Sky High

This was a movie that in 1990 my kids enjoyed and we saved on VHS. A fun adventure of two boys coming of age with James Whitmore Sr. teaching them how to fly. We saved it on VHS and through the years had more kids who also loved the movie. Well the VHS is worn out and the eldest son is looking for a DVD because he wants his boys to enjoy the tale. We are hoping Disney will release it from the movie vault and reissue it. The Biplane is timeless, Mr. Whitmore is cantankerous and funny. The first half is better than the second half which has less flying and more of a city setting. You can tell there are two different directors with two different styles. But you also get a sense of Mr. Whitmore Jr.'s directing style in the first half and I see it in other shows he's directed, like episodes of NCIS.

The story: Two kids living in the middle of nowhere watch the funeral of the old guy in town that no one likes. They decide to attend the auction where all his property is sold, and due to bad weather and lack of interest by anyone else, they buy his old barn and all its contents for tuppence. As they open it up and have a look inside, they find an old red biplane - and suddenly they have the chance to get away from their boring lives... After their pilot training at the hands of an old (ancient) stunt pilot, it also involves stranding in a colony of treehugging hippyfolk that send them on a quest to find a runaway girl in Vancouver, with the second half of the movie sharing a few aspects with Oliver Twist.

As kids' entertainment goes, this isn't bad. It's average. I used to like the movie a lot because I am fanatical about planes - without that hobby, I might have found it a lot more boring. Indeed, the few shots of Vancouver airport with planes of now-defunct Wardair Canada in the background endeared the movie to my heart - something someone less into aviation would not understand. So, if you take out the planes, what you're left with is a slightly surreal, not very exciting movie for kids. And it does not have one consistent storyline - the entire thing feels like 3 episodes of a series about kids in a plane stitched together, and not like one story.

Average.

This television drama was shot as a three part pilot for a series. The characters started okay but the scripts went lame and it flopped. The idea of a "Route 66" via a bi-plane episodic was clever but other than James Whitmore, the cast was weak in my opinion. It was shot in various locations in British Columbia with a working title of "Wings".