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! characters. Stack's role as the captain who loses his nerve in one of the earliest airline "disaster" films, "The High and the Mighty" (1954), is spoofed in "Airplane!", as is Lloyd Bridges' 1970–1971 television role as airport manager Jim Conrad in "San Francisco International Airport". Peter Graves was in the made-for-television film "", in which an SST was unable to land owing to an emergency. Nielsen saw a major boost to his career after "Airplane!"s release, and the film marked a significant change in his film persona towards a new specialty in deadpan comedy, notably in the three "Naked Gun"