Controversial Meet The Parents plane scene was banned from being shown on flights
Topics: Film and TV, Robert De Niro
Ben Thompson
Featured Image Credit: Universal
Topics: Film and TV, Robert De Niro
The antics of Greg 'Gaylord' Focker from Meet The Parents have entertained thousands, but one scene has been banned from being shown on flights.
The scene comes towards the end of the film, when Greg, played by Ben Stiller, is returning home from visiting his girlfriend's parents.
Needless to say, the visit hasn't gone well - he lost the family cat, accidentally set the garden on fire and destroyed a vase containing a deceased relative's ashes.
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So understandably, he's a bit crabby.
As he's trying to fit his suitcase into the overhead compartment on his flight home, an attendant approaches him and tells him it's too big to be carry-on luggage.
An agitated Greg insists it can fit, leading to a row with the air hostess.
When the stewardess tries to remove the suitcase herself, Greg yells: "Get your grubby little paws off of my bag! It's not like I have a bomb in here! It's not like I want to blow up the plane!"
This remark doesn't go down well with the other passengers, who are understandably alarmed.
Unsurprisingly, Greg ends up being detained by airport security, where he is later rescued by future father-in-law Jack Byrnes, played by Robert De Niro.
Although the scene has no doubt entertained many viewers as it shows Greg at his lowest point in the film's story, it has been removed from versions of the film shown on flights.
The film was released just under a year before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and American audiences likely didn't find the premise quite as amusing in the aftermath of the devastating attacks.
Especially if they were watching the film on a flight themselves.
It appears that one passenger on a Florida flight even attempted to imitate the scene.
A 2005 flight was diverted after an air steward found a crumpled napkin that read 'Bomb, bomb, bomb...meet the parents'.
It's unlikely that anybody saw the 'funny' side to the note, as the flight had to return to the airport, where a bomb squad met the plane.
In addition to that, each one of the 176 passengers were questioned by the FBI.
That's one way to ruin a holiday, I suppose.
Besides that incident, Meet the Parents is a widely popular movie.
Upon release in 2000, it grossed over $300 million at the box office and spawned two sequels - Meet the Fockers in 2004 and Little Fockers in 2010, which saw Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand join the cast.