Dateline: Friday, May 15, 2026 — Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I do stuff for each other’s birthdays! Usually it’s a road trip somewhere outside our hometown of Indianapolis. This year for my birthday, we attended something completely different: the very same weekend, Indy would be the first stop on a repertory roadshow tour for Airplane!, that 1980 parody classic from the young directing team of Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams. I trust it needs no introduction regarding the incessant goofiness and wall-to-wall gags that cemented its legacy as a critical comedic ancestor to The Simpsons and all the works it influenced in turn, to say nothing of its mythic status as a touchstone to today’s retro Dad-Joke culture.

I rarely see old films in theaters — as I recall, the only other time I’ve done so in this blog’s 14-year existence was the 4K re-release of Die Hard — but this event sweetened the pot: following the screening would be a Q&A with stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, who so wondrously brought to life the roles of disgraced war pilot Ted Striker and sweet-natured stewardess Elaine Dickinson. We said to each other, “Surely they can’t be serious.”

So the married geek couple of Shirley & Shirley spent Friday night at downtown Indianapolis’ Old National Centre, the venue still known locally as the Murat among those of us with no patience for humoring overlong corporate-sponsored names.

(The ample soundproofing between the Murat’s two theaters prevented us from eavesdropping on “Blackhole” and other singles.)

We arrived at the Murat an hour before showtime to find two lines outside. Security could tell on sight we weren’t there for Architects and ushered us to the much grayer-haired line. Once again, same as happened the last two times we waded through TSA checkpoints, I sailed through the metal detectors with little resistance while Anne was subjected to a couple minutes’ worth of bag-checking to ensure she wasn’t packing any weapons small enough to fit in her cute tiny hands.

As a birthday treat, Anne also pre-purchased a separate VIP ticket for a photo op with Hays and Hagerty. We’d received no details via email or any other communication medium advising when or how that’d work. Once inside, we searched for further instructions in vain, including asking at least four different employees who were all as clueless as we were. Once we found our row and sat down, the pre-show entertainment was a slideshow of Airplane! production stills interspersed with reminders of the merch table in the lobby, the Q&A afterward, and a card briefly mentioning the VIP experience would be after the show. That was slight relief, if not exactly complete instructions.

We technically sat in the wrong seats, but tried not to raise a ruckus. The two guys sitting on our right were one seat off, which in turn forced us to sit one seat off, as well as the party on their other side. I dreaded the prospect of having an usher scold us if anyone showed up on our left side, called foul, and demanded a domino-effect righting of so much wrongful seating. Fortunately no such kerfuffle happened: Anne checked online and confirmed none of the eight seats to our left had been bought. More elbow room for me, then.

At 7 pm EDT sharp, the film commenced with the Paramount logo and rolled onward — no host, no intro, no announcement, no preamble, no lights flashing, no symphonic overture, nada. Really, that worked out for any latecomers who’d already seen it, including a couple we talked to later who’d driven all the way in from Dayton and arrived twenty minutes late because of Indiana’s road-construction fetish.

I tried not to be too fussy about the fact that this was not a painstaking Criterion 4K remaster, merely the clearest available version screened on a digital projector with intermittent, nigh-undetectable digital micro-jerkiness. (Anne didn’t notice, but I endured enough QuickTime and RealPlayer videos via 56K modem in my day to know when I’m perceiving it.) The Murat’s aging sound system did it few favors, though this wouldn’t have mattered to any superfans who’d already memorized all the dialogue years ago. The beloved oldie earned applause at each major actor’s first scene, Rocky Horror quote-alongs for the most famous lines, and other warm approvals from aficionados who love to see old pros playing the hits. Among the numerous happy outcomes of the evening was that vivid reminder of the joy of watching a film with a live audience who just collectively get it.

It soon occurred to Anne she’d never actually seen Airplane! uncut and uncensored before. We’d each seen numerous weekend-afternoon reruns of it as kids, but she’d never caught it on premium cable or, apparently, the 2005 DVD on our shelves. That led to, uh, quite a few surprises for her. The sizable crowd around us — not sold out, but healthy in size — included a handful of attendees under 50, a few of whom had never seen any version of it before. I imagine some pop-culture references from past generations may have flown over their heads (Saturday Night Fever! From Here to Eternity! Ethel Merman!), but I hoped they enjoyed it as much as I did when I saw it at the drive-in when I was 8 or 9 and definitely didn’t understand a single sex-related gag.

We were treated to the entire film, all the way through the credits and the last-minute jokes sprinkled in there — including, yes, The Scene After the Airplane! End Credits starring real-life California politician Howard Jarvis, immortalized as Man in Taxi. An intermission followed; at 8:40 came the Q&A.

Hays and Hagerty took the stage along with our host, Portlandia producer Dan Pasternack, who entertained and informed with anecdotes and fun trivia drawn from the the 2023 tell-all book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker themselves (whom Hays and Hagerty refer to collectively as “The Boys”). There was no lineup or mic for taking live audience questions — those had to be submitted before beforehand on paper slips at the show’s merch table.

(Said table was otherwise rather spartan: they sold Airplane! stickers, and magnets and posters for this event, and that’s it — no DVDs, T-shirts, Otto action figures, or toy airplanes like the one Captain Oveur gives li’l Joey.)

I didn’t take notes and we didn’t waste too much time ignoring Ticketmaster’s threats and trying to take pics in a darkened theater. We correctly guessed the photo op at the end of the night would surpass any amateur efforts in this moment. Topics, questions, lessons learned, and happenings throughout the night that have stuck with me include but weren’t limited to:

• Hays proved more than once he can still do a spit-take on cue.
• An audience member tried to bring up Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye to Hays, but was politely rebuffed.
• A gag setup with Otto the inflatable autopilot was a cute idea, but they hadn’t worked out all the kinks yet.
• They thought filming Airplane II: The Sequel without The Boys was different but still fun.
• In his first real comedy gig, Serious Actor Leslie Nielsen carried a fart machine on his person for use at all the worst times.
• For nearly every question starting with variations on “Which cast member was the most…?” the answer was Leslie Nielsen.
• Peter Graves was said to have felt embarrassed about the role of Captain Oveur in later years.
• The only actors allowed to write their own dialogue were the late Stephen Stucker (a.k.a. Mister “THERE’S A SALE AT PENNEY’S!”) and the jive-talking duo of Norman Alexander Gibbs (who’d go on to play unnamed background characters in fifteen episodes of Star Trek: Voyager) and Al White, who’d later try killing Marty McFly with a baseball bat in Back to the Future II.
• In the bits where the stewardesses kept dragging unconscious characters out of the cockpit and down the aisles, Hagerty confirms dragging Kareen Abdul-Jabbar was really awkward.

Pasternack also introduced a variety of clips that played on the big screen, such as:

• David Letterman’s screen test for Ted, half-heartedly performing the veteran’s-hospital scene — a role his agent insisted he try out before he found his calling outside acting.
• A brief personal salute to the duo from Airplane II costar William Shatner, which he shot in a public men’s room like a last-minute Cameo order.
• An exchange from Hays’ gig between Airplanes, the 1981 comedy Take This Job and Shove It, in which his character almost certainly references a previous Airplane! joke.
• Scenes from two of the many movies that were homaged or remade outright, the 1957 air-disaster drama Zero Hour! (written by Roots author Arthur Hailey!) and the 1944 war epic Since You Went Away.
• The exact moment in the disco-dancing flashback when you can see Hays and his stunt double onscreen at the same time.

The Q&A wrapped around 10 pm, whereupon the majority of the audience were bidden adieu. VIP ticketholders were asked to loiter a bit, then were lined up for ticket-taking and wristband handout. Once it was just us and employees in the building, the photo ops commenced, and we received our best souvenir, as shown in the lead photo. Sadly, we’d realized too late their photo-op rules differed from our comic-con routines. At comic-cons, one photo-op ticket is good for an entire party, usually up to four fans, give or take a fan. For this occasion, each and every photo subject was expected to buy their own ticket. That’s why the birthday boy is in the pic with Hays and Hagerty, while his lovely companion and birthday benefactor isn’t. We’d made peace with that limitation in advance.

Also different from our comic-cons: the two stars allowed light chitchat with each fan. Still conditioned to keep these moments brief, I settled for customary quick gushing and one particular compliment. But first, a flashback to Cincinnati Comic Expo 2017, when I met actor/writer Wallace Shawn and brought up some of the non-geek films he’d made with his longtime friend Andre Gregory:

…[in 2013] the dialectic duo reunited for their take on Henrik Ibsen’s “A Master Builder”, for which Shawn wrote the screenplay himself. It was one of director Jonathan Demme’s final films and it made $46,000 at the American box office…

…which costarred Ms. Hagerty and gave her character an absolutely heartbreaking speech that haunts me whenever I think back to it. So I had to compliment her graciously for that performance on my way out. That, I think, was one of the parts of the evening I’d been looking forward to more than anything else. If there’d been an opportunity for autographs, I would’ve asked her to sign the same Shawn/Gregory Criterion set that Shawn had signed for me (to no small amount of incredulity on his part). Alas, that wasn’t among this event’s optional add-ons.

Instead I received an unexpected surprise as I floated away from the makeshift photo booth: each VIP fan was given an “Airplane! Live” poster autographed by Hays and Hagerty. That’d do. We left the building shortly after 10:30, with time left before our parking reservations across the street were set to expire. Outside, Airplane! viewers and Architects fans each mingled in their own respective post-show discussion groups — everyone in high spirits and no one looking like they’d just left an Anita Bryant concert.