Henninger Makes Top Gun - Company Business and Marketing

Emedia Professional, Nov, 1999 by Peter Schworm

While any film in which Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and a healthy percentage of the eventual cast of "ER" grace the same silver screen enjoys a measure of charismatic credibility by default, the movie Top Gun can nowadays presumably only be enjoyed as satire, or perhaps as nostalgia-laden kitsch. But the new documentary Top Gun Academy: The Real Story, produced on DVD-Video by Henninger Media Services of Arlington, Virginia, offers a far more insightful, measured portrayal of the seminal aviation academy that "created a legend in the aviation community," as the narrator says. An engaging combination of substance and spectacle, this new offering from Henninger seeks to establish DVD in a non-fiction documentary niche not much explored or exploited to date. The account is well-paced, and uses several of DVD's signature strengths to balance historical footage with contemporary interviews of naval pilots and officers, to trace the history of air warfare from World War I through the Vietnam War.

According to John Warren, a Henninger researcher who worked on the project, "The original film and DVD are aimed at a general audience (the film aired during prime time on The Learning Channel). However, the DVD will also provide aficionados of military history (particularly the Vietnam Era) and aviation history with remarkable original and archival footage of the men and machines that made the story happen."

Warren said the cavernous capacity of DVD extended the reach of the project, allowing them to use extensive amounts of original footage. Warren said the Navy recognized that the documentary was a story that "needed to be told," and allowed them to shoot on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, at the Top Gun School (including its air-to-air range) and at the last Top Gun reunion that was held at Miramar Naval Air Station.

The DVD, which runs just under an hour, is divided into seven indexed, largely chronological chapters: The F-4 Phantom; Turn for the Worst; Dawn of the Dogfight; Tet Offensive; New School for Navy Pilots; Top Gun Proves Its Worth; and The Tide Turns Over Vietnam.

The additional material on the DVD, though lacking the general appeal of the main documentary, involves the viewer a bit more, providing some instructional material that can be accessed and absorbed at the viewer's own pace. A step-by-step walk-through of a pre-flight check (just over four minutes long) provides instructive behind-the-scenes context, and Senator John McCain's matter-of-fact recounting of his escape from a fire on board an aircraft carrier (he leapt from his plane's outreaching fueling probe over a ring of flames) is riveting. Another remarkable scene, black-and-white footage from World War II, shows a Japanese kamikaze pilot dive-bombing an aircraft carrier, as a baritone voice ominously intones, "Kill them, before they kill themselves." A "weapons and operations" section pays homage to the well-oiled destructive capacity of various weapons through aviation's history--carrier ops, the sparrow and sidewinder missiles, the F-4 Phantom and the technology that largely inspired it, and also the Soviet MiG fighter. Of course, the generous indexing of the discs allows viewers with particular interests to jump around and pick and choose among the title's more esoteric content.

The quality of the video footage--some older archived material and other elements shot specifically for the DVD--also takes advantage of DVD's established audio-visual strengths. Much of the battle video is spectacular, and the dubbed-in sound enhances the effect, although the computer-generated pseudo-blueprints of the aircraft are somewhat hokey.

The film is being marketed and distributed domestically and internationally by Winstar Home Video, and should retail at a price comparable to other non-fiction DVDs, Warren said.

(Henninger Media Services, 2601-A Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, Virginia 22201; 888/243-3444, 703/243-3444; Fax 703/243-4023; http://www.henninger.com)