Airplane! - Special Collector's Edition [DVD]

The film should need no reintroduction, so this is more about the new extras on the 'Don't Call Me Shirley' edition. The audio commentary and trailer from the previous issue are retained, but because of the absence of any behind the scenes footage, rather than a new documentary there's a `long haul' option to view the film with cast and crew interviews. And it's a long haul indeed - barely 30 seconds, and sometimes less, seem to pass before you're taken to another interview, not always that relevant to what's going on onscreen. Indeed, on one occasion you're just taken to the directors clearing their throats. There are only three brief deleted scenes, but there's a fairly comprehensive number of surviving cast and crew, from the directors (who proffer such words of wisdom as "These days it's so easy to get a nun on a surfboard."), Leslie Nielson, Robert Hays, Peter Graves and various supporting players to the now grown-up little Joey (as in "Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?") and the kid whose face appears on one memorable faked newspaper headline (the producer's grandson). Only Julie Haggerty seems conspicuous by her absence. The only annoyance is that it's not possible to access the interviews separately without watching the whole film. Among the highlights is a brief shot-by-shot comparison with Zero Hour!, the b-movie that inspired the film: not only is it every bit as inane as legend has it, including laughable dialogue reprised verbatim in Airplane!, but the directors even went to enormous efforts to match parts of it shot-for-shot!

There is one tantalizing unanswered question - given John Travolta's enthusiasm for the film when it was in production, what did he make of Robert Stack beating up the Scientologists, Moonies and other cults soliciting donations in possibly the film's most memorable moment?

If you love Leslie Nielsen then you have to own this DVD of the film that kick started his comedy career. Airplane is the film that set the trend of Comedy films like the Naked Gun Series and Scary Movie series and others too many to mention.

This DVD presents the Film well my only problem is the extras I would have liked a full doc video about the film with interviews with cast and crew you do get that in a in-film feature but it is a pain to watch the film and what seems like every 30secs a doc video it would have been better to have presented those interviews in a full video doc but its still a great buy for comedy lovers.

Airplane! is a 1980 comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty and features starts in this film along side Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lorna Patterson.
Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster film genre, and is essentially a remake of the 1957 Paramount film Zero Hour!. In Australia and New Zealand it is known as Flying High.

Airplane! was a huge success, making more than $83 million in the North of America alone, the budget for the film was only three and a half million dollars.

The creators of Airplane received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted which isn't bad considering the movie had such a small budget.