I read an article about Tracy Letts and how he owns over 10000 blu rays. And I was like that guy is doing it right. So now I am buying them at an insane rate, and I am learning a lot.
One of the things I learned is that there are some very weirdly formatted blu-rays and dvds out there. There is not any centralized blu ray authorship companies or products that are ubiquitous enough to be considered a standard. The disc it self is a standard developed by multiple leaders in the tech world. But the authorship, the format of the menus and playback are wildly different depending on where you get it.
Let me tell you why this is beyond interesting to me. First of all, how can it be that the best selling entertainment product of all time (the video disc) is so experimental and unpredictable in what many think of as "the part of the dvd you have to go through to get to the movie"? Some blu-rays have trailers before you get to the menu. Trailers from 2006, trailers about other blu rays, trailers about the blu ray format itself. Some let you skip them some dont. Some blu rays start playing right away, no menu. Some have menus where all the graphic design is custom, some share the same silver stock menu. Why, after so many years and so many units sold, can no one agree on what a dvd menu is?
Those of you reading this who were born before the year 2002 or so can rremember the "coming soon to theatres" advertisement that would play before some dvds. Imagine. We lived through a time where dvds were considered a viable way of advertising the world in the present moment, a place where you would actually hear about NEW things. Now, those advertisements are useless. As advertisements. But as artifacts, they are priceless.
The finest dvd menu I have ever encountered is on the two-disc blu ray of David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". The person who designed this menu was highly aware of the fact that people were going to spend time in this menu. I bellieve they also had a much more long-term perspective for the commercial lifetime of their product. How did they know that this would be EXACTLY what I was looking for after a decade of streaming, as I toss towers of seen and unseen blu-rays into my shitty car, inspired by Tracy Letts the Michael Burry of the streaming and digital media market. How did they know that someone like me drifting from blu-ray menu to blu-ray menu would be profoundly moved by the care they invested into the most overlooked branch of the cinematic organism? - cheo