I see people trying to advocate for studios by trying to downplay the frequency of things we media buyers find annoying on discs we pay money for.
It seems one solution to that would be to simply NAME specific discs that have the annoying and unpopular things, such as:
-FORCED PLAYBACK
Any content that our ability to bypass - by hitting menu, skip, etc. - has been disabled.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF ALL WARNINGS, FBI & DISCLAIMERS, ETC at STARTUP
-FORCED WARNINGS ATTACHED TO THE FEATURE
Once we press play, this should call up the FEATURE and the Feature only. Acknowledging they have to be on the disc somewhere, the FBI and DISCLAIMER warnings should be connected to the startup of the disc, rather than playing back at the beginning of the feature.
-OBNOXIOUS JARRING PSA VIDEOS ABOUT PIRACY
You pop in a nice pleasant vintage musical and the first thing you hear is this jarring hard-rock noise screaming about piracy.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF TRAILERS or PROMOS
After sitting through the warnings and disclaimers, and the typically slow load time of Blu Ray discs, as if that's not enough, we're stuck watching trailers for their latest movies, and these vanity titles for the studio, their useless branding of Blu Ray or DVD, EVERY TIME we play the disc, and these trailers do not tend to age very well.
Trailers can be entertaining as an OPTION - IF they are RELATED - in theme or genre or era - to the FEATURE, but NEVER should they be FORCED. If they are forced, they are not features but advertising, and practically no one likes to be a captive audience. Make your trailers entertaining and give us an option, then you stand a better chance of us liking the movie you're plugging, force us to watch a crappy ad, and we can almost guarantee you will turn a lot of people off.
- FORCED PLAYBACK OF STUDIO LOGOS and VANITY CARDS
Added titles to remind us of what studio's content we are watching are also unnecessary and do not enamor the viewer to that studio. Their opening logo sequences at the beginning of a movie have been stretched longer and longer in the past 20 years, now joined by equally drawn out vanity titles for numerous production companies, so these days the time between loading a disc and the actual beginning of the movie itself can be irritatingly long. Instead of the desired effect - to impress us that the content came from whomever, The more we are forced to watch this self-promotion, the less we end up liking that studio or production company.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF BRANDED FEATURES
Certain studios insist on branding things like BluRay, DVD, 3D, and "Home Theatre" sound remixes, then force us to watch them every time we press play. I'll wager these companies did not invent this technology, it's all really common, therefore the offenders are just WASTING OUR TIME and accomplishing the opposite of their desired effect - rather than impress us, these timewasters just piss us off.
-LONG, DRAWN OUT MENU INTRODUCTIONS
One example comes to mind; a fade in on a forest, as the view tracks slowly through the trees, to a clearing, where there is a house, where we slowly approach and the door opens, where we enter a room, where we look around the room, where we see a table, and on the table is a book, we slowly approach the book, which then opens and flips a few pages... where the menu finally appears! This may seem "magical" to a kid the very first time, but after being forced through it every time you press menu or load the disc, it gets old really fast.
-ENDLESSLY REPETITIVE MUSIC LOOP ON MENUS
We may have popped in the disc in advance of our planed viewing time, (especially to let it play through all the forced content) and the short little loop of music playing endlessly, like anything else we have to experience repeatedly, becomes as popular as those obnoxious commercial jingles we can't get out of our heads. Unimaginative disc authors usually choose music from the opening credits, but even it it's just background music later on in the film, if we are overexposed to it, by the time it comes up in the actual film it's become tiresome. Options: Some companies have kindly limited the number of times such things play before the menu becomes muted. Others just politely leave us in silence with a patiently waiting menu.
-MISSING MENUS
Since Blu Ray seems to have added a pop-up menu as an option in its format - which can be useful if you want to look for content while viewing something - some discs have done away with traditional menus entirely, so when you pop in the disc, after all the forced content, the movie just starts. But what if your intent this time was to look at the supplements? Well in that case you have to have the distraction of the movie playing in front of you while you locate, and navigate through the little pop up menus to what you actually want to see. You might be able to pause the movie long enough to find the desired feature, but the minute your feature is done, you're right back in the movie whether you want to be or not. It's not as if creating a basic menu is all that costly or hard. It's much better just to have something waiting for our command instead of taking control and choices away from us.
-LIMITED MENUS WITH TINY TYPE
Personally I have to wonder what makes Blu Ray authors assume everyone with a Blu Ray player has a ten foot screen, is sitting closely to a huge monitor, or has exceptional distance vision. I'm amazed at the tendency to list ALL the features in dictionary-size type on ONE screen, rather than the ability to read the titles easily and page through as many menus as needed to list those titles in easily readable size.
-LACK OF "PLAY ALL" CHOICES
Let's say you have a list of episodes, related features, deleted scenes, trailers, featurettes, making ofs, etc. The easier you make it for us to play them, the more often we will use them. Especially having a disc of TV episodes where we get stuck back at the menu inbetween, can become so tiresome that we may not play that disc much. With me a good example is Season One of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Sometimes you're doing other things and have the disc playing in the background.
Imagine having a CD that stops after every song and you get the idea.
On the other hand, check out how cool the rare option to play a complete show - where the movie is preceded by cartoons and shorts - can be.
The purpose of this thread is not to debate whether these things are necessary, whether you happen to like them, or how often you feel they occur, it is to simply document exactly where these things DO occur.
There will be a separate thread to list features we LIKE to find on discs - Some rare examples have surfaced where someone authored the disc resourcefully and imaginatively to give us refreshing options, and we will encourage them on the Favorite Features thread, so no need to put that here.
Please name the movie TITLE, the type of disc, (DVD, Blu Ray, which release, etc.) Studio if you wish, and list the offending items found there, and where/how they appear. This applies to previous editions as well as current releases.
It seems one solution to that would be to simply NAME specific discs that have the annoying and unpopular things, such as:
-FORCED PLAYBACK
Any content that our ability to bypass - by hitting menu, skip, etc. - has been disabled.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF ALL WARNINGS, FBI & DISCLAIMERS, ETC at STARTUP
-FORCED WARNINGS ATTACHED TO THE FEATURE
Once we press play, this should call up the FEATURE and the Feature only. Acknowledging they have to be on the disc somewhere, the FBI and DISCLAIMER warnings should be connected to the startup of the disc, rather than playing back at the beginning of the feature.
-OBNOXIOUS JARRING PSA VIDEOS ABOUT PIRACY
You pop in a nice pleasant vintage musical and the first thing you hear is this jarring hard-rock noise screaming about piracy.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF TRAILERS or PROMOS
After sitting through the warnings and disclaimers, and the typically slow load time of Blu Ray discs, as if that's not enough, we're stuck watching trailers for their latest movies, and these vanity titles for the studio, their useless branding of Blu Ray or DVD, EVERY TIME we play the disc, and these trailers do not tend to age very well.
Trailers can be entertaining as an OPTION - IF they are RELATED - in theme or genre or era - to the FEATURE, but NEVER should they be FORCED. If they are forced, they are not features but advertising, and practically no one likes to be a captive audience. Make your trailers entertaining and give us an option, then you stand a better chance of us liking the movie you're plugging, force us to watch a crappy ad, and we can almost guarantee you will turn a lot of people off.
- FORCED PLAYBACK OF STUDIO LOGOS and VANITY CARDS
Added titles to remind us of what studio's content we are watching are also unnecessary and do not enamor the viewer to that studio. Their opening logo sequences at the beginning of a movie have been stretched longer and longer in the past 20 years, now joined by equally drawn out vanity titles for numerous production companies, so these days the time between loading a disc and the actual beginning of the movie itself can be irritatingly long. Instead of the desired effect - to impress us that the content came from whomever, The more we are forced to watch this self-promotion, the less we end up liking that studio or production company.
-FORCED PLAYBACK OF BRANDED FEATURES
Certain studios insist on branding things like BluRay, DVD, 3D, and "Home Theatre" sound remixes, then force us to watch them every time we press play. I'll wager these companies did not invent this technology, it's all really common, therefore the offenders are just WASTING OUR TIME and accomplishing the opposite of their desired effect - rather than impress us, these timewasters just piss us off.
-LONG, DRAWN OUT MENU INTRODUCTIONS
One example comes to mind; a fade in on a forest, as the view tracks slowly through the trees, to a clearing, where there is a house, where we slowly approach and the door opens, where we enter a room, where we look around the room, where we see a table, and on the table is a book, we slowly approach the book, which then opens and flips a few pages... where the menu finally appears! This may seem "magical" to a kid the very first time, but after being forced through it every time you press menu or load the disc, it gets old really fast.
-ENDLESSLY REPETITIVE MUSIC LOOP ON MENUS
We may have popped in the disc in advance of our planed viewing time, (especially to let it play through all the forced content) and the short little loop of music playing endlessly, like anything else we have to experience repeatedly, becomes as popular as those obnoxious commercial jingles we can't get out of our heads. Unimaginative disc authors usually choose music from the opening credits, but even it it's just background music later on in the film, if we are overexposed to it, by the time it comes up in the actual film it's become tiresome. Options: Some companies have kindly limited the number of times such things play before the menu becomes muted. Others just politely leave us in silence with a patiently waiting menu.
-MISSING MENUS
Since Blu Ray seems to have added a pop-up menu as an option in its format - which can be useful if you want to look for content while viewing something - some discs have done away with traditional menus entirely, so when you pop in the disc, after all the forced content, the movie just starts. But what if your intent this time was to look at the supplements? Well in that case you have to have the distraction of the movie playing in front of you while you locate, and navigate through the little pop up menus to what you actually want to see. You might be able to pause the movie long enough to find the desired feature, but the minute your feature is done, you're right back in the movie whether you want to be or not. It's not as if creating a basic menu is all that costly or hard. It's much better just to have something waiting for our command instead of taking control and choices away from us.
-LIMITED MENUS WITH TINY TYPE
Personally I have to wonder what makes Blu Ray authors assume everyone with a Blu Ray player has a ten foot screen, is sitting closely to a huge monitor, or has exceptional distance vision. I'm amazed at the tendency to list ALL the features in dictionary-size type on ONE screen, rather than the ability to read the titles easily and page through as many menus as needed to list those titles in easily readable size.
-LACK OF "PLAY ALL" CHOICES
Let's say you have a list of episodes, related features, deleted scenes, trailers, featurettes, making ofs, etc. The easier you make it for us to play them, the more often we will use them. Especially having a disc of TV episodes where we get stuck back at the menu inbetween, can become so tiresome that we may not play that disc much. With me a good example is Season One of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Sometimes you're doing other things and have the disc playing in the background.
Imagine having a CD that stops after every song and you get the idea.
On the other hand, check out how cool the rare option to play a complete show - where the movie is preceded by cartoons and shorts - can be.
The purpose of this thread is not to debate whether these things are necessary, whether you happen to like them, or how often you feel they occur, it is to simply document exactly where these things DO occur.
There will be a separate thread to list features we LIKE to find on discs - Some rare examples have surfaced where someone authored the disc resourcefully and imaginatively to give us refreshing options, and we will encourage them on the Favorite Features thread, so no need to put that here.
Please name the movie TITLE, the type of disc, (DVD, Blu Ray, which release, etc.) Studio if you wish, and list the offending items found there, and where/how they appear. This applies to previous editions as well as current releases.
