MiscellanySome Came Running by Glenn Kenny

The Original Of Steven Slater

By August 11, 2010January 12th, 202612 Comments

Airplane

The late, great Stephen Stucker (with Lee Terri) in Airplane!,Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1980.

12 Comments

  • G Jimson says:

    “Can you make any­thing out of this”?

  • Chris O. says:

    Stucker in AIRPLANE is one of the rare qual­ity cine­mat­ic examples of the human embod­i­ment of Daffy Duck you can see.
    And, yeah, I like to ima­gine Slater boun­cing off the emer­gency chute all “woo-hoowoo-hoowoo-hoo”-like as well.

  • LexG says:

    I saw Airplane! for the first time when it hit HBO (1981 or 1982); I was eight-nine years old and thought this dude was hil­ari­ous… At that age, I had no concept of what gay was, or that Stucker’s char­ac­ter was so proudly flam­boy­ant. He was just “that funny guy!” that I got a huge kick out of. I’d go around imit­at­ing him say­ing “The tower? The tower? Rapunzel!” in this min­cing voice and twirl­ing about, because it just seemed funny to my child brain. NO idea what my chain-smoking, beer-guzzling war vet uncles made of Li’l Lex going around twirl­ing his arms like a flam­boy­ant queen. When they’d stare sans laughter, I don’t think my crickets-chirping “You know! The funny guy from Airplane!” explan­a­tion was much comfort.
    Between idol­iz­ing this guy, and my mom watch­ing The Goodbye Girl with me in the room every single day of my child­hood ever, it is a FUCKING MIRACLE I grew up to like vag.

  • Owain Wilson says:

    Stephen Stucker is remarkable.
    And so is The Goodbye Girl. To me, it’s the archetyp­al 1970s New York romantic com­edy with ‘one of those’ theme songs, the kind that later morph­ed into the Kate & Alley theme. Whatever happened to the great New York romantic com­edy song? ‘The Goodbye Girl’, ‘Arthur’s Theme’ … all magical.

  • Ed Hulse says:

    “Toto! Auntie Em! It’s a twister!”
    I was in L.A. the week AIRPLANE opened and saw it at Grauman’s Chinese, which was packed. I have nev­er been to a movie theat­er, before or since, that rever­ber­ated with laughter the way the Chinese did that night. You’d have thought anoth­er earth­quake had hit – a 90-minute-long earth­quake. A couple days later I vis­ited the film’s pro­du­cer, Jon Davison, who’d just got­ten his own office at Paramount. Nobody was more sur­prised that AIRPLANE took off the way it did, and he par­layed the film’s suc­cess into a fairly lengthy stay on the lot.

  • Keith Uhlich says:

    “How about some cof­fee, Johnny?”

  • Fitz says:

    God thank you I have been think­ing this non stop! “Well i can make a pterydactol”

  • Mr. Peel says:

    “Just like Gerald Ford.”

  • brad says:

    There’s a sale at Penney’s!

  • Griff says:

    “Nick, Heath, Jarrod – there’s a fire in the barn!”

  • lipranzer says:

    “And Leon’s get­ting LARGER!”

  • buy twit­ter fol­low­ers on fiverr

    Some Came Running: The Original Of Steven Slater

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