The 1980 film Airplane! poked fun at an entire decade of American movie-making and showed movie producers that slapstick films could still be extremely successful at the box office. The movie appeared at the end of a decade that should well have left moviegoers a bit anxious. Disaster and horror films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974), and Jaws (1975) schooled viewers in the menaces that lurked in and on the water, high in skyscrapers, and under the earth; and a whole series of Airport movies (beginning with Airport [1970], followed by sequels Airport 1975, 1977, and 1979) exploited peoples' fears of being trapped in a metal tube flying high above the earth. Airplane! took the fears these movies preyed upon—and the filmmaking gimmicks they employed—and turned them on their head. The result was a movie (and a sequel) rich in humor and dead-on in skewering the pretensions of the...