Yes, I know this has been done before. I don’t give a fuck.
Who are the chromosome impaired, crotch sniffing, goat felching fucktards who design DVD menu? I wish one was here right now so I could kick him in the nuts. Then I would continue kicking him in the nuts until he could show me exactly where on my Star Wars Episode II special features DVD the R2-D2 “mockumentary” lives.
People have told me about it, so I know it exists. The package says its there on DVD 2. So I stick it in the player and I get all these long fancy menus that lead to all kinds of other menus. I’ve searched and searched, and it’s not to be found. Probably in some eighth-tier menu behind ANOTHER cutesy animation that I have to wait for. Great idea assholes. Ever thought of just giving us a list?
I’m not stupid. I know computers, and have owned a DVD player for nearly a year. I hold a Master’s degree, design web sites, hold a commercial pilot’s license with instrument rating, and I know all the words to “I’m My Own Grampa”. But I cant’ find the fucking thing on the DVD!!!
God, I want to kick somebody in the nuts right now.
May I add in the fine folks at Disney who thought it would be “fun” to hide actual content as “easter eggs”?
On their “Silly Symphonies” boxed set, they list (let’s say) 40 cartoons. The menus only show 36 (for example). The other four are buried about 4-6 clicks of the remote deep.
And thus, there’s no way to play all the cartoons in order. You have to stop the disk, hunt for one of the fucking hidden cartoons, restart the disk, watch it, restart the disk, watch a few more and so on.
Not a menu issue, but definitely a disc-design issue: most recently I especially enjoyed Disney’s latest trick with the finally-released region 1 Kiki’s Delivery Service, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and Spirited Away. Chapter One on every disc is an introduction that’s basically a one-man pep rally of John Lassiter telling you all about the film and how good it is (and worshipfully rubbing up against a deathly-bored-looking Miyazaki).
Need I mention chapter one will play every single time you play the movie?
Great, guys. Thanks–I need to be reassured that the movie that I bought is a good one. Hello?? I chose to buy the goddamn thing!
At least they didn’t disable the next-chapter button.
When you go to Dex’s Diner, you have the waitress droid’s menu. IIRC, go left on that menu to the kitchen. There you will find the trailer to the mockumentary, as well as a great documentary on sound effects.
So I guess that while I’m kicking the guy in the nuts, I can also ask him to explain why a trailer and documentary reside under “Dex’s Kitchen and Photo Gallery”. Actually under that and another sub-menu that provides no description of the content.
This is exactly the kind of shit I’m talking about. I’ll be the DVD Menu Designers Guild is having a goat felching party as we speak.
I could tell you where it was. But it’s not on there. Only the trailer for it is. It’s about 3 mintues long.
What you need to do is haul your ass down to a Best Buy related store (Sam Goody’s, Musicland, MediaPlay, Best Buy, etc) and buy the exclusive DVD that’s only the Mocumentary. IIRC, it’s 8 bucks, 20 minutes long, and worth it. R2D2 Beneath the Dome, it’s called.
(actually, from the main menu, go to “Dex’s Kitchen and Still Galleries” / then “To Dex’s Kitchen” / then click “R2-D2: Beneath The Dome” It’s 12 min or so long.)
If you want to talk crap menus, have a look at the main menus for Spider-man, where the selected option is indicated by a series of tiny blinking lights next to the option. Or even better, the scene selection menus for Pink Floyd: The Wall, which have no labelling at all beyond their numbers!
As was brought up in Brutus’s similarly themed thread, it’s not actually the DVD menu designers who need several hours of concentrated nut-kicking, it’s the suits who hire the DVD designers and think that people actually like not being able to easily find and use the shit for which they’ve paid good money.
These are the same suits who force programmers to release games before they’ve been properly debugged, greenlighted automobile features like the seatbelt-ignition interlock, and dumb down every Hollywood movie until its easily understood by slime molds and certain species of lichen. Literally, the same suits. It’s basically three guys who have been cloned over and over and over. Frankly, simply kicking these people in the nuts isn’t enough. Anything short of a jackhammer to the crotch is letting these fuckwits off too easy.
What I REALLY hate are the menus that force you to sit through a minute of stupid intro video (usually artsy scenes from the movie blurred into eachother with cheesy background music) before you even GET to the menu. And of course they disable the skip forward and fast forward buttons. BASTARDS!
I detest the habit of those new Harry Potter movies to force you to play their little games just to see the actual deleted scenes. Sure, I guess the games are fun for people half my age, but some of us want to watch these things without sorting keys!
You know what I hate? My TV is currently semibroken, and only shows black and white, no color. I can live with this. But do you know how IMPOSSIBLE it is to navigate some DVDs without color? Those nifty highlight-it-and-it-changes-color features would be more helpful if they were in different shades or something, so it would show up on my TV, so I don’t have to play guess-where-the-indicator-is every time I want to watch a movie.
They’re often hard to navigate WITH color. It’s like these assholes have done everything possible to make this stuff more complex than it needed to be.
Someone in the other thread on this subject mentioned how web site design went through a similar phase. Lots of cutesy crap that took forever to load, animations, etc. Then they figured out that people just want to go get the information they’re looking for, not ooh and ahh at how cleverly the site was designed.
Hopefully the DVD’s are going through a similar phase and the designers will get the message eventually. If they can stop felching the goats for a few minutes.
I just wish the DVD menus would be silent, instead of playing the same little bit of music or sound effects over and over and over and over and over and over and… MAKE IT STOP! SHUT UP ALREADY!