Meet the Parents (film series)

Before the remake in 2000, Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke cowrote the original independent film, Meet the Parents, in 1992. Glienna also directed the film, wrote two original songs, and starred as protagonist Greg: a Chicago advertising agent who travels with his fiancée Pam Burns to meet her parents, Irv and Kay, for a weekend but sets off a series of accidents and causes the family to fall apart. Throughout the visit, Pam's sister Fay, an aspiring singer, insists that Greg listen to her Star Search audition since she mistakenly thinks he has ties with Ed McMahon, who was cast as a spokesperson in a commercial Greg wrote. In the end, Greg alone survives: after Fay hangs herself, having accused Greg of wanting to cheat on Pam with her and framed him for her suicide, both out of revenge for his reluctantly criticizing her singing, Irv attempts to shoot him but accidentally kills Kay and Pam before dying of a heart attack.

Several years after the film's release, Universal Pictures purchased the rights to the independent film. After hiring screenwriter Jim Herzfeld to expand the script, a new version of Meet the Parents was filmed and released in October 2000.^[1]

The success of Meet the Parents was initially responsible for a 2002 NBC reality television show titled Meet My Folks in which a young woman's love interest, vying for her family's approval, is interrogated by the woman's overprotective father with the help of a lie detector machine.^[10][11] In September 2002, NBC also aired a situation comedy titled In-Laws. During the development of the sitcom, NBC called it "a Meet the Parents project" which prompted an investigation by Universal into whether NBC was infringing on Universal's copyright.^[12] Universal did not pursue any action against NBC, but neither show lasted more than one season. NBC and Universal merged on a corporate level two years later in 2004.

On July 18, 2005, a regularly scheduled American Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to San Juan, Puerto Rico, had to be diverted back to Fort Lauderdale shortly after take-off due to a bomb threat. The pilot turned the airplane around approximately 40 minutes into the flight after a flight attendant found a crumpled napkin that read "Bomb, bomb, bomb ... meet the parents", a clear reference to the scene in which Ben Stiller's character repeatedly shouts the word "bomb" while being detained by airport security.^[13][14] The airplane was met by a bomb squad of the local sheriff's office as well as the FBI whose agents questioned the plane's 176 passengers about the note.

Note: A gray cell indicates character did not appear in that film.