Songfacts®:

• This is the title song to Snakes On A Plane, a very campy horror movie starring Samuel L. Jackson released in 2006. The plot is exactly what's described in the title.
  
  The song started out as a track called "Bring It" and was adapted for the film with lyrics that reference snakes and planes:
  
  Times are strange
  We've got a free upgrade
  For snakes on a plane
• The band Cobra Starship was formed to record this song ("snakes" :: "cobra"... "plane" :: "starship" get it?). At the time, the "band" was just Gabe Saporta, whose group Midtown had recently broken up. Saporta teamed up with the producers Sam Hollander and Dave Katz, and together they wrote the song for the film. Since Saporta had no bandmates, they brought in guests to perform on the track:
  
  Travie McCoy does the rap and gets a writing credit on the song. His band Gym Class Heroes had worked with Hollander and Katz, who did production work on their 2006 album As Cruel As School Children.
  
  The Swedish singer Maja Ivarsson of the group The Sounds is the female vocalist.
  
  William Beckett of the band The Academy Is... handles the male vocal along with Saporta.
  
  All of them appear in the video, which shows them sneaking instrument cases full of snakes through airport security while Ivarsson distracts the agent. There are no scenes from the movie in the video, but its star, Samuel L. Jackson, shows up.
• The video was directed by Lex Halaby and features a cameo by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, who is the guy at the payphone. Wentz was in the process of signing Cobra Starship to his Decaydance label.
• Unlike the movie, there is some meaning and metaphor in this song, with the "snakes" representing venomous music industry executives:
  
  Tonight the sky's alive
  With lizards serpentine
  Lounging in their suits and ties
  Watch the whore's parade
  For the price of fame
• The song first appeared on the Snakes On A Plane soundtrack, then a few months later in 2006 on the first Cobra Starship album, While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets. The group went on to have hits with "Good Girls Go Bad" in 2009 and "You Make Me Feel..." in 2011. They called it quits in 2015.
• The movie's most famous line is Samuel L. Jackson's "That's it! I have had it with these motherf--king snakes on this motherf--king plane!" This line is incorporated into the intro of the song.
• This was not only the debut of Cobra Starship, but the first big song produced by Sam Hollander and Dave Katz, who started going by S*A*M and Sluggo. Together, they wrote and produced hits for Boys Like Girls ("The Great Escape"), We The Kings ("Check Yes Juliet") and Train ("Save Me San Francisco").
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Hollander, he explained how they got the gig writing the Snakes On A Plane theme song. "There'd been all this internet hype about how ludicrous this concept was," he said. "One of my best friends in the world, and the drummer in my first band, is Jason Linn, who ran music at New Line Cinema. So I called Jason and ask him about the film and he give me a little intel on it. I asked if there was an opening for us to write a song, and he said, 'Yeah, absolutely.' So that's when Cobra Starship was born."