I create videos talking about a whole range of different subjects. From Videogames to Shows, pretty much anything from our childhoods i’ll be covering!
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I used to play with the Shrek the Third menu all the time. It even had a school yearbook. A forgotten art indeed. PS here via Pinely, good recommendation!!
As a kid who grew up without internet but had a crap ton of movies on dvd I would like the movies that had mini games on the dvd menu. But 9/10 times the dvd remote would be lost so the only thing I could do was press play on the dvd player.
You guys got a DVD menu for Mary Poppins? I just picked up a copy that's so sold it says Walt Disney Home Video on the side instead of Disney DVD...and it jumps straight into the movie. No ads, no menu; just movie.
I’d like to mention the Big Hero 6 Blu-Ray menu. Although the design of the menu itself is pretty mid, I appreciate how one special feature was handled. In order to access the ‘Easter Eggs’ video, you have to find a secret option on the menu. The only hint that this feature even exists is on the back of the box. I didn’t discover this until 8 years after I bought the movie. 😅
Gosh, I miss when DVD menus had this kind of pizazz. While it's unlikely we'll ever go back to having new DVD menus with this level of charm, atleast we can now appreciate what we once had through videos like this one.
Maybe people should distribute DVD ISOs online instead of MKV rips for those sweet, sweet menus. *Edit:* Wrap those ISOs up in a playback box routed through a RetroTink 4K with scanlines enabled, and you'd have nostalgia in spades.
The greatest DVD menu's I have ever seen in my entire life.... are the DVD Menus for ADV's original box set of "Excel Saga" the Im-Perfect Collection. Not to be confused with the horribly inferior Funimation re-release from years later, I'm talking the original ADV box sets. Those menus are jam-packed with charm and hilarious effort. They went out of their way to get some of the menus to be narrated and even have original new audio skits using the voice actors for Excel and Hyatt to perform them, they're chock full of clickable and discoverable secret Easter Eggs, they contain bonus Easter Egg sketches and fake commercials for fictional products based on jokes from the show, and the menus themselves are well edited and feature some of the best music from the show. They're set up in a fun and creative manner.... ADV just put all their effort to go above and beyond to make those menus memorable.
One of my favorites is the House of 1000 Corpses dvd. The main menu is a character from the film, Captain Spaulding (Played by Sid Haig, RIP), insulting you from behind the counter of his convenience store. It was hilarious.
I'm not even halfway through the video but I just HAVE to comment on the editing. It's amazing, it's so fun to watch and engaging, it serves the point of the video without being too disruptive. The intro was cool, but it's so neat to keep editing like that for the rest of the runtime. The one about Series of Unfortunate Events is especially fun to watch, it fits the vibe of the menu so well.
The 2 disc editions of early Pixar films like finding nemo and incredibles were fantastic in the uk, Easter eggs hidden on the dvd by waiting for secret icons to appear on the incredibles dvd or going to certain options and pressing a different direction revealing a hidden fish icon on finding nemo for extra lill features is always fun (also the Jurassic park dvds were scary as hell for the foreboding music and raptors running around screeching god I hate it)
I have some fondness for the Red Dwarf menus, though that may be because at the time, I had also stumbled across a website with information on how to get to all the easter eggs.
its too bad the internet pretty much made these sort of like "meh". The Simpsons hands down put the most work into their dvd menus. Original animation, hidden extras you had to search around for, etc. These days, you get the basic bare bones menus because there's just no point in going above and beyond.
Oh something I know about! Shout out to Pinely for pointing his viewers (me) to this video. I used to help a coworker who handled the menu creation and DVD / Blu-Ray work ("Content & Authoring" AKA "C&A") at the post-house I used to work at and it's wild. The budgets are often *tiny* and the work is very specific. They draw up flowcharts on each video that leads into others, and where you go if you press any buttons and it's written in weird coding languages that heavily marry computer science and art and the work was mostly done by a single guy who only came in to work when there was C&A work. For some historical info that I learned from my coworker (so anecdotal but who else would I trust lol), for a while every company had their own C&A department but eventually they all started shuttering theirs and eventually Sony was the big dog and when they closed theirs, they farmed it out of house to the guy mentioned above. Now as the studios move further away from home releases, soon I'm sure there will be like 2-3 places that will even be able to handle the work and only a handful of people who will know how to do it.
I swear you included all of my childhood movies. Now I want to get all my DVDs out just to load up the menus and look for all the hidden details like I used to as a kid. Great video!
I’m surprised you didn’t talk more about all the features that would be on these menus, especially the games! The film ‘Dinosaur’ had some great games I remember playing loads.
My favorite menus were the ones from the Shout Factory _Mystery Science Theater 3000_ releases, because they just had so much care and effort put into them, creating a whole new sketch out of existing voice clips. They were also how I realized how insanely impatient people have gotten. I saw multiple people wishing that they'd stop putting in the effort because it took _15 whole seconds_ to get to the point where you could start the episode.
The menus were always fun the first time around. Unfortunately, some of them failed to have a "skip" option, so if you booted the DVD again you'd have to wait forever for it to load and go through its cycle.
I’m happy someone finally made this video, dvd menus were truly something special. My favorite menu and the one I think about often is the original over the hedge vending machine menu, it was so ingenius with how it’s not only creative but how it leads into the first scene of the movie.
