Cheaper by the Dozen (the real one, not that Steve Martin abortion) and The Late Show are coming out on DVD in the spring!

Looks like someone is doing a collection of the old Jack Benny and Burns and Allen shows. I saw one for Make Room for Daddy as well.

Okay, guys, I saw The Glenn Miller Story. If you're doing Jimmy Stewart, where's Strategic Air Command for James?

Speaking of airplane movies, there's something called "The Airport Terminal Pack" coming out in February: all the Airport movies. Can't find anywhere that tells me whether these are the widescreen versions or not. If they are, might be worth getting: Airport is great and well worth watching anytime, if nothing else just for Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, and George Kennedy. I recall Airport '77 as not bad, although my most vivid memory of the film was actually the audience we saw it with: at one point with the plane trapped underwater, one character who has been bitching and whining and thoroughly unlikeable throughout gets claustrophobic and tries to open an emergency door--pilot Jack Lemmon decks him/her and the entire audience cheered and clapped. Airport 1975 and The Concorde are worth watching simply for camp value--there are so many Airport 1975 jokes in Airplane! that it's fun just to see their origin.

Speaking of Airplane! and Airport 1975, Dana Andrews plays the pilot of the small plane in the latter movie, but in an old black-and-white film called Zero Hour, he's aboard the aircraft that is in danger due to food poisoning among the flight crew. Airplane! is pretty much a send-up of Zero Hour with Airport 1975 elements added. (Andrews' character is even named Ted Stryker.)

The real kicker to this is that Zero Hour originally saw life as a teleplay for one of the live television dramas of the 1950s, Playhouse 90 possibly, as "Flight into Danger." "Flight into Danger" was then lengthened into a novel by its original author...Arthur Hailey, who later wrote Airport!

(For those of you who are curious, Hailey had nothing to do with the three sequel movies--a fact painfully obvious with #2 and #4. He learned about Airport 1975 from a news release and only then discovered his literary agent hadn't retained the rights to any sequels.

All this is from Sheila Hailey's absolutely delightful I Married a Best Seller, which is a highly recommended used book find.)

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