Surely You Can't Be Serious is an in-depth and hysterical look at the making of …
"We need to find someone back there who not only can fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." Arthur Hailey actually wrote that! We didn't have to change it. It was ideal. Imagine being kids who spent 100% of their lives looking for things to spoof and then coming across a line like that in "Zero Hour!"
— Surely You Can’t Be Serious by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker (32%)
Jim Abrahams of the Airplane! team, on realizing that some of their best lines had been written for them in old disaster movies. Fish for dinner, but also: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking." "Surely you can't be serious."