Travolta and Cage fly high this week, as their filmic timelines finally align with two 1989-’90 films in which they play pilots! After a few dour years, Travolta struck gold with Look Who’s Talking, the Amy Heckerling-directed tale of a young single mom in New York (a pre-insanity Kirstie Alley) looking for a good dad for her baby son Mikey (voiced by an all-too-lewd Bruce Willis), and possibly finding it in Travolta’s happy-go-lucky cab driver/aspiring flight instructor.

Then, of course, there’s Fire Birds, the 1990 action vehicle/Top Gun riff in which Nicolas Cage plays a hotshot Army helicopter pilot (a maverick, if you will) training to fly the Apache helicopter so the Army can roll into Colombia to take down the (German?) drug cartel leader who killed Cage’s partner. It even opens with a George W. Bush quote, which might be the free space on everyone’s “American jingoism” bingo card. At least Tommy Lee Jones is having fun, though!

Podcasting/video game creature creation magnate Justin McElroy (My Brother, My Brother, and Me, Monster Factory) climbs into the cockpit to help us break down that one time Travolta launched a hugely successful family-film franchise at the same time Cage engaged in brain-dead propaganda for the War on Drugs.

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