Flight Sickness

Returning home on American Airlines, we were again forced to watch a mixture of corporate videos and infomercials thinly disguised as entertainment. Quick recap: I didn’t bother renting a headset, but from the footage I gathered there’s a cheesy guitarist who looks like he’s on the cover of a romance novel, and he’s backed by a group of overweight, middle aged, balding Spanish/Flaminco/Cuban salsa musician’s, and touring the country with twenty pretty, thin, young female dancers. Sort of Riverdance meets construction workers playing guitar and violin. Gotta love a mock documentary that scrolls tour dates and locations where the end credits are supposed to be. They also flashed their web address, Benise.com.

After that, we were almost entertained by the less-than-smash blockbuster film The Thing About My Folks starring Paul Reiser. Released in ‘05, this film grossed less than a million dollars. This was our movie. Except that the flight crew couldn’t get it to play in English, so instead they forced us to watch promo clips of CBS programming (Ghost Whisperer and Cold Case) as well as endless ads for new DVDs (King Kong, Narnia, Chicken Little). Between that and my complimentary copy of SkyMall Magazine, I now understand why they call them commercial airliners. (To be fair, there was an episode of the show Everyone Hates Chris tucked in among the endless ads and promos, but it was the same episode they played when we flew eastbound 5 days earlier.)

Two parting shots...

The “Welcome/Safety” video shown at the start of the flight depicted bright, shiny, smiling American Airlines personnel greeting fliers, and joyfully going about their business. As for the actual crew on our flight, they seemed miserable the whole five and a half hour trip, probably because they were working on Easter Sunday.

The video shown also plugged a charitable website called CBS Cares, but when written as a web address CBScares.tv it has a sort of subliminal message quality about it that makes you think “CBS scares”.