EVANSVILLE – Two stars of one of the funniest movies ever made will come to Evansville this spring for a screening and Q-and-A.
Julie Hagerty and Robert Hays will bring their 1980 classic “Airplane!” to the Victory Theatre on May 14, spokeswoman Megan Smith said in a news release Monday. Tickets, which start around $45, go on sale Friday.
Hagerty and Hays, respectively, played Elaine Dickinson and Ted Striker: the romantic leads of the classic Zucker Brothers film that twisted super-serious disaster moves into a joke-packed farce.
Striker, a stagnant military pilot still hung up on both Elaine and the tragic death of fellow serviceman George Zip, is thrust into duty when every pilot aboard their aircraft comes down with food poisoning after eating some bad fish.
Along the way he endures an inflatable autopilot, an air traffic controller who “picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue” (Lloyd Bridges) and his own debilitating “drinking problem” – in which he carefully pours a drink and hurls it into his own face.
The movie famously tasked dramatic actors with delivering ridiculous lines in the gravest tones they could muster.
“Mission: Impossible” star Peter Graves, playing Captain Clarence Oveur, utters “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Future “Unsolved Mysteries” host Robert Stack tells Striker that flying an airplane is no different than a riding a bicycle: “it’s just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.” And June Cleaver herself (Barbara Billingsley) provides a master class in how to “speak jive.”
But its most famous line came courtesy of Leslie Nielsen. Nielsen eventually used his role as Dr. Rumack to catapult him into the “The Naked Gun” franchise. But when “Airplane!” premiered in 1980, he was still known as a stick-straight B-movie actor.
That allowed the following exchange to become one of the most quoted bits of dialogue of all time.
Rumack: Can you fly this plane and land it?
Striker: Surely you can’t be serious.
Rumack: I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
Both Haggerty and Hays went on to long TV and movie careers. They now join a popular trend in which actors take their most famous films on the road for screenings and question-and-answer sessions.
The stars that have visited Evansville in the last few years include Chevy Chase (“National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”), Macaulay Culkin (“Home Alone”), and William Shatner (“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”)
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: ‘Airplane!’ stars to bring comedy classic to Evansville
Reporting by Jon Webb, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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