Jokes involving racial stereotypes can be funny and inoffensive if what you're making fun of IS the stereotypes, not the race. The writers of Airplane! being Jewish themselves, I reckon they knew exactly what they were doing. At least the bearded plane is clearly an example of making fun of the stereotype, not the people.
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interesting... it turns out GNAA did get their name from that...
(p.s. at least one of the members, weev, went on to become a literal nazi... and is potentially responsible for the rise of trump)
God the conspiracy scene is legendary. This movie is probably the most recent whose humor is so similar to Airplane.
Soul Plane was the first movie with John Witherspoon I ever saw (somehow), it will always have a special place in my heart. Man was an absolute comedy legend.
I wish it was so simple. Really it should be. A word can mean any number of things based on context or inflection but now i have to really be careful as to not offend. I feel like that's a created thing.
Obviously i say things in a friendly way or in a mean way and I feel like we are just going the "you can't say that word" route. When it's not the word, it's the context.
As such, yes anyone who finds that picture offensive falls into that group. It was also a great movie. Let's dissect Spaceballs for racism next!
if what you're making fun of IS the stereotypes, not the race.
Tell that to my American friends if the N word comes up. Yeah, some things for some people are so wired in as associated with offence or trauma it's better to steer clear. At least in real life. Public media is weird because it's kind of to everyone and no one at the same time. I'm glad some films/etc can make fun in ways some find offensive, but I'm glad I'm not the judge of it!
how about the topless shot halfway through this PG movie?! it feels like there is a lot of content they would never achieve that rating with today.
Ski Patrol, Police Academy 2, and Airplane the list goes on for 80s movies with a single brief topless shot.
I'd argue the self-aware humor of Airplane was really calling out stereotypes like the one pictured, and defusing tensions with humor. Now Revenge of the Nerds, there's a problematic movie.
dude, lets just rape some people or otherwise sexually assault them and call it good-natured fun!
Breaking and entering into a sorority, barging into private rooms and house showers/bathrooms, stealing property, and installing hidden cameras in their rooms in order to casually spy on them while they are naked, sleeping, etc. Capturing images of the sorority girls naked, making hundreds of copies of those images, and sharing them with the entire campus to win a school-sponsored competition for a student government seat. Raping a woman while sharing said porn of her and her friends with the entire student body. Said woman then falls in love with her rapist. All played for laughs and zero consequences for any of it. An 80's hit! Make 3 more sequels of it!
You forgot the scene where one of the nerds wears a mask and pretends to be another person in order to sleep with the hot chick. Definitely not sexual assault!
That's the rape.
AND when she learns it wasn't her boyfriend, she dumps her boyfriend and starts dating the rapist because the rape felt so good.
It's disgusting.
Don't you think they just put that in there to warn us all? That with information technology transforming the world like no-one ever imagined, even the best nerds still aren't without their flaws. Like Jobs or McAfee
"Credit" where it is due, at least there was no rape in American Pie. But, yes, other sex crimes played for laughs.
It's toward the end, he's wearing like a Darth Vader mask or something and let's her think he's her boyfriend while he fucks her. That's rape.
Oh shit yeah I forgot about that part. It's been probably 10 or 15 years since I've seen it. I thought the panty raid and hidden cameras were bad, but damn, that movie did not age well.
From 2010, Hot Tub Time Machine had a short but delightful topless seen that was absolutely sexual
NSFW
https://celebsroulette.com/videos/6025/jessica-par-hot-tub-time-machine-2010/
Frankly a plain topless shot is not in my opinion grounds for anything heavier than a PG rating
Completely agree with you. If a man can show his nipples and it's fine, why can't women. It is sexism and misogyny.
Come to Canada. We made it legal for women to be topless in public based on that exact logic.
Airplane was released in 1980, before the PG-13 rating existed. I’m not sure how the film would be rated today, but I’d wager it would not hit PG standards without significant edits.
I think you can still maintain a PG-13 rating as long as the boobs shown are not directly sexualized and they only appear in one shot or scene.
That preceded the PG-13 rating.
PG movies back then had more swearing and brief nudity like that scene in airplane was fairly common.
Stuff like that is why PG-13 came about. American parents didn't like it when their children saw two frames of boobs in a movie.
As a German, this is one of the few movies where the dubbed version is just as good as the original, in parts even better.
Especially the part where they're speaking Jive, which is "translated" into a thick Bavarian dialect, including subtitles saying something completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEkI0cH_rK4
And for some reason, they translated the movie's title to "Die unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug" (The Incredible Journey on a Crazy Airplane).
That’s fun :)
alt-text: map of “"AIRPLANE!" (1980) - international release names translated to English”
- Would you like something to read?
- Do you have anything light?
- How about this leaflet, "Famous Jewish Sports Legends?"
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I mean, the producers (David and Jerry Zucker) are Jewish themselves, so these jokes in Airplane are self-deprecating
EDIT: “were” to “are”; AFAIK the Zuckers are still with us 😅
It really is. 44 year old movie and all of the jokes still land. Gen Z kids will especially appreciate the white flight attendant speaking in Jive to the black passengers.
it was a fellow passenger that spoke jive, and the Brady Bunch mom to boot!
e. am stupid, was leave it to beaver mom
My bad, yeah it was a passenger, she steps in for the flight attendant.
I'm going to watch Airplane tonight.
im going to watch it tonight also. young me loved the boobie shot paused on my betamax!
God I love this movie. True irreverent humor that I don't want to know if people contained about. Nude breasts that perfectly fit the MPAA PG nudity guidelines of "brief and non-sexual". So many quotable one-liners. The sight gags were on point and perfectly timed. I WISH movies like this could be made. Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, and all the other parody movies are great, but do not hold a candle to the Airplane! movies.
"It's true what they say, cops and women don't mix. It's like eating a spoonful of Drano; sure it'll clean you out, but it'll leave you hollow inside"
I loved the Naked Gun movies.
The Hot Shots movies were funny too.
The obvious one is Blazing Saddles.
Then there is "the gods must be crazy" which I thought was amazing
I don't (and I'm not Jewish), but I can see how it might.
The way I see it, if it was a joke to poke fun and it was good-natured, it shouldn't be offensive. I mean the Zucker brothers who were writers on the movie are themselves Jewish, so they thought it was hilarious. All that being said, I don't get to speak for Jews as to what they find offensive.
I’m just curious because I’m Jewish and I don’t know of any Jews who would find this offensive.
If the plane was rubbing its hands together and yelling “oy vey shut it down” I’d probably hear a dog whistle somewhere. Still wouldn’t get offended tho. I’d just know they’re a special type of moron.
It might offend some overly sensitive Israelis or Zionists but they are not representatives for all Jews.
The directors (Zucker brothers) are themselves Jewish. Any cancel culture reaction would as silly as the fake-controversy over Speedy Gonzalez, everyone in Mexico who heard about it were scratching their heads in puzzlement, how some white people who got hold of a bullhorn puffed themselves up like a peacock in heat virtuous "white savior who knows better than us" gatekeeping.
Maybe if it were an ad for an airline.
I can't really imagine why people would think so, in context if the movie.
It really bugs me that YouTube have started adding tracking to the end of their links recently https://youtu.be/5CXeHk9W-iw
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It's interesting because they switched share URLs to a short domain (youtu.be/blah), but now that they have a tracking identifier, the URLs are longer than the regular video URLs (youtube.com/watch?v=blah)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/5CXeHk9W-iw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/5CXeHk9W-iw?si=LMv-hzKpOmtFO1E0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Not a native speaker but I have been learning norwegian for a while. The first translation is the most correct one.
Blazing Saddles openly called out racism and made it the butt of almost all of its jokes. I think both it and Airplane could be made today, and would be received well. Why do you think differently?
Idk maybe the sheer number of racial slurs said by white characters. I don't think that would fly in today's political landscape.
Truthfully, I don't watch many movies or keep up with Hollywood. I feel like the art of filmmaking died with the invention of CGI. Deadpool kept me in stitches tho. I finally watched it last month. I know white people got all upset about a black Ariel but gave no notice that it was otherwise a bad screenshot of the cartoon. What other bullshit are folks getting all boycotty over?
Of course not! A studio would take one look at the script and say "hey! These movies already exist!"
No they wouldn't. That logic has not stopped one single, shitty remake and almost all of them have been worse than the originals. So bad we forget they even exist. Robocop, Mummy, Red Dawn, Total Recall come to mind... garbage. I think Road House, Twister, and Mr & Mrs Smith are getting remakes this year, and they don't look good either.
None of those movies exist. You just made that up! And they definitely never did, and never would remake Point Break. It would be futile and pointless to try to remake such masterpieces of their eras, whose stories really only work in the period they were created.
Hate to tell you this but in case you thought cancel culture was a recent phenomenon: Richard Pryor (the co-star of Blazing Saddles) was arrested for foul-language during his stand-up routine the same year Blazing Saddles came out.
Blazing Saddles would be called dated and "done before."
It was originally made as a way to laugh at Westerns, which, up to that point, had dominated the market. A lot of the tropes and plot lines the movie rips on are explicitly there because they were usually in these "safe" Westerns.
Mel Brooks sort of put the fork in Westerns. They were maybe dying anyway, but after Blazing Saddles they had to change pretty significantly.
He also got everyone to laugh at all the little polite racist themes that were super common in Westerns. He hung a pretty big lamp on that stuff. You couldn't do it again, because we'd all just laughed at how stupid it was.
As for people who say it's too offensive for today's audience, idk that they ever realized they were being laughed at, not with.
They absolutely could. If Dave Chappelle can do 5 hours of shitting on trans people, a Jewish writer can write a scene where a plane is wearing a tallit with a beard.
Well no, if someone tried to make those movies today people would say that it's been done.
They made a CGI Blazing Saddles for kids not that long ago, Mel Brooks was involved too. Paws of Fury (2022) starring Michael Cera and Ricky Gervais. I watched it out of curiosity, it was pretty mid but for a kids movie it wasn't that bad.