The Big Bus (1976): The Airplane! before Airplane!

Enjoy the Jack Davis artwork for James Frawley's The Big Bus.

The '70s: Decade of disaster.

I've sat through quite a few disaster movies over the years, which is odd since I'm not exactly a great fan of the genre. What can I say? I was born in the 1970s, the decade when producer Irwin Allen became the so-called "Master of Disaster" with such calamitous films as The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). This stuff was all around me when I was growing up, both in movie theaters and on TV. I saw these films whether I wanted to or not.

The "disaster movie" formula is easy enough to understand. Gather a couple dozen familiar actors (generally a mix of major stars and B-listers) and put them in some ridiculously perilous situation, often involving a doomed mode of transportation or some terrible act of God. Focus on a few heartbreaking human stories that are occurring amid this terrible, large-scale event. Throw in a love story or two for good measure. Maybe there's a hero in need of redemption. If possible, include a villain who is either responsible for the problem or who is making things worse for our heroes. Make sure to have some fiery explosions (or crashing waves or falling rocks) and lots of dramatic music, and you've got yourself a movie.

Naturally, the popularity of disaster movies did not escape the attention of comedians and satirists. There were memorable spoofs of these films on Saturday Night Live and The Carol Burnett Show, plus Mad magazine parodies like "Mirthquake," "The Poopsidedown Adventure," and "The Towering Sterno." John Landis' The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) included a mock trailer for an Irwin Allen-type film called "That's Armageddon," including cameos by George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland. And members of the comedy troupes The Credibility Gap and Ace Trucking Company appeared in an obscure movie called Cracking Up (1977), which depicts the events following a massive California earthquake.

The definitive and still most-loved disaster movie parody arrived in 1980 with Airplane!, written and directed by the team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, the same guys who had written The Kentucky Fried Movie three years earlier. It's well-known that Airplane! takes much of its plot from the movie Zero Hour! (1957), which had already been remade for television as Terror in the Sky (1971). But what I didn't know until just this week is that Paramount, the studio that released Airplane! to such acclaim, had tried and failed for box office glory with a very similar comedy just four years earlier.

The two-story title character.

James Frawley's knockabout comedy The Big Bus (1976) bears a remarkable resemblance to Airplane! and features many actors whose work I have enjoyed over the years, but news of its existence had somehow never even reached me until the film was mentioned by a Twitter/X account called @The StingIsBack just a few days ago. Luckily, The Big Bus proved very easy to track down, so I watched it as soon as I could. It did not disappoint.

The film's plot focuses on the Cyclops, a massive, two-story nuclear-powered bus that is scheduled to make its maiden voyage from New York to Denver. If you are familiar with the conventions of disaster movies, you know that maiden voyages rarely go well. For what it's worth, the titular megabus is quite impressive. Looking like the bastard offspring of an Amtrak train and a space shuttle on the outside (and a swinging '70s bachelor pad on the inside), this thing supposedly ate up a good chunk of the film's budget. I believe it. There's an entire, wordless sequence showing it off, set to the strains of "Also Sprach Zarathustra." At first, I thought the Cyclops was a dig at NBC's Supertrain, but that famously unsuccessful series didn't come along until 1979.

An evil, iron-lung-bound tycoon called Ironman (Jose Ferrer) wants to put the Cyclops out of commission—a nuclear bus might be bad for the oil industry—so he has his brother Alex (Stuart Margolin) hide a bomb aboard the vehicle. But that's just the beginning of the troubles plaguing this historic cross-country trip. An earlier sabotage attempt put the original driver out of commission, and his last-minute replacement is hot-tempered Dan Torrance (Joe Bologna), whose bus driving career ended in disgrace amid ugly rumors of cannibalism. (He admits to eating one foot, no more!) To make matters worse, he has a painful romantic past with the Cyclops' designer, Kitty Baxter (Stockard Channing), who is also aboard the maiden voyage. And Dan's copilot, Shoulders (John Beck), has a slight medical problem: he blacks out at very inconvenient times and has trouble keeping any vehicle on the road for long.

You've probably already guessed that the passengers aboard the Cyclops are a bunch of neurotics and malcontents living out their own little soap operas. And you'd be right. Richard Mulligan and Sally Kellerman are a couple on the eve of their divorce. Rene Auberjonois is a cynical priest undergoing a crisis of faith. Richard B. Shull is a depressed man with only months left to live. Lynn Redgrave is a fashion designer seeking revenge on Dan. Ruth Gordon is an old lady who has ditched her husband and her domestic chores in search of a new life. And there's a smartass lounge singer named Tommy (Murphy Dunne) who turns the passengers' problems into improvised songs. He is to this movie what Johnny (Steven Stucker) is to Airplane!

Meanwhile, back in New York, technicians Ned Beatty and Howard Hesseman are in a high-tech control room nervously monitoring the action from afar while squabbling amongst themselves. Characters like this are in many real disaster movies (and parodies of disaster movies). They're a lot like Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges in Airplane! Kitty's ailing father (Harold Gould) is being kept against his will in a parking lot, under strict orders from his doctor (Larry Hagman) that he not be moved, not even indoors. Ironman and Alex continue to scheme against the Cyclops, and it all ends with a literal cliffhanger in which the lives of Dan, Kitty, and the passengers are at risk.

Movies like The Big Bus make me glad that the internet exists. Otherwise, I'd likely never have heard of this weird film, let alone seen it. I'm sorry that it wasn't a hit back in 1976, but I can understand why it's garnered a cult following over the last 50 years. What's perhaps most surprising is that Paramount was willing to roll the dice on Airplane! so soon after The Big Bus failed to recoup its cost. Goes to show, you never know.

P.S. Early in The Big Bus, we see a news crew from a TV station called WZAZ. This is remarkable, since there is a radio station with those exact same call letters in Airplane! (It's a reference to Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.) But as far as I can tell, the WZAZ in The Big Bus is purely coincidental.