Airplane: The "Don't Call Me Shirley" Edition
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By Cyril Pearl -- Video Business, 11/28/2005
"Believe me, there is nothing actually funny on the cutting room floor," says Airplane! co-director/screenwriter Jerry Zucker in the wildly fun new DVD of the wildly funny 1980 comedy. Wrong!!! The handful of scenes are worth a giggle—and certainly no less corny than the joke-a-minute material that fills the feature. (One exceptional gag involves a man yelling, "Hi, Jack!," to a friend in a police-filled airport.) In an effort to consolidate the disc's healthy helping of bonus materials, the Airplane! disc uses branching technology in the best way we've ever seen. Instead of limiting the branches to straight-ahead interviews or mini-featurettes, the branching leads viewers to an assortment of both, as well as an hour-plus of deleted scenes, bloopers, alternate takes and comments from a 747-load of cast and crew members. In a sense, it eliminates the need for a specific featurette as it succinctly communicates everything via the branch-offs. Leading the talents who pop up over the course of the branching movie are co-directors David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who appear to be having a good old time when they're not getting serious and offering how they directed the performers to deliver their dialog in the deadpan fashion the parody required. Also on hand are actors Robert Hays, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, Lorna Patterson, Nicholas Pryor and even Al White and Norman Gibbs, the two "Jive Dudes," who explain how they created their often-imitated, English-subtitled jive talk. (In a hysterical turnaround, their interviews are spoken in perfect English and subtitled in jive!) Between the branching bonuses and the filmmakers' easy-going commentary, a whole slew of fun factoids are revealed, including that the co-pilot role that ultimately went to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was initially written for baseball great Pete Rose, and David Letterman screentested for the Robert Hays role. Even the film's frequently used breakaway glass gets its due—apparently, it was the latest design in tempered glassware and was composed in such a way that it would safely shatter into a zillion pieces.
