The Sound of Music

His is a heavily modified version, played on the soprano saxophone, in which the initial theme ("Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...") is repeated again and again, separated by long soloing vamps. In 2000, the American Film Institute listed Airplane! as #10 on its list of the 100 funniest American films. The jazz musician John Coltrane adopted the tune "My Favorite Things" as his signature tune. Nielsen saw a major boost to his career, and since Airplane! has specialized in playing clueless, deadpan bumblers. Bridges and Stack saw similar shifts in their public image, though to lesser degrees. The seven von Trapp children are five girls and two boys: Liesl (16 years old "going on 17"), Friedrich (14), Louisa (13), Kurt (11), Brigitta (10), Marta (6), Gretl (5). Ethel Merman has a memorable cameo as a shell-shocked fighter pilot who thinks he's Ethel Merman. Combine this with its success around the world in sales of tickets, videocassettes, laserdiscs, DVDs and its frequent airings on television, it is called "the most widely seen movie produced by a Hollywood studio" by Amazon.uk  (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005AA0L/qid=1105834994/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/026-3134903-6248437). Several actors were cast in order to spoof their established images: Stack and Bridges had played many adventurous, no-nonsense tough-guys, while Nielsen had played "more cops, doctors, and attorneys than you could shake a nightstick/stethoscope/law book at." [1] (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000558/bio) Barbara Billingsley, the archetypal suburban mother on Leave It To Beaver, has an especially funny appearance when she offers to translate for a pair of hip African American passengers whose jive talking is incomprehensible to stewardesses.

According to boxofficemojo (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm?p=.htm), the film ranks third in both all-time number of tickets sold (142,415,400) and in gross adjusted for inflation ($911,458,400) in North America (behind Gone with the Wind and Star Wars). Airplane! was a major hit: The budget was about US$3.5 Million, and the film earned over US$80 Million at the box office, and another US$40 Million in rentals. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. List of gags in Airplane!. Despite the enormous popularity of the movie, which at the time became the second-largest grossing picture of all time (behind Gone With The Wind, and has continued through the present day, noted film critic Pauline Kael blasted the film in a review in which she called the movie "The Sound Of Mucus." This review allegedly led to Kael's being fired from her position as a film critic. (A number of other films in this genre were less successful, including Loaded Weapon, The Big Bus, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, and Spy Hard.). The title song's four-line prelude ("My day in the hills has come to an end, I know..."), sung by Mary Martin in the stage play (available on CD), is reduced to an instrumental hint during the overture and dramatic zoom-in shot to Julie Andrews on the mountaintop at the start of the movie. More recent movies of this sort include Hot Shots!, The Naked Gun trilogy, the Austin Powers series, and the Scary Movie series.

"How Can Love Survive?" was reduced to an instrumental, one of several waltz numbers played at the party occurring just before intermission. Other successful movies of this type include Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and the "Road movies" of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. A couple of the songs were altered. When this type of comedy works, it is exceptional (the animated cartoons of Tex Avery were a great influence), though it can be difficult for filmmakers to achieve success when working on a movie that often denies characterization and even plot development. One example is that in the play, "My Favorite Things" is sung at the convent. Airplane! is one of the most famous and acclaimed examples of a genre of similar gag-based comedies that defy logic, reason, and the "fourth wall" to produce laughter in any way possible, with comic references to other famous 'straight' disaster films such as Airport. The order of several of the songs is markedly different between the stage play and the film. Some critics have claimed that the movie's most important achievement was in bringing to an end the Airport series of movies, which could no longer be taken seriously.

As pointed out in one of the DVD's extras, the real Maria and one of her daughters can (barely) be seen starting to cross the road at that point. Howard Jarvis, the author of California's property tax initiative Proposition 13, plays a man who patiently waits in the back of Striker's cab throughout the movie. During the extensive "Do-Re-Mi" segment, at one point Maria and the children run under an archway. Lloyd Bridges portrays the chief air traffic controller, and Robert Stack plays Hays' former commander, who is brought in to aid him in landing the airplane. Another error, noted by astute observers who know the geography, is that in the scene where the family is hiking up the mountain presumably toward safe ground, they are actually walking toward Austria. ...and don't call me Shirley has entered the language as an all-purpose, nonplussed response. This error cannot be seen in the film itself. In response to the question from a passenger "Surely you can't be serious?" Nielsen's character would respond: "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley".

In some publicity shots for the film, a noteworthy error can be seen in a market scene immediately preceding the "Do-Re-Mi" number: an orange crate is marked 'Made in Israel'; however, Israel did not exist in the 1930s. His catchphrase in the film became famous worldwide. The Ländler dance that Maria and the Captain shared was not performed the traditional way it is done in Austria. Nielsen portrays a doctor on board. In fact, the "Sound of Music" itself is virtually unknown in the country, except in backpacker's hostels in Salzburg, where it is screened daily on DVD. Striker's ex-girlfriend (Julie Hagerty) is a flight attendant. Many people believe "Edelweiss" to be the national anthem—in fact, this song is nearly unknown in Austria. When the pilots of a commercial airliner get sick, an ex-fighter pilot, Ted Striker (Robert Hays) must conquer his fear of flying and fly the plane to its destination.

The musical has created a few misconceptions about Austria. Airplane! also has elements based on films in the Airport series, specifically Airport '75, which was also based on novels written by Arthur Hailey. The elements that the film lifted from Airport '75 included the guitar playing nun (played by Maureen McGovern in Airplane! and Helen Reddy in Airport '75) and the sick little girl that the nun's guitar is played for (played by Linda Blair in Airport '75 and Jill Whelan in Airplane!). It had never been performed before anywhere in Austria. In Airplane!, it is basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In February 2005, the musical premiered at the Volksoper in Vienna. In Zero Hour!, the cameo is by Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch. This was the first stage production to incorporate the two additional songs that Rodgers had composed for the film version. As the plot escalates, so does the potency of the drug ("I guess I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.") Even the odd sports cameo remains intact.

Playing to 101% of seating capacity, the show set the highest attendance figure for a single week (October 26-31, 1981) of any British musical production in history, as chronicled by The Guinness Book of Theatre. Indeed, many of the best known lines are repeated verbatim, for example, "Can you face some unpleasant facts?" and "I guess I picked the wrong week to quit smoking," which becomes a running gag. Due to an unprecedented demand for tickets, Clark extended her initial six-month contract to thirteen months. Airplane! is very close to Zero Hour!, following it virtually scene for scene, and lifting its major characters and most of its story line. Maria von Trapp herself, present at the opening night performance, described her as "the best" Maria ever. Thus Airplane! is the fourth remake of the Arthur Hailey novel Runway Zero-Eight. Despite her misgivings that at age 51 she was too old to play the role convincingly, Clark opened to unanimous rave reviews (and the largest advance sale in the history of British theatre at that time). The story of an in-flight medical emergency, caused by food poisoning, started as the CBC TV movie Flight Into Danger, then became the 1957 Paramount Pictures movie Zero Hour!.

In 1981, at producer Ross Taylor's urging, Petula Clark signed to star in a revival of the show at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London's West End. The plot of Airplane! is a well-travelled one. Hammerstein died before the film was made, and two of the numbers added to the score were written solely by Rodgers: "I Have Confidence" and "Something Good". Although most of the cast reunited for the sequel, the two films have no writers in common. Robert Wise won an Academy Award for Directing for the film, which stars Julie Andrews as Maria and Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp. Airplane II: The Sequel, first released on December 10, 1982, attempted to tackle the science fiction film genre. The film, which was released in 1965, was named Best Picture of the Year. The film is regularly shown on television, with many devotees repeatedly rewatching the film, in the process catching other gags that they didn't notice earlier due to the sheer number of often overlapping sight, sound, and dialogue gags.

The Sound of Music, with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959, and starred Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as Captain von Trapp. In some foreign releases (including Australia), Airplane! was entitled Flying High. Ruth Leuwerik played Maria, Hans Holt was von Trapp. It is the second of a number of movies produced and directed by the trio (the first being The Kentucky Fried Movie). Two German films, Die Trapp-Familie (The Trapp Family, 1956) and a sequel, Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958), were written by Herbert Reinecker and directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner. Airplane! is an American comedy film, first released on July 2, 1980, produced by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, and starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. The von Trapps spent some years in Austria after Maria and the Captain had married - in 1927 - they did not have to flee right away - and they fled to Italy, not Switzerland.

The Captain's eldest child was a boy, not a girl, and the names of the children were changed (at least partly to avoid confusion, as the Captain's eldest daughter was also called Maria). The real Maria was sent to be nurse to one of the children, not governess to all of them. It should be noted that some details of the von Trapp story were altered for the play and the film. However, during a singing performance in a theater, although they are guarded, the whole family manages to flee and walk over the mountains to Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the Nazis take power in Austria as part of the Anschluss, and want Captain von Trapp back in service. Maria teaches the children singing. He was soon to be married to a baroness but he marries Maria instead. The children, initially hostile and mischievous, come to like her, and the woman finds herself falling in love with the captain.

In Salzburg, Austria, Maria, a woman studying to be a nun, is sent from her convent to be the governess of the seven children of a widowed naval commander, Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp. It contains many hit songs, including "Edelweiss", "My Favorite Things", "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," "Do-Re-Mi," and "The Lonely Goatherd", as well as the title song. The Sound of Music is a Broadway musical and movie based on the book The Von Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp.