ZAZ: The Collection - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Have you ever laughed so hard that it hurt? Have you ever watched a movie that’s so damn funny you feared the lining of your stomach might rupture spilling your essential organs and bodily fluids across the theater floor? If this is a recurring issue for you, you may want to consult with your doctor before picking up Paramount’s ZAZ: The Collection. Featuring three of the funniest films ever made, Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad this box set is a laugh a second leaving you limited time to breathe. However, if you have the fortitude to handle it, this box set is the pinnacle of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker. 

As we’ve already covered all three of these films, we’ll just be repurposing snippets of our individual reviews:

Airplane!

After the success of Kentucky Fried Movie, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker went on to quite literally make a name for themselves with the hilarious spoof Airplane! Its juvenile jabs, unscrupulous low-blows and unexpected cracks at disaster movies, in particular the Airport series, took audiences by surprise and quickly became one of the most popular movies ever made. Despite many of the jokes seeming a bit dated or quaint instead of funny, the cult comedy classic continues to enjoy that same level of recognition from contemporary moviegoers, and the absolute visual zaniness can still deliver a few chuckles forty years later. Besides, the real brilliance behind the film is not only in the endless absurdity or the slapstick parodies but in how the script cleverly and intuitively breaks down genre convention to its simplest form, wittily borrowing from the 1957 action-drama Zero Hour! 

Jumping from one joke to the next with little time to rest in between the laughs, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team created a hilarious, non-stop parade of satirical jabs that also effectively expose how the same formula has been recycled over the decades. Not every movie strictly adheres to the structure, but its variations remain a neatly packaged recipe for action-adventure movies, making these tropes seem brainless and preposterously half-baked, subtly poking fun at the audience for watching such clichéd dribble. The only thing separating one disaster flick from the next is the ensemble cast of well-respected actors where once again the trio of talented filmmakers strikes the right notes for laughter. Their juvenile sense of humor works because they also mix some discerning smarts into their deconstruction of the genre. And so, Airplane! remains one of the funniest and most creative comedy spoofs ever. 

Top Secret! 

The comedy minds of Jim Abrahams with Jerry and David Zucker are certainly a unique crew. You’re either onboard for their brand of comedy or it’s just not for you. After the successes of Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane! - the trio turned their farcical attention to TV cop shows with the unsuccessful Police Squad! When that hilarious show failed to land an audience they pulled an ace out of their sleeves with Top Secret! Where their previous efforts aimed at one singular genre, this comedy spy war film musical fires a shotgun at a wide swath of popular genres from the 50s and 60s. Imagine if Elvis Pressley was cast in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and replaced Steve McQueen in The Great Escape with enough time to make it back to the beach for Blue Hawaii and a spin around the block for Blue Lagoon and Paradise.

Now, I think that setup is damned funny, but for some reason, this one just doesn’t stick with some folks. Perhaps the stupidest complaint I’ve heard is that Top Secret! isn’t as good as Airplane!. While that may be true to some degree, I think this movie slips on a dance belt and brisés to its own ballet delivering some of the funniest scenes ever committed to celluloid. If all you’re looking for is more Airplane! there’s Airplane II: The Sequel. I'd rather kick back and laugh at what this film delivers than whine about what it doesn't, but that's just me. 

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad 

Proving himself adept at slapstick and deadpan comedy, Leslie Nielsen returns as Detective Frank Drebin. For this outing, Drebin is trying to figure out who tried to kill his partner and best friend Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson replacing Peter Lupus). Frank’s investigation leads him to local construction magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban in his most diabolical villain role) and his beautiful assistant Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley). As Drebin digs deeper, he uncovers a dastardly plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth (Jeannette Charles, the real Queen was unavailable)! 

Before The Naked Gun, Leslie Nielsen was mostly known for his dramatic appearances on TV and film - and a few classic horror turns in films like Creepshow and Prom Night. Of course, he had popped up in Airplane! delivering a terrifically hilarious turn, but comedy wasn’t his career highlight. That quickly turned around with this film. The vast majority of his 90s work and into the 2000s was comedy (some less funny than others). Likewise, George Kennedy who replaced Alan North as Captain Ed Hocken broke out with his deadpan hilarious performance. Given the cast, it’s hard to avoid the elephant in the cast, O.J. Simpson. Now notorious for other, um, reasons, he was the classic dufus character who endured the most physical peril of anyone in the series. 

As I covered two of these films previously and am a massive life-long fan of all three, it’s difficult to pin down a true favorite. Actually, that’s a lie. I was lying. It’s very easy for me to pick a favorite. While I would say Airplane! is the most fully realized and consistent (largely because it repurposed the screenplay for 1957’s Zero Hour), I wouldn’t call it my favorite of the three. The Naked Gun is a true classic with Leslie Nielsen playing an amazing deadpan cop in one of the funniest spoofs of old-school cop shows. This one probably has some of the most memorable lines of any comedy but the honor of my one true favorite ZAZ film goes to Top Secret!. It might be because I grew up watching it, or it might be that it’s just that gut-bustlingly hilarious, but virtually every scene and every line of dialog cracks me up. From Val Kilmer singing Skeet Shooting to the absurd Blue Lagoon flashbacks to the French Resistance fighting the East Germans in 1984, this is the film where I struggle to breathe from laughing so hard. I've seen all of these films countless times in the last four decades and they never fail to entertain. If you can handle the hilarity and not hurt yourself, they make for one hell of a triple feature! 

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
Paramount digs deep into the archive to deliver the three-film six-disc ZAZ: The Collection 4K UHD + Blu-ray + Digital set. Each film, Airplane!, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun have a Region Free BD66 serving the 4K with the previously available BD50 discs returning for 1080p and bonus features. For The Naked Gun, this is the same 4K disc that was already released in a SteelBook set a while back. Housed in a tri-fold digipak with paper slipcase, each disc gets its own tray without stacking discs. Also included is a booklet about the films including lyrics to all the songs in Top Secret! with recreation mini theatrical posters. Each 4K disc loads to a basic static-image main menu. 

For this 4K set Paramount brings Airplane! and Top Secret! to 2160p Dolby Vision for the very first time. The Naked Gun is again the same disc that was previously available. That odd intermittent motion blur effect is still present. So when the time comes, I’ll just repurpose my thoughts from my previous review.

With Airplane!, this was one I was very worried about. When the Paramount Presents line first came around this was one of the inaugural titles and it looked great on Blu-ray, but the streaming 4K was an ungodly mess of smeary grain and all sorts of fugly nonsense that was only exacerbated by the limited streaming bitrate. Thankfully that issue does not transfer over to the 4K Dolby Vision disc. Film grain is pretty pronounced throughout, and borderline very noisy in some places, but the image doesn’t have the tell-tale signs of egregious bitrate modulation of other notable Paramount releases from years past. During all of the optical transitions for flashbacks, it does look like some digital smoothing/cleanup was employed, they look pretty well scrubbed, but as soon as those frames finish it's back to looking perfect. Those transitions have always looked a little dodgy or noisy from discs past so this was probably some attempt to make the best of a tough situation, Overall it’s a pleasing image with clean details, bright colors, and strong black levels and shadows. 4/5

Now the big news for me is that Top Secret! finally has a strong transfer on disc. Given some of the optical effects, zooms, and some other visual trickery, the clarity can vacillate between transitions, like when Nick is popping in and out of vents, cabinets, and the toilet in prison. Those moments can be pretty soft-looking and depending on if the shot had been zoomed in, grain can look a bit clumpy and large. However, when the shot is right on without any of the optical trickery, it’s a terrific-looking image with clean crisp lines, and fine details, with Dolby Vision HDR adding a lot of pop to the primaries without blowing out the colors or skin tones. In a lot of ways it's very similar to what we now see with Airplane! except not quite as scrubby smooth for those optical transitions. Overall this is a massive improvement over the previous Blu-ray with was a damned unsightly mess. 4/5 

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad arrives on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with a mostly very good Dolby Vision HDR transfer. Colors haven’t been overworked or altered but there are some nice refinements in black levels and whites. Details are terrific with clean lines and textures. Film grain is largely intact, but can get a little blurry or unresolved around optical effects or transitions; the opening credits are a bit rough in that regard. Otherwise, this would be a pretty terrific release - but there is a notable caveat.

The main issue plaguing this release is sporadic semi-intrusive motion blur like what we saw for Last Train from Gun Hill. It’s not always on display, the film can go some distance without it popping up, but when it does come it can be distracting. Testing out my different setups, I found it appeared worse on my HDR10 Samsung QLED/Samsung Player office setup. By comparison, my LG OLED/Oppo 203 Dolby Vision setup wasn’t nearly as dodgy. It was still present, but it felt easier not to notice the severity or miss it entirely whereas my Samsung was much more noticeable. Reading around the interwebs, it seems folks with different setups are experiencing different ranges of difficulty with this one. What would have been a solid 4.5/5 effort is getting knocked down a peg because of this issue. 3.5/5 overall.

On the audio front, the same DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio tracks all return for each film. All are solid listens, and give some heft to their respective films and their brand of comedy. Where’s what we had to say about each of these from past reviews:

Airplane! 
Accompanying the video is this equally enjoyable DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack that does tremendously well with the original elements without sounding artificial or forced. Most apparent is the light activity in the rears, which consists mostly of a few echoes, some musical cues, and the thunderstorm. The discrete effects nicely enhance the soundfield and never seem to call attention to their use. In the fronts, we have an engaging and welcoming soundstage that's full of energy and lots of madcap nonsense. Dialogue reproduction is superb and right on the money, making every ridiculous deadpan joke and silliness perfectly audible. Dynamic range is sharply detailed while the low-end is put to mild use. Overall, it's a better-than-expected lossless mix and a clear upgrade that's loads of fun. 3.5/5

Top Secret! 
Not completely leaping away with the show is this DTS-HD MA 5.1 track. Why it’s even a 5.1 track is beyond me; the mix almost never leaves the front/center channels and when it does it’s for odd spikes in sound effects or music cues that never last for long or have any logical reason for that particular effect or sound to appear in that specific channel. Dialog is at least clean and clear and Kilmer’s numerous songs come through without issue. So I’ll give it marks for that, but this isn’t much of anything to write home about. Utilizing my receiver's DTS Neural:X function did lend some spacing and impact to the experience, so that's an option but not an overly showy mix. 3.5/5

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad 

On the audio side it sounds like we’re treated to the same DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio track as before - which isn’t a bad thing. I’m not exactly sure what Atmos could really bring to this film since it’s mostly a front/center channel affair. Sides and surrounds really only get active around some of the bigger action sequences or the big baseball game and crowd chants. Throughout, dialog is clean and clear without issue. All around a solid surround mix, but not an overly aggressive one. 4/5

Likewise, there’s nothing new on the extra features list. All of the bonus content is carried over thanks to Paramount including the previous Blu-ray discs, but none of the commentaries have been included on the 4K discs, so that’s a bit of a drag. Each film might not get a massive selection of bonus content, but collectively there's some great stuff to dig through:

Airplane! 

• Audio Commentary 
• Q&A with the Directors 
• Filmmaker Focus 
• Isolated Score

Top Secret!

• Audio Commentary 
• Alternate Scenes 
• Bookstore Backwards
• Theatrical Trailer

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad 

• Audio Commentary 
• Theatrical Trailer

Just in time for the holidays, relatives of that physical media nerd (namely all of us) have the perfect box set to wrap up with Paramount’s six-disc 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray ZAZ: The Collection. Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad are three of the funniest films ever made and they make for one hell of a three-film box set. The only setback for this one is that The Naked Gun was already issued on 4K, so that might cause a collection redundancy. It’ll also be something to see if/how The Naked Gun 2 1/2  and/or The Naked Gun 33 1/3 come to 4K. I can also imagine Paramount will offer Airplane! and Top Secret! on solo discs someday - but if you can’t wait they’re iconic films that see some notable benefits on 4K UHD with Dolby Vision. They might not be game-changing demo-worthy discs, but they're suitable upgrades. I’d have loved to see some new extra features, but this is a damned fun set all the same. At the current sale price, it's not a bad deal for three films. You might not be feeling the big itch to upgrade if Blu-ray is good enough, but if you don’t own the films already, this is a set that I safely call Recommended