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.