Foo Fighters - “Learn To Fly”

Note: Dave Grohl and the rest of the band play multiple characters, as well as themselves, throughout the video…

We start out on a basically-empty airplane, with Jack Black and Kyle Glass as maintenance people who are doing who knows what in the food-service area of the plane. Apparently they are up to no good, because they slightly freak out when one of the flight attendants (Dave Grohl, swishing away) arrives, and they scurry about so that Jack can hide a small bag of something in the coffee machine. The flighty flight attendant doesn’t notice a thing, other than the fact that there are men around he can overly-touch for no apparent reason.

The song kicks off as we cut to the cockpit, where Dave and the gang are playing pilots, and cracking up about something in that “wow, these people are kind of nerdy” way. (Geeky men in a cockpit is just one of those things you don’t try to understand.) Then the passengers start arriving and the special effects folks go to town, working their magic so that Dave can play about 10 different personalities, some of them a little extreme. Let’s just say that plus-size people are not going to appreciate part of this.

We spend some time with the passengers getting all settled, and Dave does his best bit as a girl with braces who has a crush on… Dave. Happily for all, they are playing some Foo Fighters concert footage for all the actors to peruse, which is a good thing, because they’re going to be here all day so the video crew can capture all the different angles they need to make the split-screen Daves work in the video. Ain’t nobody gettin’ out of here anytime soon, so get comfortable and find something to read during the slow bits.

Okay, maybe Dave’s best bit, after all, is the fey flight attendant, because he’s having far too much fun doing the instructional “there are exits to the front, middle and back” routine. (Loved the hands-on-hips move, and the mess with the inflatable life preserver.) The plane takes off as we watch a clueless person not notice the bag of “world domination erotic sleeping powder” in the filter as he kicks off the coffee machine. One would normally wonder how you could not realize that the filter was already full, but we’ll blame it on the altitude and the free-flowing vodka at the craft services table.

Montage of the band playing on the plane monitors so we don’t forget that they have an album out. Get yours now! (And take the risk of this being the only song you like on the entire album, that eternal pitfall with music purchases. It happens, move on with your life.)

Cut to Teen-Girl Dave and her pigtails asking Dave for his autograph, which he happily provides while s/he strokes her hair and has a subtle orgasm. Teen-Girl then heads to the cockpit, where she flirts with the folks in there as well, so she might be something of a slut, despite the child-like pink ribbons she’s sporting. We watch as the flight crew schleps around the tainted coffee, which the passengers greedily suck down because there’s nothing else to do when crammed together in a giant tube.

Short bit where Flight-Attendant-Man Dave wanders into the cockpit with the love-potion coffee, and Captain Dave flirts with F.A.M Dave while the co-pilot fiddles with stick-shifts and such. It’s like soft porn on Castro Street, and everyone seems to be having a really swell time.

Back out in the plane proper, folks are getting a bit randy. (Well, the folks who drank the coffee are. The folks who didn’t are staring at the others and wondering if they’re on the right flight.) Meanwhile, Captain Dave and his Co-Tripper are a little messed up, and think it would be just keen to start rocking the plane from side to side. So all hell breaks loose, as passengers both horny and questioning are tossed across the aisles and things get spilled. It’s like Congress is in session.

Flight-Attendant Dave has a dramatic flame-out moment in the middle of the plane before he drops to the floor and throws his legs over his head. (Seriously, and I’m not even going to go there.) Real Dave and his buddies have had enough of the unexplained horniness and poor navigation, so they dash up to the cockpit to knock some heads together, where they find the crew all slumbering, courtesy of the aphrodisiac sleeping powder, and not actually flying the plane. Uh oh.

So, naturally, Dave and the gang are forced to “learn to fly” the plane, which they manage to do after only briefly glancing at a brochure they find lying nearby. They sweat and flip switches for a bit, but eventually we’re back on the ground and everybody lives to attend the Foo Fighters concert later that night.

We end with F.B.I. Dave arresting Jack and Kyle for Illicit Tampering With Heated Beverages While Wearing Ugly Jumpsuits, or some such, and they get hauled away while the original dorky pilots give them a thumbs up from the cockpit, and we get further confirmation that Dave Grohl has very interesting teeth. (Somewhere off-camera we can hear the Airplane movie producers saying “hey, this all looks really familiar…”)


Click Here to Watch the Video on YouTube.