in a gym? And then the conversation moves on. He pulls him aside. He goes, you ever been to a Turkish prison before? Why? That line made me laugh so hard again, just so like direct, She asked.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, have you ever been in a cockpit before? No, I've started ever been in a plane before? See this is how bad it is because I'm just quoting it now. Verbain is like, well, have you ever seen a grown man naked?
Do you like Fladiator movies? Have you ever been to a Turkish bath house?
And it's just like, oh, you know, obviously like just gay pedophile, but for some reason it's played completely straight for laughs.
And not I got total reality.
It's the Turkish bathhouse. And then another one he goes, do you know what happens in prison? The conversation just moves on, and uh, you know, I'm not gonna pretend to be a high brow figure. Matt but there's something about the suggestion of prison r H being explained to
a child that I find amusing. I mean, there's another one where it's two you know, very well dressed children and one offers the other coffee and this little like eight year old girl very seriously you know, looks at the guy offering her coffee when you know, you ask if she wants any sugar for cream, and she just goes, no, I like my coffee, like I like my one men black.
You see the kid do the sort of like Kevin McAllister Grimace, but uh, just a throwaway gag somehow, you know, still shocking to me when children say things like that.
Yeah, that's something that uh where children are the ones that offer the delivery line that that one.
I you know, I don't.
I'm not really a big fan of things where like, oh, the kid says something completely inappropriate at a left field for gags like so I went on a weird My YouTube algorithm was like, hey, Matt, you like celebrities, don't you, And I'm like, actually, no, YouTube, I don't. It's like, would you like to watch a YouTube channel called Hollywood Babylon where we discuss the life and times and the career of Randy Quaid, and I'm like, well, I've got
a long drive YouTube, so why not. So I listened to like two and a half hours of this guy explaining Randy Quaid's kind of obsession with star whackers and his wife and everything like that. And the last film he ever did was called The Tennis Coach. We're showing clips from it where the children are just saying the most obscene, horrendous stuff imaginable, and I'm like, oh, yeah,
this is this is an early two thousands comedy. And then for some reason, I just find the coffee gag because they're both so professionally and nicely dressed, like the kids in a little suit, like it's a Sunday best and this woman is just like, actually, no, I don't like you at all, so don't even attempt anything because I like black guys. And it's like, for some reason, this is way more of a good gag than some little girl saying the F word a lot.
I don't know.
Well, I think the reason it works is because it's only done once. And you know the other gag, right, both you know, featuring children is the exact opposite, right, It's treading on the taboo of adults saying the most
depraved things to children. You know, this is obviously the vice versa, and I think where it becomes irritating, Like I think of that film like like Bad Grandpa, right from the guys who did Jackass, which is not particularly funny because it only has one joke and it sticks on it for the full run time, whereas this is it It was a twenty second gag in an hour and a half long film, right, just kind of a quick little throw away, and you know, yeah, it does
get grading quickly, but especially out of left field, right, this isn't a major focal point of the movie. Uh, it's particularly effective. One of the the other things is that, and I've noticed this in all of the this kind of run from you know of kind of Comedies featuring Leslie Nielsen, is that the imitation parody movies were so much worse because the gags themselves are both funny and referential. The joke is not don't you remember when you know?
It's sort of a nod to something else, and also it is far from the only humor in it. Like I think of you know that obviously you had like you know, scary movie and all of those, but there were just dozens and dozens and dozens of kind of low budget derivations, like I think of a parody of the Hunger Games that came out, you know when when that movie did, and it was one of those like you know, shot on video, like horrible direct to Netflix style films, and obviously the quality is much lower, just
fidelity wise, the quality is much lower on a writing and technical level, but it is also basically the whole joke is don't you remember this thing? And it's a shocking contrast to kind of like the originator of that pattern, if you see what I'm getting at, Brude.
Yeah, and those films were terrible, especially because they never
cribbed from said source material accurately. Because I think one of the first ones that I mean, outside a scary movie, I distinctly remember Superhero movie and I think this was like right after Leslie Nielsen had died, because they had found someone who looks just like him, and they were doing the obvious like Sam Raimi Spider Man parody from two thousand and one, and they're playing it completely straight, but like the one at least had a plot to play off of whereas a lot of those later films
that they were they would literally just pull stuff from movie trailers and never from the films themselves, because they were trying that desperately to be relevant and to get in on the.
Cash grab before it got stale.
Because like I think everything from Kung Fu Panda to like the First Pirates of the Caribbean film were there were countless of those that were made in the early two thousands that are just absolute trash. Whereas this is, you know, a gag every twenty seconds. There are callbacks and references to those who pay attention. There are those freeze frame gags where if you pause the film or the VHS, like you're really going to appreciate all the
insanity in there. Like there's one where like a nun is reading you know, boys Life of course, like the classic boy Scott's American magazine, and then like we go back to the boy who was giving away the coffee to the little girl and he's reading like nuns Life, and I think there's like a point where he's like
folding it out, like there's a centerfold somewhere inside. It's just like this is something that I wouldn't expect from anything, and it's I guess the proper use of, you know, my subversion of my expectations, because what is comedy other than the subversion of my expectations with something well timed
and executed in comparison to things played seriously. So, I mean an Airplane on a technical level, for just its writing is so tight because it never focuses on one gag forever, and when it does a callback, it continues to play off of it, and they know when to
stop it. Like I mentioned earlier, like there's the Japanese guy he talks to who's like a Japanese World War two officer, and as he's talking about the war in a lane, he like kills himself, you know, the traditional seppuku style, and it's just like well, and then it stops, of course with the Buddhists when Striker gets called up to pilot the airplane and he just looks at the match and himself, you know, dows in gasoline and he's just like, oh, thank God, I don't have to go through with this.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot to that. You know, the pace of this movie is incredibly quick. When I first started watching it. As often when I watch films for podcasts, I'll put them on you know, one point twenty five or one point five speed, just because you know, to make an hour long podcast. If you spend two and a half hours watching a movie, you know, the production time can add up when you put out as
much slop as I do. But that said, I almost immediately had to turn this down because you miss things constantly. It goes so quickly and in a way that sort of like creates this sort of like mad cat pace through the whole thing that really lends to the sort of like silliness of it. Like, yeah, sure there's clever writing, but a lot of it is also just sort of looney tuned style physical comedy. And you know, the quick quick pace of this, I mean really lends to it.
I mean, I think it's functionally like an hour and twenty five minutes maybe of screen time, which I think really helps because there is a tendency, particularly in films the last like fifteen to twenty years to hit that like two and a half three hour mark. And look, some films need that, and some films can fill that much space. But I'd much rather have a tight ninety minutes than something that feels like there's forty five minutes
of wasted time. You start looking at your watch, and really it's a credit to the writer certainly, but also the cinematography that it just pulls you through the movie, like there's really no moment of quiet in the whole film.
Yeah, no, there is. There's no lull at all, and I mean, like really the only lull there might be, of course, is used as a gag from the very beginning, because of course Striker is a taxi driver, and then he's just like, hey, I'll be right back, and there's a guy inside and he's been letting the rate the meter run the entire time, and I think that's the only like quiet callback to anything where else. Everything else is building up to one another, and the time is height.
It's used appropriately, they use the budget that they had, and I mean this is really one of the classics that I think anyone should go to and say, well, like, what makes a good comedy movie and it's this, And obviously there's the running gag where it's like, we don't know how to make this anymore in twenty twenty six, and I think that the current state of comedy makes this absolutely true that you could not make this film today even if you tried without making severe you know,
either concessions on you know, progressive pieties, or just you'd have to make it completely independent and on your own, because this just couldn't be made by a major studio.
Oh yeah, I mean obviously, you know, we've mentioned, you know, the racial context along several lines, but there are a whole bunch of jokes that you probably couldn't make. You know. For instance, one of the ones that got me is, you know, when the stewardess is walking around passing out magazines again we used to be a country, and you know, the old woman who later hangs herself, asks for some thing light and the stewardess pulls out an incredibly tiny
piece of paper titled Jewish professional Athletes. That's pretty funny. There's also the infamous Air Israel cutaway, you know, or it's a it is a plane with sidelocks and traditional Jewish headwear. If that makes you laugh, I pity you. I did not laugh. But honestly, also just the constant what we would consider kind of like homophobia quote unquote.
Obviously we mentioned, you know, the predatory pilot. But you know there is a background gay character and air traffic control that is just playing the most like over the top kind of lisping queen. I'm sure you remember it, prude.
I do, and I just my my my wife is much cleaner with her language than I am. But I think when we were in the film, and like towards the end, when he keeps making all these like gags and reference is clearly playing up the flamboyant homosexual character and she's just like, can that like insert your favorite f slur here?
Like can he just stop?
And just that was funnier for me as just someone who's seen this film a dozen times more than anything else. But like, I think it's really the only character besides the obvious peederist pilot where anything like that is played. But you're right, the racial stereotypes and humor gets played up. This is definitely from a different time. And it's of course, like there are cultural things that are in there at the beginning, of course, like you have the where the
the what is it like? The church for religious consciousness and would you like to give a donation? You have the Moonies in there, and then of course a dear reference to our friend Stephen Carson Jews for Jesus or mentioned at the beginning.
Well, if I can make a direct statement to missus the Prudentialist, clearly they cannot stop. They can't.
I will tell her this when we're done recording.
Yeah, I mean obviously I noticed that as well. And it's funny, you know, I've been aware of that organization. It is funny that they get kind of a throwaway gag, a throwaway gag in this the uh, the random I guess they're Buddhist monks that just happened to be on the plane are continually funny because they're obviously like notable.
You see them a lot, but you constantly see them behaving just the most venial way possible, you know, you know, like scratching and biting, you know, for for kind of like the good seats as this plane goes down. One of the kind of gags, of course, is the you know, sort of aping the classic moment from you know, kind of like the golden age of cinema or you've seen it in you know, Gone with the Wind Right, the hysterical woman who gets slapped, you know, by the man
who tells her to regain herself. And the version in this one, you know, it starts, you know, in kind of the typical way, and then with each subsequent person saying no, no, let me handle this, just start beating and rattling this woman. And again I realized, laughing at a woman being hit probably says something about me that you know, I may want to examine. But it did get me to laugh. So there's something for that, you know.
I for some reason that one always gets played I think during trailers for the film or for best of clips, and I think that there's just something relatable because I mean, like, again, you are right, this is a callback to sort of the golden age of cinema, where it's usually like John Wayne spanking a woman or something like that happening, and it's just played completely straight, like this is just how
we took care of things back then. And then of course there's the famous like Sean Connery interview where I think it's been meaned to death about like giving a woman a slap or something like that, Like it just kind of indicates of what a separate time, and obviously people make fun of that even in the milleni writing today, where it's just like, if you're gonna make fun of the nineteen fifties or any time where women obviously were
not experiencing the you know, female you know, happiness paradox that they do today, then it's just like, listen, ma'am, you've had a rough night, you know, take take yourself another strong drink to you know, calm your nerves, and go drive you and your small child home. And for them, it's just like, you know, really the only way to contain female hysteria is with physical repression. And it's just like, well, there might be something to do that, but now we're
well past that. Now everyone's just on SSRIs and I think we're worse off. But you're right, Jay, that may say more about us than it does them.
So prude. I know, I said earlier that this is, you know, a comedy movie, you know that may not have cultural insights, But I think you and I are are pulling out the kind of threat of truth in this which is all gay men or pedophiles, and things work better if we hit wimp. Now, these are not my conclusions. These are simply the logical conclusions. The lesson, if you will.
This is a very strauss An interpretation of the film.
Strassian analysis of Airplane.
That's how you're gonna title this episode is a Straussian analysis of nineteen eighties airplane.
Yes, that's exactly how I will title that.
We're not saying.
This but Sucker abrams and Sucker is saying you should hit women.
Some have said scholars scholars disagree on the interpretation. Uh, the obviously one of the other. And a lot of this is you're sort of making fun of kind of traditional Hollywood motifs. And there's one where, you know, our our heroine, who's I am awful at names, and let's be honest, the names are not particularly important.
In this Ela is her name Elaine?
Right, our leading lady h is reminiscing about a you know, a romantic kind of walk on the beach with the striker her man and they're kissing in the surf, and of course, right it's there, you know, on a beach, and so the waves are just pounding them like absolutely, like completely submerging them. They're covered in like sand and seaweed while doing this kind of like over the top
romantic Hollywood dialogue. And again, because there's never a moment where they you know, address it or kind of like wink at the camera like you know, a haha, we're in on the joke too. It makes it so much better. And I mentioned millennial writing and obviously people have talked about it in dramatic movies though like you know, I can't believe this is happening. Oh that was awkward, kind of you know, tension deflating, but also right it it sort of cheapens the joke in a comedic sense because
you're basically it's low time preference comedy. Brute if you see where I'm going with this, where you're taking a cheap early laugh at the expense of the joke actually playing out. And you know that in half a dozen other examples we've already mentioned, like they give the joke enough time to be funny. Again, it's a fast paced movie, but there's none of that sort of cheapening that you see a lot in kind of modern not even necessarily comedies,
but sort of comedic tone. You see what I'm getting at.
Yeah, no, we have we there's the fourth wall breaking concept where there's obvious winks and nods to the audience or you know, we have to break the tension instantly. That we have to deprive the character of everything. I
think it was real life fake Wizard. He's a YouTuber who does a lot of like film and sort of like media commentary, and he was talking about the new he Man movie that they couldn't allow Adam to play, you know, the he Man character completely straight, without like taking away the character development, with that sort of millennial Marvel esque writing where it's just like, well, I guess I'm gonna be he Man, and you know, then they like, well, that's a terrible name, and like they have to play
it up that way. And of course the MCU, I think is the most directly responsible for this, but it's got everywhere to it's now defined an entire generation of writers, and of course Airplane is from nineteen eighty that obviously doesn't apply here, which is something that I greatly appreciate where everything is played completely straight, that there is confidence in the gag that you're seeing and even if you don't like that, we know that in thirty seconds there's
going to be a whole new part of the plot where it doesn't really matter because you're probably gonna laugh at this. And it reminds me of like very early what Lauren Michaels said, when Esnel came on to the air had said, you know, we're gonna have like eight skits, and we hope that two of them are funny and at least, you know, for airplane, I think almost every gag more or less lands. I mean, like the disco thing does go on for a little while, but there
isn't anything here that particularly, you know, is overstays. It's welcome and you don't have to be so self referential to tell the audience about it. And even then, like at the end of the film, right like where the the autopilot takes off and he winks at everybody, like, it's more that he's winking at the characters and he's not winking at me. It's not as a deliberate of a fourth wall break as I think if they were
to remake this movie they obviously would. And then of course there's always the wonderful RoadHead reference with the automatic pilot and the and the tube just below the belt buckle that you have to inflate manually. So thank you Elaine for doing that.
Good job.
It's a job for a reason, so you know it works. There's to be like Bethesta.
It just works well. And if we can take this in a slightly more serious direction, I think it's really interesting.
Looking through this, you can tell that the writers and the directors have seen a lot of serious classic cinema, right, They are students of art and culture outside of just their one art for and you mentioned Halo earlier, although you've seen this in kind of every one of the big legacy properties that at the moment where you have people who are Star Wars fans writing Star Wars, or you know, D and D fans writing D and D, paradoxically the quality gets much much worse. That's all they
have to pull from for reference. Warhammer is another great example where the guys that created that were interested in history, interested in fantasy, interested in any number of things, and
they could pull that into their work. Whereas you know, and we'll beat up on millennials because it's fun and easy, but like part of the scourge of millennial writing is this, you get the idea that the person writing isn't particularly intelligent and doesn't have a lot to pull off, right, They're sort of just referencing the thing in and of itself. And I thought that was interesting because look, like, clearly the writers are intelligent. Look that they're doing a stupid movie.
You know, it's got stupid gags in it, but it speaks to a sort of media diet outside of simply the exact form of art they made. And I think looking back on it from as you said, you know, nearly fifty years later, you can see that decline in quality, and I think a large part of that has to do with the sort of like ororo boros nature of culture, culture built on reference to itself. Look, maybe that's too chin stroking, but I'm curious to get no.
I think there's a real good point to that, Jay, where you know, we have a lot of data and a lot of papers that are being published about how a lot of like large language learning models and a lot of AI research has been poisoning itself with synthetic data or data generated by AI that's not actually real in sense that it was like an actual published paper that's being cited, and so you have AI hallucinations, you have a I think there was one case already where
a lawyer has been disbarred or put on some sort of disciplinary review by the state bar for writing a brief with AI, and it was just citing phantom cases that do not exist. And so when you were built on a reference culture, you're like an AI or an LM that's just building its training data off of more synthetic data. So the more referential you get, you the more you lose the formula that made the original good.
I mean, the thing that made Star Wars so effective is of course the Hero's Journey or The Hero of a Thousand facis by Joseph Campbell, to a point where, you know, Lucas loved the book so much that not only did it become something that he wrote the forward for, but also it became the de facto formula in which all sort of Hollywood blockbuster you know, films and epics
were using. And we've basically lost the ability to do that because for a lot of people, you don't have that sort of repertoire to understand other cultures or the writers and references of your day. Like my I don't watch a lot of modern televisions. So for instance, for a comedy or a feel good thing to put on when I'm eating dinner, I'll watch Cheers.
You know.
Again, another you know, piece of media from the nineteen eighties, and there are countless references to Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Heidegger. Like of course, sometimes they're played for gags, like there's one where Diane says, you know, I spent like three and a half hours finishing off like kerekad Guard, and you know Ted Danson's characters like, well, I hope he thanked you for it, you know, like obviously a sex joke.
But the fact that you can like pull off a lot of these like sort of well written references or reference the HMS Pinafore with Kelsey Grammar just as he does in The Simpsons, like that kind of stuff doesn't really happen anymore because the American cultural zeitgeist is either built off references or it's become completely dare I say one shotted by short form content where you don't have that kind of cultural depth, oh one hundred percent.
And it's it's one of those things where look like we on the right side of things tend to have a fairly dim view of modern culture, to put it mildly, and so often get get accused of being these sort of you know, dumer esque figures right always predicting disaster. There's a classical reference there, but it's fallen out of my head, so we'll go with Dumer and uh, yep, no,
definitely not there. But I feel like you can objectively look at a comedy movie, right, something made for laughs, and say, well, look like, look at the talent in the room, even that you know, a cheap movie, something that wasn't kind of top line, and see that there was real human effort. There was a lot of IQ put into this. And then you know, you look at you know, tent pole productions or you know, certainly even academian politics, and you're like, what is this just passed us?
I mean, I know there are reasons why, right, I'm very much familiar with the misallocation problem, but uh, it's particularly stark, even in a kind of you know, lighthearted example.
Yeah, And I think that that's just something that doesn't really get to exist anymore outside of I think smaller budget or independent creators who can build off of older stories or things that in their childhood imagination were seemed cool and we we don't really get to see that be made nowadays. And I think that's what's led to all this discourse. As you mentioned the beginning, where like smaller budget films with independent, younger creatives really seems to
be the way going forward. I mean, you know, he is his own guy. I'm sure you know he has
an agent and everything like that. But I mean, like markt Plier made a bunch of money doing the Iron Lung movie, which of course based off of an indie video game project, some other guy is doing an animated Bloodborne film, and then, of course the two biggest films in recent weeks has been Obsession in the back rooms made by younger gen Z creatives that you know, we're big on YouTube, making short films and things before getting
on there. And while those aren't comedies, although you could certainly play Obsessions straight as a comedy, Like I kind of want someone to do a spin or a take on Obsession where it's played completely straight as a comedy. And the closest thing we have to that is Mike Myers's film So I Married an Axe Murderer, which is another great comedy film that I think that you should definitely have someone on to review.
It's a good time.
See I've actually I have seen that it's been years. Uh, it's okay. There there are two memory for you, Yes, yes you did. There are two buyers films. I want someone to record an episode with me, so I made an Axe Murder. That's one of them. The other one is Love Guru, which is such a wretched, wretched film, especially uh oddly enough.
Give it comedy.
No, No, that's the thing that sank Meyer's career, where he plays like an Indian love Guru trying to get Jennifer Lawrence and Justin Timberlake back together. Justin Timberlake is the only actually good thing about that movie. You can tell he's just having a blast, and he's charismatic enough that you enjoy him. But that movie is genuinely wretched. It might be one of the worst things I've ever seen, and I wish to inflict it upon people. Other people
need to suffer what I have suffered. Are honestly pretty close to the motivations of the pilot in this movie, right, someone who went through trauma at an early age and wants to kind of externalize that by forcing other people through.
Of course, uh, and honestly I would.
I would basically.
Want someone to watch a Love in a in a Turkish prison.
Yeah, yes, I do. The experience is roughly it's roughly analogous, to be honest, But the other one is I married ANX Murder, which is kind of a fun film. Well, Matt, we are are fast approaching time. This has been a ton of fun. I appreciate both making time to talk with me, and honestly also the recommendation. I can't believe I hadn't seen it, and I'm glad that I did. But uh, where can people find your work? Man?
Yeah? Jay, thanks for having me on.
I'm glad that the advice I gave you all those years ago, you know, worked out for you. It's amazing to see where you are now all these years later. It's one of those things where it's like, well, he can help others, but he cannot help himself.
No.
You can find my work on YouTube and sub stack. I'm most known by many people as the Prudentialists. You can find me on Twitter at mister Prudentialists or just find look up Matthew Williams on Twitter and I'll be there. I am the host or co host of the programs Do You Even Read? And The Digital Archipelago, trying to make sure that you know we're the only pro literacy podcast and the Side of things so we can continue to read and review books so you don't have to.
But as always, you know, Jay, just thanks for having me on. This was a lot of fun and I hope that you do get the chance to inflict the Love Guru on someone that you know you truly enjoy talking to.
And everyone at home, keep your head up like it last forever. Good Night,