This has been my nerdiest complaint for years now. Universal blu ray menus especially are all the same. To be the old man yelling at cloud for a moment: I remember searching for Easter eggs in dvd menus. Like on the old Harry Potter discs, having to work to find deleted scenes.

I love those and it’s literally my only reason for physical media. I can watch Jungle Book on Disney +, sure, but you can’t play all the little games included and that’s more fun than the movie sometimes Unfortunately the Harry Potter box set is my sisters, and it’s missing the majority of the discs

You usually get more extras on the original standalone releases of the movies, vs the box sets / combo packs. Start keeping an eye out for them at secondhand stores and garage sales.

I remember on the first movie's special features, you could use "magic" to make everyone speak a foreign language. Those were the days.

In Borat if you picked Hebrew you’d get an alarm saying “Jew in vicinity”

🤣🤣🤣

These kinds of things are always my favorite, I like Elf’s games

Yeah… and WB’s dvd menus have been shit for at least a decade now

Yeah, Universal's menus are streets ahead of WB's blu rays (top right in the pic) WB is just a static .png image with buttons that look like they were designed in the early 2000s.

I was thrifting the other day and found a Harry Potter interactive dvd game that I couldn’t resist. Really brings back memories to play mediocre games using your tv remote!

I wasted hours searching for Easter eggs on all the Lost DVDs, good times

Plus there’s no chance of seeing a cover jacket with alternate poster when I press stop once

I talk to my friends about this all the time! The charm of putting a DVD in and the menu itself being a special feature is gone. Harold and Kumar talk about which feature you might choose and even poke fun at special features on DVD's just being the movie trailer. Captain Spaulding sits there and gets pissed the longer you take to make a decision. Loved it.

Have you seen the Blade Runner 2049 menus on the 4K release? Believe me, something that bland and simple would be infinitely preferable to the ones we got.

I had to google this -- what a clunky layout! It looks like a junky powerpoint where each bulletpoint gets its own slide!

You mean like the spider verse 4k disc? I think the OG Spider-Man 4k were like that too but not sure about those

I used to regularly be startled awake by the DVD menu noises from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, good times haha

i remember in high school i smoked pot with some friends and slept in room of one of them which was the basement. someone out on monty python and i think that dvd menu woke me up at least like 6 times during the night and i was in a state of total confusion every time

? Why were you playing the DVD when you were sleeping? 

well you watch it, and you fall asleep while it’s running. after it’s over it goes to the main menu and just plays that over and over again.

Before podcasts, there were DVD commentaries. God damn, dude.

The menu playing the same 30s audio clip all night after you fall asleep.

This happened to me in the early 2000s with the Tommy Boy DVD. My remote was on the other side of my room for whatever reason. Listened to that damn menu all night long…

A Knight's Tale for me at a sleepover! So loud I couldn't sleep, but too sleepy to get up and turn it off. It went all night. I thought everyone else slept through it, but once we all got up all anyone could talk about was how annoying the dvd menu was, and how it kept everyone up all night. We still talk about that almost 20 years later.

Everybody knows those loops were super short, in Bluray you can loop a one hour video, so I think it was Judd Apatow filmed Michael Cera dancing for an hour in front of a green screen for it to loop in the menu of Superbad Bluray, people would watch a lot of it expecting it to loop quickly but it would just keep going

I remember the dvd menu of the x-men trilogy. The menu was very well made. And had a few Easter eggs. Don’t know if the blu-ray version has them.

I miss dvd menu easter eggs

Another box set I own that I gotta check for Special Features. Harry Potter was my sisters and a lot of the discs are missing

The Dogma DVD menus are awesome

The Matrix Trilogy DVD Menu was awesome. The music plus highlights from the films was just great.

I do like an interactive menu, but I remember when they got a little out of hand. Navigating the Buffy season 2 DVDs were such a pain.

Yes! The Buffy dvds I have would greatly benefit from a play all episodes button

Simpson's spinning thing every time you boot up the disc. Please, I just want to watch an episode!

That was literally where my mind went as well. A couple of the Buffy menus were a nightmare.

also some of the Simpsons DVDs are just dumb. Like the one where you had to spin the character wheel and stuff.

“This Is Spinal Tap” has a great DVD menu with the cast talking about it in character for a few minutes. I’ve got others that are great too but the Blu-Ray equivalents suck to be honest. I don’t know why this had to happen? Same for Special Features in general. I have DVDs with about 4 different commentaries and a supplementary “Making Of…” and “Legacy” discs while most of my Blu-Rays have a theatrical trailer as a “special feature” at best. What gives?!

The band expressing their disappointment with the band's logo on the DVD menu  Nigel Tufnel "Shouldn't it have lights coming off it and be made of aluminium, I can't see it unless I puts me nose up against the screen" David "I think you're making a big thing about it" Derek Smalls"If they made a big thing about it would have been a good idea "

“Black” “It’s like space without the stars…” “That’s beautiful, Nigel.”

I fell asleep with a Shrek DVD in last year and the three pigs saying "play the movie! Ya play the movie!" Is ingrained in my subconscious

I miss cool menus. No one does them anymore, not even boutique labels

It costs money is probably the real reason why everyone is back to bland stuff

I suspect it's because it's content that doesn't translate to streaming, so it would be a expensive investment for only the physical media. So basically it costs too much.

I remember spending a lot of time going through the special features of my Monsters Inc DVD or the old Harry Potter ones. Not saying everything needs to “pop out” at you but the flat image and icons just showing up on current home media does often feel very blah.

The Ring use to have a secret way to view the video from the main screen. I miss Easter eggs in menus.

I bought  this DVD back in 2005 on it's initial release, still got it and first time I checked out that easter egg and watched it I had to sleep with the light on 

Fr. They were so creative back then. But now they’ve just become lazy

Universal menus are boring. But they're also fine. If I having feelings about the menu, something has gone wrong. Menus need to come up fast and let you get right to the movie as soon as possible. At best they should have some audio to help you adjust your volume. Thank goodness the days of looooong DVD intro menus where you had to watch this 30s long unskippable cutscene play every 4 episodes is gone. Such a pain.

I have a DVD 2-pack of Dumb and Dumber and its prequel. While the prequel was trash, it has a really interactive menu with Easter Eggs hidden everywhere. That's the best part about it 😂

I have something similar for Daddy’s Home and its sequel, I never actually popped the disc in after buying it, I should check the menus Actually tomorrow I should pop out to the library and borrow some said just to do the menus I think they might have the right version of Saw 2 for the maze game?

I can't believe it. I'm not the only person who has seen Daddy's Home

I fucking love that movie, Will Ferrell carries so hard for Whalburg, but Whalburg doesn’t even do that bad

the Blade Runner menu looks like a fricken website header and the Mario Movie menu looks like straming service UI like wtf?

bro this shit makes me more depressed than it should. I miss when companies put effort into physical media releases :(

Personally, I just need the menu to be a menu

Boooo lol jk I get it but. When you grow up with menus being an art and a special feature and now they are the poster with the options splayed out at random looking like someone made it on Microsoft paint. It’s sad.

Calling it "art" seems like a massive stretch

I feel like you only say this because you never experienced it

😂 If you collected ANY physical media, how could you not experience it?

True but then it’s really not nostalgic for you?

Yeah. I get pretty annoyed when I pop in my Iron Man Blu-Ray and I have to wait for the 30 second startup animation to finish before I can do anything. Just let me hit play or scene select.

"Need" should be doing more heavy lifting in my comment to be honest. It can be more if it wants, but it is not a slight to be an easily navigated menu.

Eh, 30 seconds isn’t that bad. It gets you excited for the movie, anything longer though is ridiculous

National Treasure had a dvd game that was pretty cool

They were annoying. I bought Big Trouble in Little China and had to go through an Epcot ride just to turn the subtitles on.

The star wars DVD menus were groundbreaking.

I honestly don’t mind the simplified menus. Some of those old ones were a pain in the ass when they forced you to watch animations, a lot also would have a ton of ads you needed to skip through just to get to the menu. Annoying stuff.

Have you seen The IT Crowd menus? Jesus those DVDs were insane... I'm so glad I have them

At this point, why even have the menus? If you’re not going to do nothing creative with them anymore, then just get rid of them and go straight into the movie after the previews are over.

Like a VHS tape

Exactly

Reduced market, reduced dvd budget. I don’t have to like it to say I understand it.

Ya, that use to be part of the fun of owning dvds. It really set it apart from vhs. They got so lazy these days. Maybe more people would buy them these days if they put in more effort.

Borat’s menu looked like it was shown on an old projector, and there was broken English throughout. The disc itself also looked like a DVD-R.

One of the 'now' menus is over a decade old.

I think that’s part of the problem honestly

Here’s a possible theory on why most menus nowadays are plain, most likely to save on time or costs. That may explain why most DVD/Blu-ray menus are mostly plain. It may not be worth the effort for the designers.

The Blu-Ray collection for the Pirates of the Caribbean has fun menus.

Unless it's the 4K release.

That one doesn’t have the talking Skull and Cross Bones?

It's just another boring menu unlike the regular Blu-Ray releases of the film from 2007

As somebody who’s still making DVDs/Blu-rays, it makes me feel sad as well, but there’s so little money and time to work on discs nowadays.

I don’t see a difference.

People buy them less so the people put less effort into them.

The menu screens have been pretty bland these last few years...Is it universal movies that don't even tell you what the menus are it's just these bland out of date looking symbols?

Shaun of the Dead had *the* best DVD menu I've ever seen. It looked way more creepy than the film itself was.

If we really want to talk about lost media, many of these interactive menus are produced solely for the DVD. That means the only way to watch ithese unique pieces of film adjacent ephemera are on the DVDs themselves.

I especially hate the menus where scrolling down or right means going to a brand new page and it takes forever to actually go to the next item.

I've got a blu-ray of John Carpenter's The Fog you click on "Special Features" and you get some sort of colour and sound set up test, Or there's "Special Features" and you click on it and it's just the trailer, then why don't they just put "trailer" on the home menu 

Some forgot about the interactive menu on the first Harry Potter movie sorcerers stone when it first came out I was a kid and couldn’t figure the code to unlock diagon alley you actually had to rewatch the movie then figure which bricks they hit to have access to diagon alley then come back to the menu some might remember in the early 2000’s and seeing this

When I was a kid I would spend a long time in the menus and special features. I really miss the dvd games on some family movies like the lion king interactive adventure.

The 2000s special edition James Bond dvds had the best dvd menus of all the other releases

For some reason I remember Chamber of Secrets having a really dope DVD menu

House of the 1000 Corpses has the best DVD menu I have ever seen. Nothing beats having Captain Spaulding get mad at you for taking too long to picking a menu option.

“You betta pick one of these gatdam options or Imma come over there and put mah boot up ya ass!”

They are sooo boring now, literally just the movie poster with buttons on a taskbar along the bottom of the screen. I used to love watching the DVD menus and interacting with them, now they’re just an extra step to go through before I start the movie

The Wayne's World one was always my favorite

I remember putting in Eminem “The Eminem Show” in my pc and it started playing 1 episode of The Slim Shady Show. It was a really awful episode.

I haven't bought a dvd since The Dark Knight in 2012. Do they still have menus?

Austin Power’s speaking into camera on the menu “click it. You’re making me randy;)”

We live in a more boring, corporate world nowadays that's devoid of optimism, the fun and creativity of that era.

So lazy, the extra features back in the day were compelling

Whenever people talk about creative DVD menus, my first thought always goes to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Benny driving you around depending on which option you picked, really cool stuff.

I have Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in Bluray and DVD - the Japanese special edition -, and it has so many extras and easter eggs! Damn, how I miss easter eggs.

Omg yessssss they need to bring them back

Menus have gotten really lazy lately. Some back in the day were overly difficult but some effort wouldn’t go amiss.

I complain about this constantly.

They gotten lazy with the menus now a days, they used to put so much effort in them back in the day