" When he rescue mission succeeded, the credits began to roll with Lalo Schifrin""s familiar theme music - with a lighted fuse providing continuity through a series of images foreshadowing the film""s action sequences.There were at least four inspirational sources forAirplane""splot:Flight into Danger (1956)- an episode of the 1950s Canadian TV showEncounterZero Hour! (1957),from director Hal Bartlett, starring Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, and Sterling Hayden; with a script by Arthur Hailey, who was later responsible for the screenplay forAirport (1970), based upon his own best-selling 1968 novel of the same nameThe Crowded Sky (1960), segmentsTerror in the Sky (1971), a CBS-TV movie, a remake ofZero Hour!The storyline of a distressed airliner was an excuse for a frantic, slapstick parody filled with visual-sight gags, puns, deadpan and absurdist humor, gross-outs, sexual double entendres, verbal literalism ("Surely you can""t be serious.She enters the inner office of her ex-boss (and ex-husband), big-city newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant).Say, you""re awfully large for a pill yourself.When Dr.Wilmerding (Charles Trowbridge) suggests hat the pill would take a lot of water to swallow, Hackenbush retorts: "Nonsense.