Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. And this is short stuff about in flight movies, all the great stuff that you can watch when you fly with your favorite airline.
Yeah, and this is something that if you've been flying for a number of years, has changed quite a bit. I do remember the old days where I didn't fly a lot growing up at all, like I think if one time before I went to college, and then not even a lot after that because I was always broke.
But I did go on a couple of flights back in the day where they had the one movie being shown for the entire plane, and there were these big, huge, like Volkswagen Beetle size monitors that drop down from the ceiling like every ten rows right in the middle, and maybe thirty percent of the flight could get a good angle on that screen.
Yeah, and if you were lucky, you were close to that one big screen verse that was like broadcast or shown on like the wall. Oh yeah, yeah, in the middle rows.
Uh huh.
Yeah. That was how we used to watch movies. Everyone watched the same movie at the same time. You plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics if I remember correct. Yeah, air travel episode just through a tube. Yeah, and you watched that same movie. And because there's all sorts of different people with all sorts of different tastes, the movie you saw was radically different from the movie that that you would find on like your at your video store.
Yes, for sure, one movie whole plane. We will tell you. The very first in flight movie, believe it or not, was in nineteen twenty nine. It was a newsreel and a couple of cartoons on a trans continental air transport flight. Right, but real deal movie service started in the early sixties. This comes from Variety and CNN and how stuff works. But nowadays it's a whole different deal because we have broadband connections, we have servers on board. Everyone knows. Now
you can stream like over one hundred movies. Probably even a couple of decades ago, you probably just had ten or fifteen movies you could watch because they were just you know, stored on a hard drive, I guess. But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play games against passengers, you can read ebooks, listen to podcasts or music or whatever. Right there, either on the seatback screen or on your laptop or tablet or whatever.
Yeah, it is quite a time to be alive for that. But the I guess the whole problem, the whole issue that faced airlines back in the day, which was how can you show a movie to a bunch of different people, is still around in different forms.
Yeah, for sure. I mean it cost them a ton of money. Apparently some airlines spend like twenty million dollars per year just on like licensing the content. Then you got to outfit the planes. That can cost about five million dollars per aircraft and it makes a lot heavier.
So that was a guy, an econ professor in Norway that basically calculated all the weight and everything and said, if the airlines got rid of this stuff, they can save about three million dollars per year per aircraft by not having this on board.
Right, which I mean they're like, well, so what, we make so much more than that, Yeah.
But they'd pass along the savings to us, I'm sure for sure.
Yeah, of course, apparently depending on where you are. I think in the United States you pay something like ninety grand for one movie for a couple of months, yeah, and then other yeah, for a license, and then other licenses are like by a per view, so every time somebody watches a movie, you have to pay a certain amount, probably not ninety grand, but still, like there's all sorts of different ways that airlines have to kind of dig in their pockets to make sure you have all the
movies you want. So feel bad for the airlines.
Yeah, I don't know if this is for everybody, but I even call them airplane movies. It's sort of like a hotel movie. It's a movie that, like I probably wouldn't pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally get, like, had enough interest to watch it. I will do that on airplanes almost one hundred percent of the time. I won't watch either that or like an old favorite. But I watched f one Brad Pitt Formula one movie on this last flight recently, and it was okay. It was an airplane movie.
Too much minimalist like office stuff for me.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean.
It was lousy with that. I saw some I was watching it over somebody's shoulder.
Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that. I mean, the racing stuff was really really great. I'm sure obviously much better on a big screen. But it was one of those where like not most, but a lot of
people don't understand Formula one racing. So the entire time, like the race commentary was so explanatory and now he has to go do this because that means this, because the rules say this, and it's just incessant and it helped you understand it, but it was really pretty pretty bad, like inception and that respect like inception.
Let's take a little break and we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the stuff that airlines have to do to make sure that no one gets offended by their movies. All right, we'll be right back, all right. So you were saying airplane movies are ones that you would normally never pay to see. I get that. There's also airline versions of movies, and they come in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes the airlines like commission companies
to edit the movies that they're gonna show. Other times the studios themselves will make an airline cut where they edit out, you know, the the sexiest stuff or the most violent or gory stuff, or like jokes like you probably couldn't show any of the Austin Powers movies because of all the mean stuff about different cultures, they figure out how to edit that out in the best way possible so that it doesn't screw up the plot, which is was not what they were doing before when they
showed the same movie to everybody at the same time. It was just really clumsy editing.
Then, yeah, for sure, it's kind of funny some of the things I'll edit out. Apparently they'll add out other airline logos which I didn't know, which is hysterical not so hysterical. You're never going to see a movie about a terrorist or certainly like a hijacking or a plane
crash or anything. You're not going to see that Denzel Washington movie, Like, You're not going to see anything like that, which makes a lot of sense, of course, sure, But depending on where you are in the world too, there's different cultures that are going to find different things offensive and you've got to be aware of that. So like in Europe they're way more okay with like a little bit of nudity, maybe a little bit more sexy stuff, but they're not as much as into the gore and violence.
The Middle East, apparently any kind of bear skin or sexy stuff you can't have. But they have a little higher tolerance for violent scenes on their flights.
Right, airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have like any references to pig or pork or anything like that edited out. Yeah, Singapore apparently is sensitive to scenes or movies with LGBTQ plus content, which means they can't get enough of it, is what I'm reading.
I don't think that's the case.
And language you would think like, well, they got to edit that out, but that's not the case anymore. It doesn't seem to have been the case ever since they started showing on demand individually selected movies because you listen to them through headphones generally, yeah.
Through headphones. And also they have the little sort of caveat now where they tell you beforehand, this contains scenes of you know, violence or whatever brief nudity and you have to tell whether or not you want to proceed right beforehand. And you know this. I think because I
was I'm still a bit of a prude. I was raised Baptist, so I'm always very sensitive to other people's experience around me, Like I would never be the guy that's just watching some awful like thing on their screen with people all around them, just totally clueless that like kids are around or other people that might be offended. So I've always been sensitive to that. But there are there's an actual trade group, the Airline Passenger Experience Association.
Because there are no laws about this, they they will offer guidance, I guess to movie distributors and to airlines and stuff like that. There's been some sort of I don't know about famous, but like at least gone viral
online for like how could they edit that out? I know when the film Carol came out in twenty fifteen, which is about a lesbian couple in the nineteen fifties, Delta got a lot of guff because they edited out scenes of like women kissing, and so Delta was like, hey, that's not us, Like that's the movie they gave us.
But apparently there's a guy who runs a company that how stuff works. Talked to Amir sum Nani. He's vice president of content services for Global Eagle, which is like
the big company that edits films for airlines. Yeah, he had said he wasn't saying this to contradict Delta, but he said, like airlines actually have a lot of say in what gets edited out, so it seems like Delta is like, no, we can't show lesbian stuff, whereas American airlines in United are like they're all like they're like Singapore, They're like, bring it on, right.
Yeah, there was in two thousand and seven that was a co sponsored bill called the Family Friendly Flies Act, where they wanted to have child safe viewing areas on the planes where anything over g couldn't be played. But I think it never passed. And I'm sure it didn't pass because that's a near impossibility or just a terrible idea to be like we'll put all the kids in the back of the plane together right without their parents.
I was looking at this and it was congress people, congressmen from North Carolina, and it does, especially today, sound just preposterous. But to in their defense, this was two thousand and seven, and this was a time when planes still mostly showed the same movie to the entire airplane at the same time.
Well, that makes sense a little more sense.
Right, it did. It did to me too, And I was reading like a just basically an article on it from the time, and they were like, well, one of the problems is like you don't want to just show only G rated movies because everybody on the airplane is going to hate kids even more than they already do. That was a quote from it. So they landed on if this did happen, to just show PG thirteen as a compromise.
Yeah, all right, well that makes sense.
Yeah yeah, And.
If you're wondering how much gets edited out, someone actually did check running times of movies shown on Virgin Air and Air Canada.
They had funding that's.
Right, which will be flying soon when we do our Canadian tour. We got some Air Canada flights book, can't wait.
You got that straight.
And they found that two thirds of the movies shown on these two airlines were the same length as the theater presentation. Fourteen percent were shorter, not fourteen percent shorter, but fourteen percent of the movies overall. So that, like that just sort of tells you how many movies are being edited down for content. Twenty one percent were longer, which is sort of interesting.
Yeah, I would guess Virgin is not huge on editing down movies. But you never know, you never know, so yeah, Chuck said, you never know. I guess, Chuck, doesn't that mean that short Stuff is Out.
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