Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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141 of 144 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shirley would be pleased, December 10, 2005
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.
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39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
There's never been any parking in the white zone..., December 7, 2003
"Surely you can't be serious"
"I am, and don't call me Shirley!"
Classic lines from a classic spoof-comedy. It doesn't get much funnier than this.
Ok so we all agree it's a classic spoof-comedy - but what about the DVD? I can't complain for lack of special features - the movie is what's important. And about the movie, I have noticed that there are parts missing (yes, scenes were cut out) of the DVD that were in the original movie!
One such scene is when the two children are play-acting as adults drinking coffee, when he asks her how she takes her coffee, she replies, "black, like my men". This isn't in the DVD but was in the original TV version. There are a few more such incidents (One with the hysterical girl who had "never really been with a man before" - this really makes me mad - I wonder if they cut these parts out for politial correctness or ??
It makes no sense to me. Watch your old version and then the DVD - you'll notice that scenes are cut out and that's just not right. So while the ORIGINAL movie gets ***** five stars, the DVD with it's missing scenes gets only *** and a big boo! from me.
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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic satire, November 9, 2004
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.
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