Product Details

• Actors: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lloyd Bridges
• Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
• Writers: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, Arthur Hailey, Hall Bartlett
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Paramount
• VHS Release Date: July 22, 1997
• Run Time: 88 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (311 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6300213986
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,786 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The quintessential movie spoof that spawned an entire genre of parody films, the original Airplane! still holds up as one of the brightest comedic gems of the '80s, not to mention of cinema itself (it ranked in the top 5 of Entertainment Weekly's list of the 100 funniest movies ever made). The humor may be low and obvious at times, but the jokes keep coming at a rapid-fire clip and its targets--primarily the lesser lights of '70s cinema, from disco films to star-studded disaster epics--are more than worthy for send-up. If you've seen even one of the overblown Airport movies then you know the plot: the crew of a filled-to-capacity jetliner is wiped out and it's up to a plucky stewardess and a shell-shocked fighter pilot to land the plane. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are the heroes who have a history that includes a meet-cute à la Saturday Night Fever, a surf scene right out of From Here to Eternity, a Peace Corps trip to Africa to teach the natives the benefits of Tupperware and basketball, a war-ravaged recovery room with a G.I. who thinks he's Ethel Merman (a hilarious cameo)--and those are just the flashbacks! The jokes gleefully skirt the boundaries of bad taste (pilot Peter Graves to a juvenile cockpit visitor: "Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), with the high (low?) point being Hagerty's intimate involvement with the blow-up automatic pilot doll, but they'll have you rolling on the floor. The film launched the careers of collaborators Jim Abrahams (Big Business), David Zucker (Ruthless People), and Jerry Zucker (Ghost), as well as revitalized such B-movie actors as Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Leslie Nielsen, who built a second career on films like this. A vital part of any video collection. --Mark Englehart

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

174 of 179 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shirley would be pleased, December 10, 2005

By 

WTDK "If at first the idea is not absurd, the... (My Little Blue Window, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition) (DVD)

A clever, funny parody of disaster movies (bad melodramas such as "Zero Hour" and "The High and The Mighty" along with "Airport" were the prime targets here), "Airplane! The `Don't Call Me Shirley' Edition" manages to combine silliness, puns and with topical humor in a style that recalls something out of an alternate off-kilter universe. Filled with melodramatic, over-the-top music, deliberately bad acting and every cliché about plane disasters you can imagine, "Airplane!" aims wildly and accurately most of the time taking the wind out of the sails of bad (and some good ones, too such as "Jaws")movies everywhere. Evidently the writing/directing team of Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams (who wrote "Kentucky Friend Movie" for director John Landis and later went on to crate "The Naked Gun" films) caught "Zero Hour" on TV and realized that this overripe melodrama was just right to be plucked and served up as comedy (something it verged on anyway).

Robert Hays plays Ted Striker(the name of Dana Andrews' character in "Zero Hour!") a former fighter pilot who is now afraid to pilot planes since a disastrous mission years before. Striker books a seat on the flight of his girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty) in hopes of working out their relationship. When the crew and passengers are brought down by food poisoning Ted has to overcome his fears to pilot the plane to safety.

While the film looks very good (and better than its previous edition), I was a bit disappointed by the amount of dirt and debris. I thought that a deluxe edition like this would have a nearly pristine print and that Paramount would have the film digitally cleaned up. Overall the film looks good but could have been tweaked more for this special edition. The soundtrack sounds pretty good overall and is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 with dialogue clear and little distortion.

The extras are where this edition truly shines. "Airplane! The `Don't Call Me Shirley Edition" doesn't have any of the conventional special features you'd expect. There's no "making-of" documentary or featurettes on the film per se. The "Long Haul Version" allow you to watch the film with frequent detours into comments by the actors (Hays is present but Julie Hagerty curiously isn't), writers/directors and other production crew. We also get deleted scenes in the "Long Haul" section that are quite amusing in many instances as well. Included in the "Long Haul" version are clips from the movie that inspired the Zuckers/Abrahams "Zero Hour". We also get the theatrical trailer and a clever menu that presents some of the classic scenes from the film as if you're watching an animated version of those horrible safety/disaster cards they place on airplanes drawn in the same style. This is like watching the movie, deleted scenes and a documentary at the same time. It's a great conceit and works pretty well here. There is also a subtitle track that features trivia about the movie and points out visual mistakes, etc. throughout the movie.

There's a good commentary track featuring the directors sharing stories about the production of the movie. This sounds like the commentary track from the previous edition. The commentary track provides a lot of amusing stories, trivia and background about the movie. Many of the comments are also echoed in the extended branching edition of the movie so listening to the commentary track really can't compare to watching the seamlessly branching edition.

A classic comedy that still works amazingly well, this special edition of "Airplane!" is well worth it for the fans of the movie. Although the image quality could have been cleaned up a little bit more for this presentation, it's a pretty minor issue really as the "special features" make this edition worthwhile for fans of this classic bit of madness.

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic satire, November 9, 2004

By 

J. N. Mohlman (Barrington, RI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Airplane! (DVD)

Anyone who has ever seen one of a host of abysmal 1970's disaster flicks could have predicted that they were ripe for a satire, but I doubt anyone could have predicted that "Airplane" would have set the gold standard for the spoof. In addition, since it appears on TV so often, seeing it on DVD is almost a new experience because all of the scenes that were cut for content seem like new jokes.

I can't imagine anyone is unfamiliar with the plot (such as it is), but by way of a brief summary, a passenger jet is in trouble when the entire flight crew, and many of the passengers, fall ill from the in flight meal. It's up to Ted Striker to bring down the plane safely; but there's just one problem, he hasn't been able to fly since his last abortive raid during "the war". Oh, and his estranged girlfriend is one of the stewardesses. However, where a disaster film would turn this into an overwrought melodrama, absolutely nothing, and I do mean nothing, is taken seriously in "Airplane".

In fact, it is almost remarkable how much is packed into this film. Literally every scene contains a joke or a sight gag or a double entendre. There's so much going on that in spite of dozens of viewings, I still find something new more often than not. Eve the sound effects are a gag, as all of the exterior shots of the plane (which is a model that is so fake it's hilarious) feature the sound of a prop plane even though it is obviously a jet.

The DVD doesn't have much to recommend it other than the film, but that's to be expected from an older, relatively low budget movie; and those who have seen it would agree, there can't have been much left on the cutting room floor to make up extra features. The image and sound are fine, if not spectacular, but then neither needs to be. However, having the film in widescreen is nice because some of the wide angle shots now contain people that weren't visible in the fullscreen version familiar to TV viewers.

In the end, "Airplane" may very well be the king of movie satires. From start to finish it is a non-stop joke reel, and the amazing thing is that they are all still funny years after the first viewing. Fans of the movie will find this DVD to be adequate, as the transfer and sound are fine, but don't count on any new material or amazing extras. However, as I said before, I don't think this is a movie that needs a lot of extras, and the film alone is well worth the very reasonable price.

Jake Mohlman.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Plane Wreck That Is The Shirley Edition!, December 17, 2005

By 

2littlemoney "somuch2buy" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition) (DVD)

Like many fans of this movie, I'd waited for this bells & whistles edition then quickly snapped it up on the first day of rerelease. Well....though it's nice to see this film again, it did come with it's lil' bit o' surprises.

The Print: Most rereleases that I've seen tend to have a newer transfer...at least one that outshines the previous and doesn't make us feel we're watching an 'OK' print. This one here has a liveable, but still noticeable amount of scratches and mystery objects that appear in the frame. I was expecting a bit better considering this is the day and age of restoration. Here, they didn't seem to do much of, if anything to the print, so we're left with one that is slightly better than a good TV quality picture. Hardly a 'special edition' copy of this film.

Features: I noticed immediately when I played the film alone, that it stopped or sputtered in the framerate at times. I'd stopped counting at about five, but still managed to finish the movie fine despite these annoyances. Well, I come to find out, as others have pointed out, the ballyhoo'd special features are chopped up and mixed into the movie (you enact this in the setup menu). Well, after looking at where these special features popped up when enacted, then going back to watching the same scene with them off....bingo....the sputtering I was seeing was exactly where these parts would normally come in. My point being....BEWARE......on some players this will cause a jittery film experiance at times if your just trying to watch it straight thru. My Apex & Koss Players refuse to play the film without these jittery spots, but my Playstation 2's both play the film normally. So just be informed, and keep this in yer back pocket. I'd took my first copy back for an exchange thinking it was defective, then got the replacement and it did the same. This is my first film of hundreds that I can only play on the PS2...lol....and the film.... what can I say that hasn't been said....unfortunately packed into a good intentioned, but rather lamely executed DVD Release. Was this an intern's project? Where's the menu for the special features to see them seperately instead of thru that grating pause so the disc can switch layers or dresses or whatever it does. Gaaaah!

But yea....AIRPLANE: 5 stars.....SHIRLEY PRESENTATION: 3