Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition)

Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition)
by Zucker, David, Zucker, Jerry

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DVD details

Actor: Barbara Billingsley, Craig Berenson, Jonathan Banks, Julie Hagerty, Robert Hays
Director: Zucker, David, Zucker, Jerry
Brand: NIELSEN/HAYS/STACK/BRIDGES
Primary Contributor: Robert Hays
Primary Contributor: Julie Hagerty
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 87 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-13
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Paramount

DVD Reviews of Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition)

DVD Review: The funniest movie ever made!
Summary: 5 Stars

I think this was the funniest movie ever made. In this time of economic problems, people going through stress due to job loss and just the drudgery of everyday life, this movie does the job of distressing you. Everyone knows a line or two from the movie. It is one you can watch over and over again and still laugh. Get a group of people together and have a party. They all know what is coming in the next scene and still laugh hysterically.

DVD Review: The "One Scene"
Summary: 5 Stars

This movie was hilarious from start to finish. Scary Movie and the like were born from this movie right here. I never saw it in the theater. I, like many of you I'm sure, probably saw this in the very early 80's on HBO while it was being played over and over. If you were 8 or nine (and a male) like me when this was on you all know the "One Scene" that we sat eagerly by the TV waiting for. Now it seems trivial but man, that was the best movie ever then, and it is one of the funniest ever now. A must own.

DVD Review: A Classic Comedy That Is Still Funny
Summary: 5 Stars

Written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker; Airplane! is widely considered one of the greatest comedies of all time. Unlike many comedies that are considered "classics," this is a film that is still laugh-out-loud funny and brilliant.

This film is basically 84 minutes worth of jokes manipulated into forming a coherent plot, but here's a quick synopsis: the movie opens at an airport (obviously) and we quickly meet Elaine (Julie Hagerty), a flight attendant on her way to work. Ted (Robert Hays) has found out Elaine has left him and boards the plane to convince her to come back to him. Meanwhile, Captain Oveur (Peter Graves) meets his new co-pilot Roger Murdock played by Kareem Abdul-Jaabar, who is actually Kareem Abdul-Jaabar! Due to problems with the airline food (namely the fish), Captain Oveur and his co-pilots are rendered unconscious, leaving the plane to be manned by Elaine and Otto, the inflatable automatic pilot. The day is saved by Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) who gets the idea to commission Ted, a pilot in the war, to take over.

What I've just described is hardly the plot, but that gives you a general idea. You'll be laughing hysterically within the first ten minutes and there are so many great comedy bits in the film...From the opening shot (a spoof of Jaws), to the suicide of every passenger who listens to Ted, to Lloyd Bridges' "I knew I picked the wrong day to..." bits. It's all great.

Of course, this is a film with some of the most legendary comedy dialogue of all time. And I stress the word "comedy." Truer words were, almost, never spoken.

The jokes never stop. Every opportunity for a joke is taken, no matter what the subject is; African Americans' "jive" talk, young girls who need heart transplants, vomiting, bestiality, and pedophilia. Literally nothing is off limits. Every single thing is a joke. There's not a sincere moment in the entire movie. It works only because about 90% of the time, the jokes work.

Viewers of Airplane! can be separated into two groups, those who find it brilliant and those who find it stupid. Whichever group you fall into, I doubt you'll be able to keep from smiling through most of it.

GRADE: A-

DVD Review: Hilarious!
Summary: 5 Stars

'Airplane' is perhaps my favorite comedy, right up there with 'Caddy Shack' and 'Sordid Lives'!

DVD Review: The beginning of it all...
Summary: 5 Stars

If you were to point to one film that probably had the biggest impact in actually launching a genre, it might be `Airplane!', a hilarious spoof on the disaster flicks of the 70's that paved the way for the cinematic parody. Thanks to the onslaught of gags and familiar jokes (granted, not all of them hit, but with this many thrown at you at rapid fire it doesn't really matter) this film rightfully become considered a classic, and will go down in history as one of the funniest films of the 80's.

I much prefer this to `Caddy Shack'.

The film tells of Ted Striker, a former pilot who no longer can work up the nerve to enter the cockpit due to an accident years prior. He gets on a plane where his girlfriend Elaine is working as a stewardess in order to try and repair their fraying relationship. While in flight the crew gets sick from food poisoning and so it is up to Elaine and Ted to save the day.

With an array of off color jokes, outlandish performances and a steady string of perfectly parodied blockbusters, `Airplane!' rarely strikes a sour note. Julie Hagerty and Robert Hays are hilarious as the two leads, but it's the supporting cast that really stands out, all of them making the most of their limited screen time and delivering memorable caricatures. Leslie Nielsen is probably the most recognizable face in the group, and he works wonderfully, but it was Peter Graves who really made me double over in laughter. It takes talent to makes something as unfunny as propositioning a young boy funny, but he makes it work.

At times `Airplane!' goes over the top, but that is half the fun here. The script is all over the place but it manages to have a handle on itself, making for a funny and crazy yet surprisingly cohesive film. It's nice, because many parodies today completely throw any real script out the window and just deliver a series of unrelated spoofs. At least `Airplane!' holds to a plot outline, and even if it goes off the page a bit it has the smarts to wheel it back in.

What's great about a film like `Airplane!' is that, even though it's been almost thirty years since its release it is still very, very funny today. Sure, some of the jokes are out of date, and if you haven't seen some of the movies being spoofed the gags may go over your head in places, but if you are getting the complete experience then it is an experience you will not forget. I, for one, have never even seen `Airport', the basis for this spoof, and yet I was in stitches throughout the films entirety.

With memorably hilarious scenes like the acoustic sing along (I was crying, it was so funny) and that risqu? blow up doll scene, `Airplane!' is a laugh riot and a sure fire crowd pleaser to any fan of genre it helped launch. It's possibly the best of its breed.

Description of Airplane! (Don't Call Me Shirley! Edition)

Parody of airplane disaster films in which a former pilot gets his nerve back when he has to land a plane on which everyone has food poisoning.
No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: NIELSEN/HAYS/STACK/BRIDGES
Title: AIRPLANE
Street Release Date: 12/13/2005
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY VIDEO

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 ? 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

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