Monkey Fighting Snakes On This Monday To Friday Plane

fun fact: Samuel Jackson made his theater debut in "Mother Courage and Her Children" in 1980, but is probably not the "Mother" reference you're thinking of

It’s time to fly
Tonight the sky’s alive
With lizards serpentine
Lounging in their suits and ties

Oh! I’m ready for it! Come on, bring it!
Oh! I’m ready for it! Come on, bring it!

Oh, honey, I’m gonna make it out alive
So kiss me goodbye
Oh, I can see the venom in your eyes
So kiss me goodbye

Oh! I’m ready for it! Come on, bring it!
Oh! I’m ready for it! Come on, bring it!

- Bring It! Snakes On A Plane! (Cobra Starship) (yes, an actual song!)

Censoring dialog for prime time viewing used to be much more commonplace.

Surely you are thinking “Mother Goose”, right?

Certain actors have catch words. Keanu Reaves was known for “Whoa.”

Arnold Schwartzenegger, inevitably, would tell us that he would return.

It’s rather dated, but it survived long enough to make it into meme pop culture: Mr T, iconic in his own right, had a particular catch phrase that society remembers him for.

It’s from Rocky 3, which wasn’t the best of the Rocky movies, but has its moments, and this is certainly one of them.

And of course Samuel Jackson… well…

He’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Samuel Jackson famously did a terrifically schlocky movie called Snakes on a Plane - yes, that’s basically the whole plot right there - and his most distinctive line in that movie uses his tagword twice: “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.” How could they possibly make that one safe for mainstream television?

Yes, they really turned it into “Monkey Fighting Snakes On This Monday To Friday Plane”

Supposedly Samuel Jackson decided on this cornball line himself, deciding that if they were going to replace it he was going to have some fun with it.

Good for him. Well played. We’ll come back to him here in a minute.

Scarface was one of the most violent and profane movies filmed at the time. Al Pacino is Tony Montana, a Cuban expat turned tremendously ruthless drug lord in Miami. (It is an extremely 1980s adaptation of an older Prohibition era movie by the same name, but modernized for audiences who would prefer Latino cokeheads for their machinegun fire rather than Irishmen smuggling whiskey during Prohibition.) Somehow it was cut down for mainstream television. Tony Montana required an extraordinary amount of editing to turn his dialogue into anything suitable for prime-time. The first network broadcast of the movie by ABC, in 1987, they literally cut out 32 minutes - and some of the edits are absolute howlers.

“Where’d you get that scar… eating pineapple?”

“This town’s like a great big chicken, just waiting to be plucked.”

Now, while we’re talking about interesting actors and in particular about Samuel L Jackson, the man’s got a pretty colorful history. He currently holds the record as the highest grossing actor of all time - by which Hollywood means that he was an actor in films that collectively grossed over $27 billion dollars. Theoretically Stan Lee slightly beats him, I think, with bit appearances in nearly all the Marvel movies, but that doesn’t really count - Jackson is a significant part of nearly all of those movies, whereas Stan Lee basically cameos. But let’s start a little earlier.

Samuel Jackson was born December 21, 1948, in Washington DC, though he grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was basically raised by his mother and maternal grandparents - apparently he only met his father twice - and went into acting to learn how to combat his stutter: the rather important lesson that when he was playing a role that didn’t stutter, he didn’t either; thus, he did his best to be “always in character”. (Incidentally, the other thing that he finds helps him deal with his stutter? It’s, yes, his iconic word: I didn’t believe it either but Vulture did a whole article on this. Try “stutter therapy” if you need an excuse for swearing, I guess?) He attended Riverside High School, went on to Morehouse College, and initially studied marine biology before deciding that acting was going to be his career path. But he followed a very unusual path to get there.

You see, in 1968, Jackson attended Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral - as an usher - and then went on to Memphis to join an equal rights protest. This led him to join up with some radicals… and the next year, take hostages at his own university, in what had to be a very small world sort of moment.

In 1969, Samuel L. Jackson and several fellow Morehouse College students held the school’s board of trustees - including Martin Luther King Sr. - hostage for two days to demand greater student involvement in matters of policy and curriculum. The protest resulted in Jackson’s two-year suspension, though King Sr. chose not to press charges and instead met amiably with him. During their meeting at King Sr.’s home, he recognized Jackson’s interest in television and suggested he explore theater arts. This conversation became a pivotal moment, inspiring Jackson to take on an actual career in acting. (Also, apparently his mother had been warned by the FBI that Jackson was likely to die within the year if he continued to be involved in the Black Power movement, as per Parade Magazine, so he got shipped off to LA for a couple years while he was suspended from school.) Jackson later returned to Morehouse and graduated with a BA in Drama in 1972.

Talented man. Quite a shift. But what a very outre way to change career paths.

It was not a smooth ride from there. He did several television and theater productions during the 70s and 80s, but struggled with addiction to cocaine and alcohol. He did however establish important connections, including acting as a stand-in for Bill Cosby for the Cosby Show (in retrospect this might not be so awesome, but it helped at the time), a mentorship from Morgan Freeman, and crucially, Spike Lee - who cast him in Do The Right Thing. He also managed to kick a heroin habit just in time to get cast in Goodfellas, bringing him into Martin Scorsese’s orbit. But Spike Lee followed up with Jungle Fever, which gave Jackson critical recognition at Cannes - and subsequent mainstream films Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, and a starring role in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1.

And this in turn convinced a new director to cast him in a movie that absolutely made him iconically, quotably, meme-level famous, to this day: Quentin Tarantino cast him as Jules Winnfield in the iconic film Pulp Fiction. Alongside Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta, these two hoodlums navigate a violent life in Los Angeles working for crime boss Marsellus Wallace - if you’ve not seen it, this movie very much put Tarantino and Jackson on the map (and Travolta back there after some earlier missteps.)

From there, his career took off. He starred in Die Hard 3 alongside Bruce Willis - they were a very unlikely couple - along with a Golden Globe nomination for A Time To Kill.

Then things really kicked into high gear when he joined the Star Wars franchise as Jedi Master Mace Windu - also, got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, costarred again with Bruce Willis this time in the M. Night Shyamalan movie Unbreakable, and appeared as the eponymous character in a remake of the movie Shaft. Can you dig it? Also, he crossed over into animation in Pixar’s The Incredibles as Frozone, teamed up with Vin Diesel in XXX, and got pulled into an awful lot of other Quentin Tarantino films along the way.

Naturally, the most high-profile point in his career would come next, when Snakes on a Plane was released. when the movie Iron Man was released, Jackson made his end-credits appearance as Nick Fury, setting up a role where he would gather members of a team for the Avengers Initiative and eventually put together the team of superheroes that comprised the Marvel superteam. This led him to appear in many Marvel movies and television shows, and this franchise - even more than Star Wars - is what let to his enormous box office total. But this is not to minimize what Jackson has done over the years - he’s been a prodigious actor.

He’s also done more than a bit of voice work - Jackson voices Whiplash in the Turbo cartoon, Frank Tenpenny in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and of course he’s the voice of Afro Samurai. And in shorter-form content, you may have seen short-form video clips of Jackson reading the not-safe-for-children children’s book Go The Fuck To Sleep (yes, you can apparently get it on Audible).

It may have escaped your attention that Jackson dabbled a bit in crowdfunding. Yes, of course, it was called Motherfunder. What would you expect? Man knows his brand, I guess.

And then I just now encountered this little bit of “news” in the form of a meme:

OK. Seriously. Is this guy making a sequel movie? (Because if so: I’m in. It can’t be worse than say, Crank 2: High Voltage.)