Everything in Planes, Trains & Automobiles that wouldn’t work today
A deep dive into how the best Thanksgiving movie of all time would be different if it were made now
Film Features John Hughes
This year marks the 35th anniversary of what is widely considered the best Thanksgiving movie of all time—Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Paramount is marking the occasion with a new remastered 4K release featuring over an hour of deleted scenes from the original film (which initially clocked in at a hefty three hours). The two-hander starring Steve Martin and John Candy as a pair of unlikely travel companions trying to get home for Thanksgiving has stood the test of time when it comes to the brilliantly paced comic beats, but with each passing year, it becomes a little more dated. With a possible remake in the works (or maybe not, considering Will Smith’s image isn’t what it was back in 2020 when the project was announced—imagine how that rental car meltdown would play now) we had to wonder how much of Neal and Del’s disastrous journey could be avoided today with all the innovations we have at our fingertips.
In an age of smartphones with access to the internet, digital wallets, and apps like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, there are so many solutions that make traveling easier than it was in 1987. We even have virtual meeting software that makes travel less necessary, so Steve Martin’s character might not even have had to be in New York to present a physical ad campaign to that indecisive client at all. Without that business trip two days before Thanksgiving there is no movie, but where else would it have stalled out along the way? Let’s take it beat by beat.
Planes
The first sign that we’re living in a very different era is the fact that one of the first things Neal (Martin) does is check his watch. Besides it being a very ’80s watch, the time is also notable. It’s a quarter to five and he has a six o’clock flight. The fact that he still expects to make it when he leaves the meeting shows how far we’ve come, and not necessarily in the right direction. This is probably the one case where things were simpler back then. Neal’s more worried about the hold-up of finding a cab than getting stuck in an airport security line (he’s actually beaten to an available taxi by Kevin Bacon in a memorable cameo). With no Uber or Lyft service he has to pay a businessman cash for his cab, then loses it to Del (Candy) in the opposite of a meet-cute.
Neal arrives at the airport at 5:58 thinking he’ll still be able to board the plane if he hurries. There’s no wait to go through security, no ID or ticket checkpoints (the TSA didn’t exist yet), so he sails through (we don’t actually see this, but the timing suggests only a few minutes between arriving at the airport and reaching his gate). We’ll never know if he would have actually made the original flight, because by the time he gets to his gate it’s been delayed.
When Neal finally gets on board with his paper ticket he discovers he’s been assigned a coach seat despite paying for first class. Could that happen now without the passenger being aware of it before getting on the plane? Neal and Del meet for a third time (after an awkward airport encounter) as seatmates, cementing the growing animosity between them. Their forced landing in Wichita, due to a snowstorm in Chicago, unfortunately, is something that still plagues travelers today. The aftermath, however, is a different story.
Trains
What’s the first thing you would do if you were forced to make an unexpected landing in a random city and might have to spend the night? Get on your phone and start looking for a hotel room, right? And failing that, you might turn to Airbnb or VRBO or a travel site for more options. What you wouldn’t have to do is wait in a long line for a pay phone and risk all of the local rooms being gone by the time you got to the front. That’s what happens to Neal, and it’s the leverage Del uses to stick with him a little longer. If Neal had any other options, he’d wait out the storm and get on another plane the next day. And that would be the end of the movie.
He’s out of options, though, so he heads with Del to the Braidwood Inn. Here’s another instance where a rideshare app would come in handy. They have to settle for the ’80s equivalent, Doobby’s Taxiola, a tricked-out cab with a shady driver who insists on taking the “scenic route” in the middle of the night. Both men hand over their Diners Cards (which still exist!) to the hotel clerk who rings them up with a manual carbon credit card machine and mixes them up when handing them back. This could probably still happen today, but the mistake would be evident much earlier.
Despite not specifying a smoking room (you weren’t required to back then) Del smokes in the room. Don’t try and imagine what it must have smelled like in there; it’s not a fun exercise. That night, while the guys are sleeping, a teen breaks into their room and robs them (fun fact: in a deleted scene, the same teen delivers a pizza to the room earlier in the night and Del stiffs him on the tip, so this is his revenge). If the door had an electronic card reader like most hotel rooms do now, it wouldn’t have been so easy for the intruder to get in. They would have still had their money the next morning, and one less thing to fight about.
A plane to Chicago still isn’t looking good (a weather app would take the guesswork out of it), so the next phase of the trip involves taking a train. They get as far as Jefferson City before the train breaks down and they have to walk to a bus station and catch a bus to St. Louis. Again, a Google search, a call to the credit card company, and a rideshare would take care of all of this and Neal would be home by Thanksgiving. End of movie.
Automobiles
Without any money for more tickets, Del goes into salesman mode and makes some cash selling shower curtain rings (which, by the way, are also mostly obsolete now), he helps Neal out, and after sharing a meal at a diner in St. Louis, they once again go their separate ways. We might as well take this opportunity to note how many pay phones Neal uses in this film to call home. His wife has no idea where he is so she can’t reach him directly. She can only wait for him to call her with his travel updates as Thanksgiving creeps ever closer. It’s unfathomable.
Neal’s next travel mishap is getting dropped off in a rental car parking lot with a set of keys to a car that isn’t there. The bus drops him off and … just leaves him there. There’s no other airport shuttle on the way. He’s completely stuck. Again. This final straw leads to the famous “fucking” tirade aimed at Edie McClurg as the rental car agent, after he’s had to walk through the snow across a highway and the actual airport runway to get there. The punchline is that he’s the one who’s “fucked” because he’s lost his paper rental agreement. It would be a snap to look up nowadays, if he didn’t already have it accessible on his phone, but no such luck for Neal
Del comes to his rescue again with a rental car that he was somehow able to acquire with Neal’s Diners Club card. He lights up a cigarette just like in the room, and we’re willing to bet that he didn’t have to request a car you could smoke in. The near-death experience they face when going the wrong way on the highway could have been easily avoided by using a navigation app. That wouldn’t have helped when the car caught on fire, though.
The last hotel where they spend the night together won’t take their toasted credit cards (another phone call and this problem could have been resolved too) so Neal trades his fancy watch to get a room. On their final leg, they are stopped by a state trooper (played by Michael McKean) who impounds their burnt-out car. According to McKean there was a cut scene where he tells them they’ve overshot Chicago by about a hundred miles (which a navigation app also would have told them). Finally, Del comes through with another primitive rideshare—a three-hour ride in the back of a cheese truck to downtown Chicago.
They seem to go their separate ways again, and if Del had asked Neal for his email address instead of his home address, he might have given it to him. Del definitely would have found him on social media and followed every account. But that would have taken away from the feeling of reluctant parting that makes this scene so heartwarming. If Neal hadn’t put the pieces together on the train and gone back, there’s a real chance they’d never have seen each other again. We’re glad he does, because it makes for a perfect ending.
A clever writer could still make Planes, Trains & Automobiles work in the present day with a few tweaks. Taking their smartphones out of play early on, for instance—due to damage or theft or whatever—would put the modern versions of Neal and Del in a position pretty close to where they were in 1987. The question isn’t whether it can be done, but whether it should be without John Hughes around to at least consult on the project. His gifts for characterization and storytelling—not to mention the performances of Martin and Candy—are what made the original more just than a silly comedy of errors. The characters have stuck with us for this long because they’re fully realized, flawed human beings who get under each other’s skin, then go deeper to find the beating heart within. That’s what keeps us returning to this film year after year, and why it will never become outdated.
311 Comments
“shower curtain rings (which, by the way, are also mostly obsolete now)“Shower curtain ring salesmen, maybe, but that was a joke job back then too. The rings aren’t mostly obsolete, you can get any number of different kinds in Walmart or on Amazon.
Our shower curtain rings had no idea they were such a dated, out of touch technology. Hard to tell if they’re weeping, but it’s a good bet.
I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping While my shower curtain rings gently weep…
Oh you’re still using the old transistor shower curtains, aren’t you? Get with the times, grandpa!
My shower curtains are vacuum tube only.Thank you very much.
Yeah that’s what happens why you buy crates of shower curtain vacuum tubes, you just never have a good reason to upgrade if you can replace them whenever they blow.
You joke, but…
It’s true. Shower curtains are now controlled by an app. There are no rings. They are just hung digitally with the blockchain.
So that’s what the blockchain is good for!
Your shower curtain rings? Well, you better answer it and see who it is!
Hang on, I just discovered my refrigerator’s running. One thing at a time.
Shower rings are obsolete? How the hell are people hanging their shower curtains? Some sort of app drive smart levitation system?
Well there are the curtains that the rod goes through but that’s mostly a hotel thing in my experience. Nobody wants to take their whole shower rod down when they have to wash/replace the curtain.
Exactly. We have machine washable shower curtains that I pull down and wash weekly with my towel laundry. If I had to pull the damn rod down every time I’d go insane.
I had them and it wasn’t a Herculean task. Although perhaps I was already insane before I moved into that apartment?
It’s actually pretty easy to do that. But them being used as earrings is something I could totally see being done today. Even as ear gauges.
You don’t have levitation curtains!?
Nah. I just have a hard time taking the plunge. Plus I don’t want to lock into a smart bathroom ecosystem. Sure the Apple Smart toilet is the most popular but I hear people really prefer the Google smart shower curtains. And of course the cheapest is the Amazon smart bathroom stuff but I only hear that their smart toothbrush with Alex is worth it. And don’t get me started on Elon’s new Neural Poop link solutions. I’m not sure I need a chip in my brain and colon just so that the bathroom fan turns on when I fart.
This was clever until you started just naming brands and name dropping Elon Musk. It was a good bit theoretically but if you didn’t know how things in a bathroom would be updated to be futuristic you should have stopped instead of rattling off brand names of electronics / showcasing that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I suspect the author has a a dedicated shower stall (not that this is a new thing) which often have glass doors rather than curtains. But yes, rings are very nice for holding a curtain if you (like me) use the bathtub for showers in addition to using it for baths.
I think the writer is under the impression that the majority of showers now have a glass door or partition and not a curtain.
I don’t have a guitar. Does that mean they’re obsolete?
I think glass shower doors are more popular than they used to be, but shower curtain rings 100% exist.
They’re far from obsolete, but some newer style shower curtains essentially have the rings built in.
As usual Platypus Man (Richard Jeni) has all the answers.
Some of them did back then, too!
I like those in my stall spare shower. In my main bath/shower combo, I like the questions mark with the ball bearings that goes over the rod, but the two perpendicular ball topper so you can have a curtain AND liner.
Magnets and ball bearings, my friend. Magnets and ball bearings.
It’s all ball bearings nowadays!
Magnets? Those things are magic. How do they even work?
Im in the planning process of remodeling a bathroom, and the common design now seems to be a glass enclosure with a door, and no shower curtain at all. I assume this is what the author is thinking of when he says shower curtains are obsolete. But it’s a pretty ignorant assumption, as bathrooms typically go 20+ years between remodels so the majority of bathrooms out there are probably still using curtains.
What are people hanging their shower curtains with now?
The same thing that stops school shooters: Thoughts and prayers
Hooks most likely
I’m guessing Cindy has a nice glass shower door that doesn’t need a shower curtain.
Sure, but don’t tell the person who wrote this article that the joke job bit sailed right over their heads.
Indeed. The meta-ness of its meta-ness is double meta.
I guess it’s a testament to the rest of the article that this little aside jumped out at me too. We built our current house in 2018 and it still uses shower curtain rings in 2 out of the 3 bathrooms – well technically hooks since they’re easier to pull the curtain off to wash it but still.
Shower rings are obsolete??? There is no shortage of them to find to purchase on-line or at most of the usual places like Target, Amazon, and Bed, Bath and Beyond was a go to before most of them closed up shop (to be fair, I have not checked lately). If you rent and your place is not a high-end unit built in a modern apartment complex, you are most likely used to showering in a bathroom that uses a rod and rings to hold up the shower curtain.
If you have a home you might have a sliding shower door but one of the most unexpected things I have read on the internet this week is that shower rings are no longer a thing, lol!
Seriously. How out of touch must this writer be to think that most people don’t still have shower curtains?
The same amount of out-of-touchness it takes to find it “unfathomable” to exist without a cell phone. She must be 20 years old.
Well, those aren’t exactly the same.
I’m clearly very out of touch, but what high tech Gen Z insta-ready technology has replaced shower curtain rings?
XXXTREME LASERBLAST SHOWER CURTAIN LEVITATORS!
XXXTREME makes it sound very 90s. I’ll wait until the new model comes out.
That’s GenX, baby, the XXXTREME is right in our name!
right lol, it was always a joke job…. I guess glass showers are more common now, but for the most part shower curtain rings are at the same relevance level
I was so confused by that statement! Is there a new thing like having an Alexa enbled, self defogging mirror and you just say “Alexa, hold up shower curtain and liner!” Or does the author think everyone now has only showers with glass doors? Curious-er and curious-er.
“#67 on CinemaSins, the girls buy the shower curtain rings as earrings. No one is that dumb #68…”
My favorite part of the joke job, incidentally, and speaking of obsolescence, is that Del describes the shower curtain rings as being made of “Czechoslovakian ivory.”As someone who lived through those days, I can report that even back when there was still a Czechoslovakia, there weren’t a whole lot of elephants running around there.
I think that was a joke along the lines of the “rich, Corinthian leather” that Ricardo Montalban (Khan!) used to shill for in 1970s Chrysler car ads, which had nothing to do with the Greek city of Corinth — it just sounded good.
Well that’s it I can’t suspend my disbelief with this film any more!
Here’s a deleted scene that definitely wouldn’t fly today:
https://twitter.com/DeclouxJ/status/1595123419372457984It arguably didn’t fly back then.
Why wouldn’t it fly, because he’s smoking in an airport?
Maybe because Martin is reading a physical newspaper.
Ha I mean, that wouldn’t fly back then?
My parents (admitally in their 80s) still read paper newspapers — actually even two of them — they subscribe to the local paper as well as the NYT.
I’m 70. I also read my local paper and the NY Times daily.
The Canadian Mounted??
More like the sheer disgustingness of the scene. At least for me.
Wait, how the fuck is everybody else holding up their shower curtain, because mine is rings all the way down.
Newer apartments and homes are swapping out the old school bathtub shower with modern shower stalls that have glass doors, but rings are still more prominent, so I have no idea what the author is trying to say.
My husband is an architect who specializes in bathrooms, so I’ll ask him this evening. I do think you’re right, that bathtubs are increasingly passé (rich people might have a separate soaking/hot tub) and large glass-walled showers are more common.
My FIL owns a glass company that specializes in mirrors and shower doors. They do a lot of ritzy custom shower enclosures. But I don’t know if rich people HGTV style carries over into the real world; we have one shower stall and one tub with a curtain in our house.
It does, to some extent. I live in SoCal (ironically where a few HGTV shows take place), and I’ve seen plenty of uber-wealthy people remodel their homes with ridiculously extravagant guest bathrooms.
Ask your hubby about who can build me an enclosure for my 60×30 corner tub
Which is bullshit, because anyone with a kid under 6 knows that bathtimes are impossible in a shower.
When I was in Denmark, the bathroom was essentially a walk-in shower with a drain in the floor and the toilet and sink just there in the room. It actually made washing the kids easy because I could literally hose them down with the handheld shower head.
Most homes/condos/etc that have 2 bathrooms usually have a tub in one of them. Parents typically need a tub for the baby/children.
Our house originally had a glass door. But either the way the bathroom was designed or the placement of the bathroom in the middle of the house meant that even leaving our fan running all day, the shower stall was always musty and mold would grow if we weren’t constantly vigilant. On top of that, the seal at the bottom fell off, and had to be reattached, though the reason it fell off was due to it being bent, so the screw barely held it on, and if it got bumped too hard, CLANG.So we removed the door and hung a shower curtain. All the problems stopped. I’m a curtain person from now on.
The author doesn’t have a shower curtain, therefore no one has a shower curtain.
I had a glass shower door when the movie came out. I have shower curtains now. And they have shower curtain rings.
thank you, I wondered if i was going crazy.
okay wait can we talk about your curtain that is apparently rings all the way down
Stapled to the ceiling, because shower curtain rings are obsolete (apparently).I hear magnets are the wave of the future in shower curtain holding technologies, but have yet to find any.
“Due Date” is already basically a remake of this movie, and is pretty decent IMO.
All I know is that this is quite possibly one of the most heartwarming shots in all of cinema.
This movie is magnificent on so many levels and the thought of remaking it is just terrible. Someone can create a holiday-themed buddy misadventure / accidental stranger sort of script without redoing PT&A. And NO ONE—I’m convinced—could have equally delivered comedy and pathos as John Candy in this film. The two of them were magical together.
Yeah, every time I see that scene, I also, umm, get something in my eye …
Gotta love a man whose underwear you used to wash your face.
The freezeframe final shot of Candy, especially since he’s been gone, hits me right in the feels every time.
Another thing is that John Candy was thought of as massively overweight in the 1980s. Nowadays he would … not be.
No way. He’s a dude. Only fat bitches get the “wow, fat is sexy” treatment today
I watched a somewhat recent interview with Tom Hanks, in which he was reminiscing lovingly about working with Candy. He made the excellent point that Candy’s comedy style was never the easy “fat guy fall down go boom” style that a lot of bigger comedians go to. In Splash, he was the playboy brother; in Only the Lonely, he was the romantic lead. I truly believe had he lived, he would have pivoted into an acting career somewhat similar to Hanks or Bill Murray.
I always think Candy would have had the a similar career arc to Goodman, who can do any role.
Oh, yes – THAT’S the better corollary. Good call.
Part of Goodman’s range though is that he can be both the warmest, most comforting guy ever, but can also play absolutely TERRIFYING, which is an end of the spectrum I have a hard time seeing for Candy. I have no doubt though that Candy would have gone to have incredible dramatic range. Him passing was such a terrible loss.
Also, maybe those kisses in the motel room could have led to something else…
See my fan fictions “Planes, Trains and a pair of boomers midlife awakening of their repressed sexuality”It was far better received then my other work on the genre“Planes, Trains and auto erotic asphyxiation gone wrong”
“Where’s your other hand?”
“Between two pillows…”
“Those aren’t pillows! But I don’t mind…”
“See that Bears game last week?”“Great game, great game. Bears got a hell of a team, gonna go all the way, all the way. Now let’s get back to having sex.”
Mine did not get greenlighted by Dave Chappelle: Planes, Trans, and Automobiles
I hear that’s how Steve Martin’s hair turned white. Lack of oxygen.
I did see something online awhile back about coming up with what happened after the movie ended, and for this one, someone came up with Del turning out to be a serial killer, that murders Neal and his family, and makes shower curtains out of their skin.
What, like the Bears being good again? No way, there are some things that the human mind just won’t accept.
They did remake this movie for the modern era, it was called Due Date with Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifinakis.
I’m amazed Paul Feig hasn’t tried to shove Kristin Wiig and Mellissa McCarthy into a remake yet.
Just wait, pretty soon it will be the Rock and Kevin Hart remaking it.
I can already hear them screaming in unison when they discover Kevin Hart’s hand is not wedged between two pillows.
I read that as “..shove Kristin Wiig into Melissa McCarthy…”
A movie with women as the leads?! Blasphemy!!
Switch Wiig for Sandra Bullock and I’m in!
12 years old at this point. almost another era.
but the technology was roughly the same. RDJ was using an Iphone in it, maybe things like Ipay and Uber weren’t as commonly used back then?
Uber started in San Fran mid 2009. Due Date was being filmed in late 2009/early 2010, I doubt anyone outside of the Bay Area had even heard of it. I live in SoCal and I don’t recall hearing anything about Uber until around 2012, and I was only 20/21 at the time, meaning I was the prime demographic that would have needed it lol.Apple pay (I assume that’s Ipay) didn’t start until 2014.
Yeah, whatever apple uses for their phone payment system. And I know Uber was in it’s infancy then, but both of those close major plot points in the movie, he had to get wired money from Western Union (No banking App, Paypal, Venmo, etc) and they couldn’t get an Uber anywhere..Like the article stated, to even do Due Date today, you would have to remove the cell phone somehow, and presumably the laptop if he was on a business trip.
Yeah you’re right about that. It’s nearly impossible to do today without removing the cell phone from the equation.
I was completely wrong, he is using a Blackberry in that movie, so it was just right before the IPhones and Androids were pretty much all anyone had, so he really couldn’t do much with it. I guess if they wanted to try and remake this they could have the characters for some reason refuse to use smart phones, and have like, flip phones or something (there are some people that are like that, believe it or not!), which is a pretty easy hand wave explanation of not trusting the government or tech companies ,otherwise they definitely want to get rid of the phones.
Beat me to it. While road trip comedies weren’t even new in 1987, Due Date definitely feels like the most recent movie that was, ahem, “inspired” by PTA.
Steven Brody Stevens (RIP) was in that movie. I know that because he hilariously referenced that fact constantly.
Came here to say this and you beat me to it!
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but ‘inappropriate’? That’s fucked up.”
After his divorce, Steve Martin went to live with John Candy and his family.That’s the movie I’d like to see.
I thought John Candy’s character didn’t have a family — just a dead wife.
Exactly. Wouldn’t that make a very interesting movie?
Martin discovers that Candy’s wife is still sitting in a rocker by the window, Psycho style
I think they should have threaded it into Home Alone. Would have been an easy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles 2.After finally making it home for Thanksgiving, Neil Page accidentally leaves his 7 year-old son home alone during Christmas. Unbeknownst to Neil, his wife makes it home with the help of Neil’s old friend Del Griffith, now using his polka stage name of “Gus Polinski” and traveling the country as a polka bum.And also his son brutally tortures a couple of burglars.
And the kid next door gets away with everything, even pressuring his best friend to borrow his dad’s beloved classic auto, ultimately leading to its destruction. BTW it isn’t too far to imagine John Hughes’ films as having a cinematic universe. Most of them take place in the Chicago suburbs, and some of them even state that they are in the fictional suburb of Shermer, Illinois.
Pretty sure Shermer High is where all the kids go to school.
And practically no one is dealing! You could clean up being the only dealer in a town like that.
… aaaaaand we’ve walked right into the first act of Dogma.
Yup, everyone in John Hughes movies lives in the same neighborhood. So, in theory, Del Griffith could’ve bumped into Uncle Buck Russel, while Sam and “The Geek” from Sixteen Candles went to school with Claire and Brian from “The Breakfast Club”, as well as Ferris Bueller, whose sister probably babysat Kevin McCallister.
This whole thing is more or less, look how it was in 1987 lol.
Bizarre article. You could write something similar for any film made before, say, 1995. Probably later.
lol pretty much. Like a hey do you remember waiting HOURS to download a single song on dial up, only to be devastated when you come back to check and realize your mom tried to use the phone and your download failed haha.
Imagine Around the World in 80 Days now. You could do that in 3 flights in under 48 hours.
Download? Do you remember waiting hours for the radio station to play a song so you could tape it. You had to hope the DJ didn’t talk over the entire intro/outro. That’s what you had to do when a song/album was out of print!
Oh I do remember those days, or sitting in front of the radio waiting for that one song to come on so you could record it lol. Hell I am old enough to remember 8 track tapes lol. Granted when I had a record player slash radio slash 8 track machine it was well after 8 tracks fell out as it was the mid 80’s lol.
Radio? Do you remember having to wait for the orchestra and hoping what they have been practicing for 6 months is something you like. And if you missed it you never heard it again? or possibly could afford a harpsicord and the sheet music to learn the piece.
Song? I remember when it took damn near 8 hours to download a jpg.
I guess it depended on the time, as in year, and your dial up connection speed. My earliest memory of the internet was on like a 14.4 kbps dial up modem. This was pre .mp3, which let’s be honest was a GAME CHANGER compared to .wav files.
Trying to download Godspeed You! Black Emperor tracks on Napster was always a crapshoot.
Even sticking with Steve Martin, think of Bofinger (1999). While cell phones existed at the time, they were expensive luxuries that a would-be producer like Martin’s character couldn’t afford. Which explains the scene where he is pretending to have a cell phone which probably makes no sense to anyone under 30 today.
“While cell phones existed at the time, they were expensive luxuries”In 1999?No. Absolutely not. In 1989, sure. But not 1999.The US was just behind the times, and US moviemakers were even more behind the times because they constantly liked to pretend cellphones were still like they were in the ‘80s. They kept pretending until like 2010, dude.In 1999, I’d had a cellphone for 3-4 years. I was a child. 3 years. My wife who was also a child back then, and in the US, and not well-off either, also had a cellphone by 1999, because that was normal for younger people.And I get that this stuff is annoying to look up, but for example, in 1997, a Nokia 6610 cost $200 if you bought it with a contract, which was certainly not an “expensive luxury” (the contracts weren’t even as expensive as they are now!).So the issue with Bowfinger the issue isn’t that at all, the issue is that Steve Martin’s character has a truly tiny amount of money – an amount that wasn’t very believable in 1999 even, just over $2000. It’s not that cellphones were “expensive”, it’s his character is implausibly poor (given what else we know about him). I feel like Steven Martin (who wrote it) was on a bit of a “how much can a banana cost?” trip because he’d been wealthy for decades at that point.
Yeah, the US was behind the curve in terms of cell phone use. Also broadband internet. Even today in a lot of rural places in the US it is difficult or impossible to get a better connection than a slow DSL line that can barely stream video without stuttering. While my relatives in Bulgaria of all places had until recently a better Internet connection than I do in the Washington, DC area!
I don’t know, maybe it was because my friends and I were mostly poor retail-working gutter trash (we were) but me and most people I spent time with didn’t have cell phones until at least 2003. From what I remember, the cost wasn’t the phone itself, it was paying for minutes (Ha! Remember when THAT nonsense was a thing?)
That sounds about right for the US. I didn’t bother getting one until 2005 myself and that only because my employer insisted (I don’t like to talk on phones and texting was absurd using the standard number keypad although it was possible). I think the person saying they were common in 1999 was from Western Europe or East Asia, both of which were into cell phones earlier than the US.
I didn’t have a cell phone until 2003 when I started working as a lawyer at 27 years old. My parents didn’t get cell phones until even later than that. I know there were people like you who had cell phones in the late 90s, but it definitely was not a common as you seem to think.
I mean, in 1995 Sacramento I had a roomie who was an engineer for Nextel (I think) who had a phone for her job that she was required to carry to map coverage (of which there wasn’t much). She was literally the only person we knew who had a phone. It was still peak pager.
I had a big Motorola bag phone for my job in 92 it looked like a man purse along with a laptop with a green screen that weighed about 25 pounds.
In Clueless (1995), a cellphone rings in a classroom and all the students check theirs; the joke is that everyone at that school is rich enough to own a cellphone!
I’m 28 and people my age absolutely remember the time before cellphone ubiquity. I was 5 in 1999, for pete’s sake! I didn’t get a cell phone until I was 15.
Honestly the way movies up until like, nearly 2010, tried to pretend mobile phones didn’t exist means that there are movies from the mid-late 2000s which don’t really work now because they rely on people not having cell phones, or them constantly running out of battery or never having signal (and like, the battery thing was particularly bollocks back then – they lasted a long-ass time).It wasn’t even believable back then, either!
Wow – use of the words “bollocks” and “ass” in the same sentence. You are the epitome of “Mid-Atlantic”.
I am indeed “mid-atlantic”. But that’s what happens when you’ve been married to an American for 15 years.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was especially notorious for coming along right when cell phones became a big thing, and never once acknowledging their existence until the final season, which opens with Buffy making a big deal about how a cell phone is “a weapon that could save your life.”
That was pretty weird with Buffy, yeah. I was a teenager when it started and I already had one, and just none of those people did. Initially I thought the US was just behind, which it was – about two-three years behind the UK/Europe on uptake of mobiles, for whatever reasons, but that obviously didn’t really explain it.
Yeah. I think Little Children is a masterpiece but it already seemed so dated when a huge plot point is that Jennifer Connelly won’t let her husband, Patrick Wilson, have a cell phone because they can’t afford it until he gets that good job as a lawyer.
I hadn’t heard of that but 2006 movie based on a 2004 novel and they’re acting like cell phones are expensive? Ugh lol. We were well into the “burner phone” era by then. Still it did happen a lot.
True – but there are few movies that are so perfect for a particular holiday and for which the technology is such a key part of it.
Yeah but there are comparably few movies where the absence of smartphones and apps is, unknowingly to 20th century audiences, driving the entire plot. Many older movies prominently feature payphones and cash and paper agreements, and I would actually argue that in many respects cinema never caught up to texting (current movies still feature way more voice calls than most people take in real life), but in Planes, Trains and Automobiles nearly every plot twist would be a mild inconvenience in 2022.
I thunk the reason that movies till feature voice calls is very simple. If they showed texts all the time, some people might not be able to see quickly enough what the text is, especially if they are watching on a tablet or their own phones.
There’s that. It also makes it difficult for international audiences, because then you either have to translate the texts for each market, or subtitle them.But ultimately I think the voice call is just entwined in cinema. The transition to talkies in the late 1920s coincided with a huge boom in landline phone adoption. Even the earliest talkies adopted the rhythm of editing between both sides of the voice call as though the speakers were talking directly to each other, and we’re so accustomed to this technique that we don’t even think about the way the phone technology has been abstracted by the editing process. In film, there is no substantial difference between an in-person conversation, and a phone conversation across a great distance. From a performance standpoint, actors have every tool in their toolbox during the phone call. Cell phones didn’t really change the cinematic fundamentals — if anything, they opened up opportunities for showing conversations against more colorful backdrops, as first seen with Michael Douglas’ brick-sized phone on the beach in Wall Street.By contrast, we are not as accustomed to reading texts that appear as floating motion graphics in cinema, there is no common visual language for showing text conversations, and actors have limited ability to emote while reading and writing texts. A lot of great filmmakers have tried handling this in different ways to make it more dynamic, but there’s kind of no substitute for just cross-cutting between two locations for a conversation.
I think, as more filmmakers have grown up with texting, they’ve started to figure out how to make texting work within film. One of the first instances I can recall of using texting as a storytelling device was Sherlock, where it was used as an example of his anti-social personality (in 2010). More recently, I think they’ve started to figure out that the pauses between texts is the dramatic sweet spot. Starting to type something and deleting it, reading it over again before hitting “send”, waiting impatiently for the next response, etc. I’ve also seen the “tense ongoing text conversation in a crowded, rowdy place” done. I don’t think translating the text for each market is too big a deal, 99% of the time when it’s a close-up it’s not the actual actor’s hands, anyway, but a stand-in. Even easier when they do the “floaty on-screen bubbles” instead of showing the phone’s screen. I think there will still be WAY more live conversations than is realistic (it’s a hell of a lot faster to convey information in a few lines of dialogue than an ongoing, 30 minute text conversation), but it’ll just be one of those little movie/tv conventions, like how no one says “goodbye” when they’re ending a phone call.
I feel like filmmakers have only figured out how to make texting work on-screen relatively recently. It’s always more cinematic to have an actual conversation.
not every film is explicitly about how we travel, and its kind of fun to think how much that has changed in 35 years… idk its a kinda fun thanksgiving article
Okay fine, write one for Blade Runner if you’re so cool.
But… Those aren’t Thanksgiving movies on their 35th anniversary. So… Why would you?Your reaction of bizarreness is, itself, bizarre.
Yes I, too, hate reading for fun. You could write something similar for any film Stunning logic.
“If Romeo and Juliet wasn’t in the 16th century, Friar John could have just EMAILED Friar Lawrence from Mantua and told him the plan! No one needed to die!”
Arguably no one needed to die even then because the concept of seeing if an unconscious person was still alive by looking for a pulse was known even to the ancient Romans, yet Romeo never checks Juliet’s pulse before concluding she was dead and committing suicide.
To be fair, they were teenagers, and teenagers are idiots.
It seems like early rom-coms in particular would have been short-circuited by the existence of mobile phones since they rely so heavily on miscommunication.That, and the Battle of New Orleans.
Heck even modern rom coms still rely heavily on miscommunication. Just look at a movie like Hitch, it’s modern from 2005 so well into the smart phone era, and still heavily relies on miscommunication/misunderstanding.
That was one of the ridiculous parts about He’s Just Not That Into You. They tried to acknowledge cell phones with that whole big scene with Drew Barrymore’s character ranting about how there are “so many ways to communicate,” and someone called her on her answering machine, so she called him at work, and they called back on her cell, so she responded to their myspace, and there’s email and there’s snail mail, and like, what? Just call the person back on the number they called you on. No one does all that. It’s not that complicated.
If it was made today, they would bang, too.
They’d be a couple of trannies trying to get to their dick-cut-off surgeries on time
This would be an excellent 9th grade honors English paper, so good job!
There were still long security lines, metal detectors, and pat downs in 1987 so he would’ve still missed his flight.
Yes I remember a security guy asking my Mom in the mid-80s if she had a knife in her bag, all accusingly. It was nail clippers.
Sort of. But “security” pre 9/11 was even easier than it is with TSA-Pre or Clear today. Basically the metal detectors were like the ones in museums and other public buildings meaning that things like watches, belts, and wallets didn’t trigger anything. You had to have something major like a weapon or something. So things were pretty quick — you just walked through the detector and 99% there was no problem.
I can remember traveling in the 90s, and taking a souvenir pocket knife in my carry on. Security didn’t think anything of it, and I remember at the time, nobody thought that would be a problem. Now, I’d be whisked away by TSA so fast. But it’s crazy how wild west it used to be. My parents can remember when you didn’t even need ID to travel. You just showed up and boarded. It was practically like taking the bus.
I never flew pre-9/11 and the thing that always gets me about “old” movies/shows is meeting someone at the gate. Like, they’d just let anyone that far into the airport without a ticket? Whoa.
Oh yes, this I remember. One time I was traveling with family, and we had a layover in a city where we relatives, and they just came to the airport and visited with us at the gate until we were ready to board. The only thing you needed the boarding pass for was getting on the actual plane. And even then, the imperative wasn’t out of some kind of security measure, they wanted to see your boarding pass so they knew you were a paying customer. I don’t even recall if they checked out IDs back then.
Definitely. You had to go through security (such as it was) but it was extremely common when friends or relatives came into town. You’d be waiting for them to get off their plane at the gate so they could follow you to your car so you could give them a ride and you could keep them company when they were leaving. Also, you could go through security to just look at the planes taking off better if you wanted to. I remember us doing that in the 1970s when I was a kid, but that was when my dad was going back to University and things were tight so I think my parents were just looking for cheap/free ways to entertain my brother and me.
Yeah, I still miss that. Your friends/family would literally meet you the second you got off the plane!
Or the reverse; in 1995 I escorted my girlfriend to the gate when she flew to Israel to spend a year on a kibbutz. (We’d graduated high school a few months before and knew the relationship wouldn’t survive past the summer.)
Yup!
I was just talking about this with my girlfriend the other day. We speculated that back then the airports must have made a lot more money on short-term parking, with so many people accompanying their friends/family to see them off.
I don’t understand why you still can’t do that. You can’t get on an airplane top hijack it in the first place without the boarding pass, and if you’re just going to blow the place up then the security area would be much more impactful anyway.
Probably has something to do with not wanting to make security lines even longer since all those people coming to meet the plane would have to go through security as well.
Yeah, fair point. It’s disaster enough as-is.
That was exactly what it was. When the whole “TSA” thing was being created they specifically said that non-ticketed passengers would no longer be allowed through security since security lines were about to get LONG.
In April 2001 I went home to do some shopping a week before going on a school trip to London. When I went to get on the bus on campus I realized I’d left my Discman and CD cases at my mom’s. The airport we were flying out of was between my campus and home, so my mom and sister drove down and met me at my gate. I love them anyway, but I was really happy to see them that day!
I haven’t flown post-9/11 and didn’t realize you can’t do that anymore.
When my friends and I were 19/20 y/o, we would go to the airport bars to drink. Yes, it was pricier, but we never got carded. I think most bartenders just assumed if you were in the airport, you were probably old enough to drink.
I got a last-minute ticket from Portland International to Boston Logan in college, summer ‘93, from a friend of mine and raced to the airport. I was so far behind that security basically let me jump over the turnstiles and when I hit the gate (no time to stop at check-in) the attendants said “This isn’t your name on the ticket.” I said “Oh yeah, I got it from a friend of mine, but he couldn’t go” and they shrugged and said “Glad you made it” and let me on.
tl;dr – the world I grew up in is gone.
Back in 1999-2000 I was taking a flight from Bern to Munich (then onto Toronto) – halfway to the airport in a taxi I had to explain to the driver in painfully broken German that I had forgotten my paper ticket in my hotel room. Crazy Taxi’d it back to the hotel with the driver making some terse calls to the hotel (the clerk was waiting in front of the hotel with my ticket in hand as the driver flipped a u-turn in the parking lot and I grabbed my ticket through the passenger-side window) and airport en route and made it to the airport at 11h51 for a noon flight. No idea how my bags got on the plane but security basically waved me through and I was in my seat at 11h57 withering under the icy stares of annoyed Swiss and Germans. Tried to describe this to some younger folks and they looked at me like I had a supernumerary limb growing from the middle of my forehead.
I carried my swiss army knife in my pocket all though 1992 from Australia to Europe, all through Europe and back home to Australia and nobody blinked.
It’s still like taking the bus. The cramped, late, urine smelling city bus.
Coming back from Spain in 1993, I made it all the way to the gate with the sword I bought in Toledo. The stewardess wouldn’t let me on the plane with it, primarily because the box it was in was 6’x2′. Neither the check-in desk, nor security had cared.I had to go all the way back to the check-in desk to check it.
I had/have a kubotan keychain since about 1980, mostly so I can’t ever lose my keys. It was a plastic one back then. I went all over the country with it on Delta, American, and United. Nobody said anything about it until about 1990, suddenly in Chicago, the guy says, “You can’t carry that, it’s a martial arts weapon!”. I explained I had had the thing for like 10 years and had flown at least 12 times without any mention of it, and most of the time, they definitely saw it. So I had to put it in my checked in luggage. I wasn’t happy, on my previous flight, I wound up in Panama City, FL, but my luggage went to either Seattle or Portland, I can’t remember, and I had to buy a bunch of stuff to use before it finally came. If they had lost the keys on that ring, it would have been a hassle to get them replaced. Luckily, my luggage made it with me. And one time at the Clark County Courthouse in Las Vegas, the crack security let me go into the courtroom openly wearing my gun from work(a Casino security guard), a large .357 revolver. I was testifying as a victim of a robbery, and when they called me to the stand, the judge said, “Ummm, they didn’t take your gun and lock it up for you downstairs?”. I didn’t even realize I was wearing it until he said that. The bailiffs and him looked at each other and rolled their eyes and one of the baliffs said, “Jeezus, what great security we have here!”. The judge told me to keep it in the holster, “Please”, and then laughed and shook his head again. The judge had me come into his chambers when they broke for the day, and I thought I was going to get my ass reamed, but he just wanted to check out my gun. The next day, they wanted my gun as soon as they saw me. I would have loved to hear what the judge said after I left to them.
They had security but it was nothing like post 911 America. You use to just throw your bag on the scanner and walk through. Now you go to take off your belt, pull out your wallet, take off your shoes and remove every electronic from your bag which just eats up time in line and after. Plus they are much more diligent on scanning. The Airport is never fun but the difference pre and post 911 is staggering
And the failure rate when the TSA tests its checkpoints is something like 95%. It’s such performative nonsense.
I got pulled up by Aus Customs (now Borderforce, because Tony Abbot is a drunken semi-fascist), for having a CPU in a jar back in the early 2000s. They thought it was a missile guidance chip or something.Two things:* One, if it is, I’m smuggling it into Australia, so if it is sneaky-beaky mil tech, you, the government, should be grateful.* Two, what the fuck is anyone in Australia going to do with a missile guidance chip? It’s not like we build ‘em here. Haven’t built a missile since the Ikara. It was a Pentium III.
I had one of these about six months ago in a carry on, it’s just a slick looking radio, but the security people were freaking out. I had to fire it up and show them how it worked. They oooohed and ahhhed. It’s a fun toy, and if you use an antenna that’s not near it, it works quite well. On a whip screwed onto one of the two antenna jacks on the left top, it’s basically an FM band only receiver, HF/SW is trashed by the noise that pretty display panel cranks out. If they could solve the display noise issue, these things would just be a killer gadget. This one is a Chinese copy of the real Russian one, but as it seems to be with a lot of China copies of things, the copies get better and better, and this one works better than a friend’s “real” one.
I’m just old enough to remember smoking on flights. Talk about wild.
What, you’re saying the “smoking section” on an airplane didn’t confine the smoke to those rows??What was also funny was even after they banned smoking on flights the armrests had built-in ashtrays for years until all the plane interiors had been redone.
You could smoke on flights to and from the Middle East as late as 1999.
Security did exist, but it was nothing like it is now. Heck, I got on a flight in the late 90’s with a pocket knife that had a 4 inch blade, without a single problem from security.
Even earlier than that.
I mean, *maybe*. I flew a few times back then and it didn’t take long. I even remember in the year 2001 (Jan) when I had a puppy in a carrier and they just passed it around the metal detector and didn’t even look inside, despite there being a blanket in the bottom and than large enough to hold two handguns.
In 97 I arrived at the airport 15 minutes before departure. There was some screw up with the booking so all they had left were first class seats. Different times.
Enjoyed reading, when i watch it i’m transported back to 1980s mindset. If they did it now, they would have to have a much greater distance (mexico > US) and maybe a huge cellular outage accross the states for 48 hours.
Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and the EMP That Ended Modern Civilization
Username checks out.
I would prefer this list in slideshow form.
According to McKean there was a cut scene where he tells them they’ve overshot Chicago by about a hundred miles (which a navigation app also would have told them).Even in 1987 without navigation, this is a stretch. Especially for a travelling salesman like Candy who should know his way around. You start seeing signs for “To Chicago” when you are hundreds of miles away.
I drove through Chicago last year, and it seemingly took an hour, passing literally hundreds of exits into various parts of the city, while seeing the skyline the entire time. “Damn, missed it!”
One of my favourite lines from Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’ is, “Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.”
One part of the movie actually became dated before it was even released, with Neal wanting “a fucking Datsun.” The company changed its name to Nissan shortly after the scene was shot.“If Neal hadn’t put the pieces together on the train and gone back, there’s a real chance they’d never have seen each other again.”The original ending was actually Del taking a cab to Neal’s stop, which Hughes figured would make him a bit too much like a creepy stalker, so instead they cobbled together the sequence of Neal figuring things out with B-roll footage of Martin making various facial expressions on the train.
True on the Datsun thing, though I like to think someone like Neil Page would refer to it as Datsun long after the company changed its name. He strikes me as the kind of guy who still referred to jeans as “dungarees.”
For sure, over here people still refer to ‘British Rail’ when travelling by train, even though BR hasn’t functioned as a train company since the beginning of 1997!
“Three coins in the fountain…”
They’d actually finished the switch to Nissan by ‘84 (they spent a couple years as Datsun by Nissan to get the public to accept the change), although it’s pretty reasonable that a normie like Martin’s character wouldn’t make that distinction in the moment.
I grew up in the 80’s and my maternal Grandfather always referred to my youngest aunt’s car as a Datsun for their entire time of ownership though i’m fairly certain it had Nissan branding. Also, I always thought that Datsun was its model until this post. Not a car guy outside of GTA and its ‘clones’.
lot of dissenting opinions here but this is exactly the kind of piece i used to see on websites all the time and love reading. it’s airy, it’s fun classic internet nit-picking.
Right. It’s a cute piece and gives us all a moment to reminisce about a classic movie. I’m all for this.
Home Alone would’ve been over at the TSA line in ORD as everyone would’ve missed the flight.
There are a lot of formats this site could use to spur this type of discussion. Instead of snarky newswires, this is the stuff people engage with.
Look at you, reading for fun! It didn’t make you oddly upset like this guy? https://www.avclub.com/1849816377
Does the author really think that travel was so primitive in 1987 because there were no smartphones, or maybe things were taken to extremes for comedic purposes…
It’s a quarter to five and he has a six o’clock flight. The fact that he still expects to make it when he leaves the meeting shows how far we’ve come, and not necessarily in the right direction. This is probably the one case where things were simpler back then. It depends on the airport these days. I generally fly out of Santa Ana (John Wayne) in SoCal and arriving about an hour/45minutes before your flight should be more than enough time to get through security. Could it be faster? Yeah, but it’s still really quick comparatively speaking.
Flying Southwest out of MSP is great, they’re on a small remote terminal away from the Delta madness, counter to gate is usually about 10 minutes, always a nice change. Now getting to MSP is painful as start off in ATL and TSA has turned multi-hour allowances into completely missed flights.
My mom is from northern Minnesota and I used to fly out of MSP all the time. It was always fairly quick and easy from what I can recall, but it’s been over a decade since I last visited.
There were times on business travel (pre-pandemic), where I could get from my front door to the gate in under a half hour, out of YYZ. I admittedly only lived a few miles from the airport, had parking available on site, and have my NEXUS (Canadian Pre-check equivalent). Even without, I don’t think I remember security being that much of an issue unless you’re travelling at a peak tourist time.More than anything, customs can be the biggest timesuck, especially if you’ve got the bad luck of arriving at the same time as a bunch of big overseas flights.
But also you don’t have the incompetent, often nasty, and often racist TSA like we have in the States. There is rarely a week that there isn’t a story about hoe the TSA treat totally innoceet people like shite.Reecntly (I forget where) a TSA agent forced a handicapped child out of her wheelchair and when she starte getting upset, the jerk took her stuffed animal away from her, making her way more upset, and angering the parents even more. Eventually someone came along and took care of the situation, but I believ the parents are trying the sue the TSA and/or the vile agent.
I work in downtown Houston and routinely leave my office an hour before my flight leaves Hobby airport, which is about a 20 minute drive. I know it’s self-destructive because all it would take is a stalled car to make me miss my flight, but that’s just how I roll. Danger’s my middle name.
The teen who breaks into the motel room and steals from them is famed Summer School co-star Gary Riley / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Riley
Hey, he needed money for speakers and/or his pregnant girlfriend!
“This movie is outdated because of smartphones” could be said about literally any movie from pre 2000. Just another sad article about how this site is shit now. Also, editing. Missing periods and all.
But it’s literally about a THANKSGIVING MOVIE that is literally CELEBRATING AN ANNIVERSARY.Some of you people are being real dumb.
Imagine getting upset about this and thinking this is the reason the site sucks.
It is kind of the platonic ideal of an AV Club commenter complaint. Ignores context and ends with snark about editing.Now that I think about it, the only thing missing is a needlessly personal slam against the writer.
But how is it really a Thanksgivine movie when it just as easily could be a Christmas movie since the idea is getting somewhere in time?
Okay. Call it a Christmas movie. OP is still an idiot for bitching about this article. It’s a holiday movie. We’re in the holiday season. “Any pre 2000 movie”. Well sure but THIS movie is having a significant anniversary.
I, too, hate reading for fun.
Taking their smartphones out of play early on, for instance—due to damage or theft or whatever—would put the modern versions of Neal and Del in a position pretty close to where they were in 1987. The problem is that even if this happened, Neal and Del could just walk into a Walmart or Walgreens or Dollar General and buy a cheap $30 prepaid smartphone to do what they needed to do.
This is one of my favourite comedies! I really hope WS doesnt do this as a remake leave this one alone. I still laugh out loud when watching this 😀 I cant see the same happening with a remake, as said, a lot of jokes wouldn’t work. And the movie was so good due those three people already mentioned in the article.
“The near-death experience they face when going the wrong way on the highway could have been easily avoided by using a navigation app.”
You’ve clearly never had a navigation app send you the wrong way up a one-way street.
In the early days of GPS I was in San Diego which has many ravines interrupting the street grid. Many disconnected streets even keep the same name on both sides of the ravine. The GPS would sometimes ignore the ravine and expect us to leap across Dukes of Hazzard style to continue on the same road.
Driving through New Jersey’s Bridge and Tunnel Land was a lot of fun with the old Tom Tom. It never took into account that you were on a bridge and would want you to make a left on the road underneath it. If you missed it, you got “Make the next u-turn” and “Recalculating route.” A seemingly 20 minute drive somewhere turned into over an hour.
We should’ve seen it coming. When I first got the GPS unit, I tested it out by driving from my house to 7-11, which was a 1/2 mile straight shot on the main road. It had me making a left and then a right and another right to go around the grocery store across the street.
I used to love printing Mapquest directions. “Turn left down the alley behind the 7-11.”5 minutes later: “Where the fuck am I??”
“You don’t wanna know from me, man. This ain’t even my neighborhood.” – A line from another John Hughes written film
Mine: “Turn right onto ‘Imka Street’”, which I slowly figured out was supposed to be “YMCA Street”.
It’s a source of constant battle with my wife. She just wants the step by step and I at lease want to see the map so I have some feel for where we’re going. Especially since Waze seems to be getting less accurate with time.
The same early GPS I was complaining about before pronounced Los Angeles as “Los An-Gal-Less” which led to a in-joke in our family lasting to this day nearly twenty years later where we call the city by that name.
If you are using a navigation app navigating to a National Forest expecting to arrive at a National Park type gate you will eventually find yourself at the top of a mountain in a 35 foot RV trying to do a K turn on a fire road next to a 200 foot cliff.
Nearly had something like this happen at the Grand Canyon. Realized that the “avoid toll roads” setting was helpfully trying to navigate through backwoods trails to avoid the entry fee gate and followed the existing signs like any rational driver would do at that point. This also plagued me at a Dallas/Ft Worth airport but I was a bit slower to catch on, fortunately before any security took notice that I was not exactly headed to the terminal any longer (and before running into any restricted gate access).
A clever writer could still make Planes, Trains & Automobiles work in the present day with a few tweaks.Easiest fix is use either BIG TELECOM/DATA or Timothy Olyphant from Live Free or Die Hard as a villain – nationwide cellular outage, transportation servers down, bad working conditions trigger employee strike(s), etc. But it would have to be a trickle down, first air then train then automobiles, because in a “real” scenario they would all be down simultaneously.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles & the Apocalypse
If the door had an electronic card reader like most hotel rooms do now, it wouldn’t have been so easy for the intruder to get in.You’d be surprised.
It’s a quarter to five and he has a six o’clock flight. The fact that he still expects to make it when he leaves the meeting shows how far we’ve comeIt’s 35 years later and of course New York now has fast, efficient train service from Manhattan directly to the terminals at all three major airports.
“shower curtain rings (which, by the way, are also mostly obsolete now)“What?
I love that this seems to be the main takeaway most people have from this article. I’d say it’s more that traveling salesmen like Dell are mostly obsolete. I don’t know anyone who drives around with samples in the trunks of their cars anymore.
For me, the biggest issue is the death of John Candy in 1994.
No barrier these days, we can use CGI to revive him!
And with the increase of obesity you could probably easily find a look-alike anyway. He’s gone from being comically fat to just a bit plumper than normal.
“Wait a minute, you just reused the CGI Tarkin from ‘Rogue One’! Eh, it’s fine.”
If they remake this, I sure hope they don’t force Will Smith upon us. He long ago eclipsed his talent in disappearing into a role, and he’d just seem like Will Smith playing Will Smith in this situation. It would be more fun to see some up and coming comedians that could act in the roles in my opinion.
He’ll probably rap the theme tune too.
YoYoPlanes Trains Automobiles That’s all I have.
No hate for the guy, but did he ever have that talent? I admittedly haven’t seen his entire filmography, but even in the dramatic roles I’ve seen he’s always kind of been Will Smith plays Will Smith as [X].
Yeah tbh, I think most of Will Smith’s star power was not about disappearing into roles, it was just about being a personality that a lot of people find charismatic.
NO.
Stupid Boomers using shower curtain rings when there are apps available.
And it’s so affordable. With a yearly $29.99 subscription to CurtainHang you can hold up two curtains**curtains must be in the same household. Password sharing of CurtainHang not allowed.
Big Ring wants you paying for life to keep your shower curtain hung. Ownership is so 20th century.
When watching Home Alone recently, I got to thinking about what time you would arrive at the airport in 1990 for an international flight (and therefore how close they were cutting it by sleeping in). When I first flew international it was post-9/11, and the advice was three hours, but surely back then it was much shorter. Would you even show up any earlier for an international flight than domestic?
The one thing I have always found utterly unrealistic about the movie, which was as true in ‘87 as it would be today, is the dismissive, rude attitude of the flight attendant towards Neal.Airlines kiss the asses of first class passengers, there’s no way he’d be bumped and treated with such naked hostility, especially when there were seats available that the flight attendant just gave away a second afterwards.
I just assumed they worked for the same airline that Bill Murray has to deal with at the end of Quick Change.“You think you’re late enough?”“Oh, you must be from around here.”
You could’ve given us help, but you’ve given us so much more
Quick Change is one of the most criminally underrated movies ever.
It is and I’m not letting Geena Davis’ story make me not love it any less
What’s the opposite of a love letter to a city? Quick Change is a great panacea to all the “I Heart NY” movies out there. The whole damn movie is “this city fucking blows and it’s impossible to escape because it sucks so hard.”
Man it is going to be so annoying when teleporters are invented and this article has to be updated.
Another movie from that era (which could have been resolved quickly) is the Kevin Costner/Gene Hackman flick “No Way Out”. With today’s tech the key photo enhancement would have been completed in minutes rather than days, and the movie would have had maybe a 20 minute run time.
Ah yes, truly 2022 is a paradise wherein everything goes smoothly.
You have FAR too much time on your hands, Cindy.
#4 Comedy
I was quite relieved reading this as the headline had me afraid about what kind of social language/standards Del and Neal violated that wouldn’t fly today. (Sort of like what everyone’s reaction should be to someone hypothetically saying, “You know, they should remake Soul Man.”)
Wait, hold on, a movie that was made 35 years ago would be made differently today???
Wait, hold on, reading about it could be fun???
Kudos for not making this a slideshow.
You can’t underplay the runway part of the rental car debacle. These days a guy with a bag running across a runway would shut down the airport and summon the SWAT team.
While there was no ID or ticket check as anyone could go through to the gate area at the time, pre-2001 airports still had security, and specifically metal detectors you had to go through prior to the gate areas. Maybe not in all airports, but in all the ones I used.
Stolen smartphones, blizzard, middle of nowhere Hicksville, no wi-fi, rednecks… it could work. Horror movie would work too.P.S. I remember the Kevin Bacon cameo. Crossover with She’s Having a Baby.
The SHABCU was king in the 80s.
sorry but movies are not uncomfortably dated by circunstancial things like the context the characters live – pop media never had to be about you in your specific moment – but some other considerations like casual sexism or homophobia as jokes
Why was Neal so desperate to get that flight? Thanksgiving was days away.
Shower curtain rings aside, this is still better than that time all the AV club staffers complained about how the turkey episode of WKRP was unfunny.https://www.avclub.com/wkrp-celebrates-thanksgiving-by-tossing-turkeys-out-of-1798242197
Why… this 19-year-old writer… doing this… thought piece?… about the World that Once Had Typewriters… imagine… I cannot finish this. Then we all did the Charleston and died of consumption.
If shower curtain rings are now “obsolete,” what newfangled technology are people using to hang shower curtains?? Crypto??
Until two weeks ago, yes. Then they woke up to discover their shower curtains lying on the bathroom floor.
“…Taking their smartphones out of play early on…”I’m feeling some parallels with the first Harold & Kumar film. They’ve walked halfway down the hallway, realized they forgot their cell phone, and decided that they’ve come too far to go back for it. You have to remove their cell phones or the movie can’t work.
The ending, where Neal Page puts together all the things about Del Griffith`s behavior that just do not add up to a happy man with a loving wife and home, ALWAYS gets to me… I`ve lost people I love, and the thought that this big, love-able, slob has nothing in his life but his traveling sales job is all-too believable.As for the endless frustration that Neal endures; I am getting a taste of that right now, after finding out about the new ‘Deleted/Extended Scenes’ release of ‘Planes, Trains, and Automobiles…’
…and discovering that it is ONLY available in ‘4K HD BLU-RAY’!—Which I have neither the player, nor the tv to support.—-Wanna guess how may times I used the ‘F’ Word about that?
I’m now just thinking of my experience two nights ago, where my phone provider’s coverage dropped out unexpectedly, so one of my friends ordered an Uber for me, a process that consisted of him saying, “Here we go – no wait, the driver cancelled. Here we go – no wait, the driver cancelled”, many, many times.The night ended with me not getting an Uber.
You should write a movie about that.
“Taking their smartphones out of play early on, for instance—due to damage or theft or whatever—would put the modern versions of Neal and Del in a position pretty close to where they were in 1987.”That’s a much worse position.Without your cell phone, do youa) remember anyone’s phone number,b) know where a pay phone is, andc) have any change?
If movies became too “dated” to watch, I wouldn’t be currently watching and enjoying It’s A Wonderful Life.
I doubt ride share would solve the problem. I’ve used a ride share 7 times in the last 6 months, only to have three of those trips not pick me up (but I got to watch their car on the map pick me up and take me to my destination without me in it). Also, due to consolidation of major airport hubs, a plane from NY to Chicago would never wind up in Witchita nowadays. It would probably be Denver or Dallas.
One of the most unnecessary articles ever written.
there was just a horrible accident somewhere where someone was driving the wrong way on a highway & lots of people died so…
Home for the Holidays is a really great T-Day movie as well! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113321/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
“Both men hand over their Diners Cards (which still exist!) to the hotel clerk who rings them up with a manual carbon credit card machine and mixes them up when handing them back.”I have watched this movie over a dozen times since it came out (including this past year) and I never noticed that this happens and that this is how Del ended up with Neal’s card. I had always wondered, and had the uncertain thought in the back of my head wondering if Del really did steal it in an uncharacteristic act of *intentional* inconsideration. A lifelong mystery’s been solved!
Nothing would work because big studios don’t make comedies anymore.
This might be the most obnoxious thing ever posted on this once great website. You answer to every hurdle is uber, airbnb, and cell phones. Well duh. Now do Home Alone (no, don’t).