Much ado about menus
August 29th, 2008 at 03:49pm Will Pfeifer
Glenn Erickson, aka the DVD Savant, has a great column up over at Film.com discussing DVD menus and the way companies seem to deliberately try to annoy us with annoying animations, insulting anti-piracy screeds and asinine forced content. (As someone who is constantly screening Disney discs for his princess-obsessed daughter, I can agree that the Mouse is the worst offender for forced content. “Fast Play” my ass.)
Check out his column here. Glenn worked for MGM in the early days of DVD, and he’s one of the best writers on the format anywhere on the Web, so he knows of what he speaks.
In one aside, Glenn mentions that studios often hype unrelated trailers as “bonus content.” I remember back in the late 1990s, when DVD was still a pretty exotic format, that Entertainment Weekly raved about the bonus feature of foreign language audio tracks on an Arnold Schwarzenegger disc, saying it was a kick to hear the (not yet then) governator speaking Spanish. Ah, those were the days.
Entry Filed under: DVD complaints
1 Comment Add your own
1. Jerry | September 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
As a parent and DVD lover, I concur that the non-skippable, forced ads and promo content at the beginning of DVD’s has led me to say a few “this is frickin’ stupid” (to put it mildly).
I understand the fact that if we bought one DVD you’ll want to target us specifically for a bunch of others. So if the powers that be want them there fine, but for the sake of Neptune let us please have the option to skip over them! I mean we’ll probably watch those ads at some point, probably out of pure curiosity. All I ask is that when I hit that menu button on the remote it will take me right to what we want.
It should be a law. Possibly put in place as a result of “cruel and unusual punishment”. Like a Vin Diesel movie? (Did you see Babylon A.D.? Even the DIRECTOR hated it.)
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed