Airplane! watch as "Otto" takes control of the plane, inflates a female companion, and takes off. Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (collectively known as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, or ZAZ), wrote "Airplane!" while they were performing with the Kentucky Fried Theatre, a small theatre they had founded in 1971. To obtain material for comedy routines, they routinely recorded late night television and reviewed the tapes later primarily to pull the commercials, a process Abrahams compared to "seining for fish". During one such taping process, they unintentionally recorded the 1957 film "Zero Hour!", and while scanning the commercials, found that
Airplane! the doctor ordered". In 2008 "Airplane!" was selected by "Empire" magazine as one of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". It was also placed on a similar list by "The New York Times", a list of "The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made". MaximOnline.com named the airplane crash in "Airplane!" number four on its list of "Most Horrific Movie Plane Crashes." Leslie Nielsen's line (in response to Hays' question 'surely you can't be serious'), "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley", was 79th on AFI's list of the best 100 movie quotes. In 2000 the American Film Institute listed