Hot Shots: Why Top Gun’s Best Parody Was So Successful

Hot Shots! was almost as big a success as the blockbuster it spoofed, Top Gun, but what made the parody such a huge hit upon release in 1990? Released in 1986, Top Gun was a big hit with audiences that soon led to a massive increase in recruitment for the real-life Navy and Air Force. It was not hard to work out why, since Top Gun’s propulsive story of feckless-but-talented test pilot Maverick made the work look more exciting than many other earlier movies had managed.

Unlike most army movies of the time, Top Gun was a fun, breezy, and cheesy summer blockbuster that ignored any inconvenient realities of life in the Navy in favor of glamorous Hollywood fantasy. Top Gun even invented pilot rankings and trophies for flying, neither of which existed in the real-life institution, to make the story feel more like an inspirational sports movie than a heavy drama about war. As a result, the Tom Cruise vehicle was highly successful, but Top Gun was also undeniably a little silly.

Even the most ardent defenders of Top Gun could not deny that much of the movie’s appeal came from how over-the-top its goofy heroics were, and how unlikely its escapist story was. Director John Carpenter even turned down the project upon reading an early draft, noting that the climactic dogfight would trigger World War III if it occurred in real life. The movie was a bombastic, self-consciously silly story that was unashamed of its cheesiness, and Top Gun director Tony Scott infused the action with winking self-awareness years long before later action auteur Michael Bay’s movies mocked their own excesses. However, despite how silly Top Gun was, there was still room for a movie to mercilessly parody the film and gain critical and commercial success in the process. In 1990, the creators of Airplane! earned both glowing reviews in years and a cool $180 million box office payday with Hot Shots!, a scene-for-scene Top Gun parody. So, what made the spoof so successful?

Hot Shots Perfectly Recreated Top Gun

It can be hard to recall, after decades out of critical and commercial favor, spoof movies used to be serious business at the box office. However, part of the reason that the sub-genre fell out of favor was the decision by critically-derided spoof movies throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s to take a scattershot approach to parody. Where successful spoofs like the Austin Powers movies meticulously recreated the aesthetic of the movies they were mocking, many ‘90s and ‘00s parody movies simply referenced anything popular at the time in the hopes that topical familiarity and recognition would make up for a lack of focus. Hot Shots!, in contrast, succeeded because the movie focused on recreating the feel, tone, and style of Top Gun, albeit with some absurd punchlines added throughout the proceedings.

From renaming Goose as “Dead Meat” to the movie’s Maverick stand-in having a father who survived a crash, only to be mistaken for a deer and shot immediately after Hot Shots! painstakingly recreated the aesthetic of Top Gun to spoof the movie. Where many parodies were happy to just spoof the most famous scenes from the object of their ire, Hot Shots! had a real affection for the source material, as proven by Cary Elwes and Charlie Sheen’s pitch-perfect parodies of Iceman and Maverick in the pair’s respective performances. With a real love for the movie being spoofed and a laser focus on Top Gun‘s unique style, Hot Shots! could have visually passed for a sequel to the movie were it not for the goofy prop comedy scattered through the spoof’s action.

Hot Shots Satirized Real-life Politics

As well as affectionate spoofs of Top Gun and other ‘80s hits, Hot Shots! featured more pointed satire of the real-life politics of the day. The Iran-Contra affair gave the filmmakers a prime target to mock with pointed satirical barbs that gave Hot Shots! real edge despite the silliness and over-the-top nature of the spoof format. Much like Rick & Morty’s Prometheus parody poked light-hearted fun at the Ridley Scott movie but added sharper critiques of contemporary politics into its script, so too did Hot Shots! temper its off-the-wall absurdity with clever satirical stabs at the corporations profiteering off endless war through arms sales. Often, the comedy of spoof movies could end up feeling somewhat toothless and juvenile, as a parody by definition prizes making audiences laugh over making a point. However, by adding ruthless, Juvenalian satirical jabs at real-life politicians and corrupt arms manufacturers to a movie built on fonder, Horation parody of Top Gun’s goofy action-movie heroics, Hot Shots! gave edge and relevance to a fun, silly story.

Hot Shots Had Funny Source Material

Top Gun is a fun film and one that never took itself too seriously even though it is not filled with outright comedic moments. This balance between being relatively self-serious and inherently heightened made it prime material for the creators of Hot Shots!, the writing/directing team Zucker Abrahams Zucker (Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker). The writing team noted when writing Airplane! that many self-serious cheesy movies have endless inherent comic potential in their stone-faced treatment of absurd lines like “the life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane but who didn’t have fish for dinner” (a real line lifted verbatim from the deadly-serious disaster movie Zero Hour, which inspired Airplane!).

Likewise, the original movie was always charmingly funny in its own unintentional way (as epitomized by Top Gun’s notoriously bad sex scene). As such, the creators simply needed to add punchlines to Top Gun‘s cheesy, corny tone to earn stellar reviews while other spoofs of the same era fell flat (like 1990’s Repossessed, which made the mistake of attempting to lighten up the famously dour, humorless The Exorcist). Thus, Top Gungave Hot Shots! the material necessary to create a spoof almost as successful and well-remembered as the movie it was parodying and produced an addition to the parody movie pantheon that remains an underrated classic of the sub-genre to this day.

About The Author

Cathal Gunning
(1446 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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