Top Gun — but the fighter jocks are morons, the enemy is “a dark-coloured plane that looks sinister”, and the Cold War is being run by men too proud to admit they can’t read a radar.
Airplane!-brained, not a Hot Shots retread — the same beats as the genre it’s spoofing, played by men too proud, too stupid, and too well-armed to notice they’re the joke.
The story
A note-perfect, feature-length send-up of the 1986 original. Aboard the USS Crazyhorse, a bald, perpetually-smoking Captain scrambles his best aviators — Panther and Wizard — against a radar blip an analyst can only describe as “behaving in a fairly nebulous manner” on a heading he’d “rather not refer to.” Panther has a complete meltdown mid-dogfight against what turns out to be an F-5 Tiger painted black, and the real heroes of the piece step up: Lone Wolf and his co-pilot Moose, whose signature move is an “air-to-air flyby” — buzzing fellow pilots with live targeting radar for fun. Their victory lap is landing two F-14s side-by-side on a single-lane carrier deck, obliterating the control tower in a fireball the Captain can only respond to by screaming Lone Wolf’s name into the sky. Rather than suspend them, the incandescent Captain instead promotes the idiots into the elite Best Guns flight school — via his own tortured transitive-property logic — where they meet preening instructor Striker (“first best”, per his own plaque) and top student Riceman, a joke Lone Wolf himself flags as suspect before finding out it’s just the guy’s actual callsign. Best Guns runs the entire Top Gun playbook — rivalry, machismo, training montage, career-ending near-misses — and lets every beat collapse under its own unearned confidence.
Coverage — plot points
- A vague, vibes-only radar contact scrambles the Crazyhorse’s best aviators, Panther and Wizard.
- Panther has a full breakdown mid-dogfight against what’s very obviously just a painted F-5 Tiger.
- Backup pilots Lone Wolf and Moose “save the day” by buzzing Panther with live targeting radar for a laugh.
- Their victory landing destroys the carrier’s control tower; the Captain’s fury somehow ends in a promotion, not a suspension.
- Lone Wolf and Moose ship out to the elite Best Guns flight school to face off against reigning top gun Striker and his ace pupil, Riceman.
The Black List — Coverage Evaluation
“The script’s best asset is its sense of humor – absurd, bold, and not as broad or purely referential as spoof films have become… a breath of fresh air, certainly when compared to modern spoof films.”
“Fudge butler! That does sound ominous.”
“They were number one, you were number two. You weren’t number one before, but by the transitive property you’re now number one.”
Read the sample
Below is the existing draft — a sample of the final shooting script (101pp shown). Scroll to read, or download the PDF.
Seeking representation and/or a producing/financing partner. Complete shooting script available on request.