Get these snakes off my plane!!

Buckle your seat belts ladies and gentlemen. There are snakes on this plane.\nYet this is no ordinary snake-filled plane -- this is an airplane flying from Hawaii to Los Angeles with a ton of poisonous snakes, there to kill a mob witness and everyone on board. Unless federal agent Samuel L. Jackson, the owner of "motherfucking" movie lines, has his way.\nThis upcoming movie, "Snakes on a Plane," hits theaters across the country August 18, with the first official teaser trailer premiering before X-Men 3: The Last Stand in May. Like many summer blockbusters, the anticipation leading up to its release is high, yet this film has a particularly unique following. \nIt's rare that a movie like SoaP received such extensive parody before its release, and even before its official publicity started. Cult films like "Evil Dead," "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Reefer Madness" didn't have massive amounts of followers until after their release, often years later. The "Star Wars" movies, particularly the original trilogy, and "Star Trek," in all its incarnations, have a dedicated fan culture that developed once audiences filled the theaters on and after opening day.\n"SoaP" is already immensely popular. Typing "snakes on a plane" into a Facebook search finds 95 groups, most of them dedicated to the movie. Typing that same phrase into Google gives even longer lists of humorous fan media. Fan culture has been flooding the Web since March. For the past year, the buzz surrounding the self-descriptive title gave the initial push, from interviews with Jackson to blogs about movie rumors.\nIn August of last year Collider.com published a segment of an interview with Jackson on a publicity tour for "The Man." \nWhen the interviewer asked about the upcoming project "Pacific Air Flight 121," Jackson cut him off and said, "Snakes on a Plane, man! We're totally changing that back. That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title."\nIt appears the rest was history.\nJosh Friedman, a screenwriter, read the Collider piece and discussed it in his blog "I find your lack of faith disturbing." He titled the entry "Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane." Friedman had a brush with the script months before, when the studio producing the movie asked him to work on it. He insisted on keeping the title of "Snakes on a Plane" and purportedly clashed with the executives, losing the chance to work on the movie, according to his entry.\nSophomore J. Alex Boyd, creator of the Facebook group Snakes on a Plane! believes the movie's title is the main reason it has become so popular. Just as Jackson loved the movie when he heard the title, apparently so do fans.\n"The reason snakes on a plane is so very popular is, quite frankly, that (it) is ridiculous," Boyd said. "A lot of people are very fed up with silly action movies with unbelievable plots and excessive violence, that we were shocked, almost relieved, to see a movie that admitted to all of that simply through its title."\nFriedman's blog supposedly sparked a larger interest in the movie's premise and lead actor, as well. A few months later, according to the posted dates on YouTube.com and GoogleVideo, spoofs of "SoaP" began appearing all over the Web.\nPosters, movies, t-shirts, songs and even a board game have developed independent of New Line Cinema studios, the production company for "SoaP."\nThe board game, Cobras in the Cockpit, created by Secret Doors Game Studio LLC, claims its roots in a "fictional movie." Players are the snakes, not the FBI agent played by Jackson in the movie, and attempt to cause mass chaos on the aircraft.\nA popular poster, created by Something Awful LLC, features Jackson from a previous film, a plane with "SoaP" crudely written over its body and a snake drawn in an "s" shape for the title of the movie.\n"The glory of Snakes on a Plane is basking in the insanity of it," Boyd said.\nThe video spoofs appear to be the most popular medium for fans to express their excitement and creativity with regards to "SoaP"and create their own hype.\nBob Rehak, a doctoral candidate in Communication & Culture, said he thinks it's ironic that so many movies disappoint audiences when studios hype them up.\n"The hype surrounding 'Snakes on a Plane' is not quite the same as that around, say, 'Superman Returns'," he said. "I suspect that with "Snakes," we're enthusiastic, but also 'performing' enthusiasm, something like the scripted audience rituals around 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' in the 1970s."\nAs with most of the visual fan media, many of these fan films use clips and stills of Jackson from his previous popular roles. A favorite is Jules from Pulp Fiction, his infamous Quentin Tarantino role.\n"Jackson has become a particularly beloved icon in pop culture, largely due to Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction'," Rehak said. "The role of Jules cemented Jackson in the public eye as an emblem of ass-kicking cool."\nJackson's liberal use of "fucking" and "motherfucking" as adjectives in movies like "Pulp Fiction" led anticipating fans to use his popular lines from other movies in their spoofs. \nNotable references to previous Jackson movies abound in most fan films, including "Snakes on a Plane: Rough Cut," one that is close to six minutes long. The video features a cardboard cutout of Mace Windu, Jackson's character in the "Star Wars" prequels, armed with a light saber and a few lines of dramatic dialogue from Jules in "Pulp Fiction." \nThese repeated uses of Jackson's famous "motherfucking" lines and Friedman's entry title of "Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane," prompted New Line Cinema to see the light at the end of the ratings tunnel. They regrouped to shoot new scenes last March, bumping the rating from PG-13 to R because of language and gore to the delight of fans everywhere. Now that New Line has released official trailers and a music video of the title song by Cobra Starship from the soundtrack, fans are delighted at the promise of a line such as, "That's it! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"\nJackson's cult status with his foul language and attitude has prevailed.\nOther fan films, many serving as fake trailers to the movie, feature pictures of Jackson spliced with pictures of snakes and with a background of techno or original score music. Creators appear to have had a lot of fun imagining outcomes for the movie, as well. The Web site McSweeney's Internet Tendency (www.mcsweenys.net) dedicated an entry to film endings, including Jackson crashing the plane into a nitroglycerin plant and saving the plane but revealing that he is made of snakes, too.\nOne popular fan film combines another Web joke, "All your base are belong to us," from the 1989 translated Japanese video game Zero Wing, with the movie title to form "All your snakes are belong to us." Others have taken the premise one step further and added their own twists, such as "Snakes in a Dorm," "Badgers in an Elevator," "Chimps on a Blimp," and "Pirates in a Wood."\nIn addition to all the fan culture for the film, the phrase "snakes on a plane" has taken on its own life. The Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com) lists 23 entries for the phrase, most defining it as "oh, well," or "whaddya gonna do?" They list examples such as:\n"Guy 1: (irate) Dude, you just ran into the back of my SUV! Guy 2: (calm) Snakes on a plane, man. Snakes on a plane."\nDespite all the humorous fan-led publicity and hype surrounding "Snakes on a Plane," the studio has not threatened civil suits or ignored any of it in favor of its own promotions. Instead, the fan culture has been the movie's best publicity, even at New Line's own admission. A section of the movie's official site (www.snakesonaplane.com) is dedicated to fan sites and the movie has a MySpace page.\n"We are delighted that fans have taken an early interest," said New Line Cinema in a CNN interview. "We plan to build on the growing buzz in the next few months."\nNew Line has licensed the film to DC Comics and a novel of it will be released, as well. A book titled, "Snakes on a Plane: The Guide to the Internet Ssssssensation" will detail the fan culture.\nAlthough the movie is admittedly ridiculous in premise, its acceptance seems to be what draws in its fans. While the latest horror film about stranded spelunking teenager scientists at the mercy of a mutated murderous creature may take itself seriously and fail at the box office, "Snakes on a Plane" opens its arms to ridicule and jokes, to much anticipated success.\nWhile both Boyd and Rehak are excited about the release of "Snakes on a Plane," both realize this is a rare event. Rehak noted that fan involvement in media doesn't always work as fans clash with the creators.\n"Snakes on a plane is, sadly, a once in a lifetime thing, and we won't be able to see anything along the same lines and enjoy it nearly as much," said Boyd. "It'll seem forced"