Blog From The Bench

I got a stack of screeners in the mail today, and inside the A Tree of Palme case, I found something I have not seen in a while. There was a 3-page booklet, filled with design art, interviews with the creator of the film and some other text. It was very pleasant to sit down and read this on paper, rather than straining to read it on a television screen in print as large and fuzzy as a wooly mammoth.

Early on in the world of DVD, there were tons of these inserts, which were always a point of excitement when I first opened up a new DVD case. Now, all we usually get is a single page with the chapter list, but we often don't even get that anymore. Is this a way of saving a bit of cash? Do they think we don't care?

These are the first things that start to disappear, but it won't be long before we start to see other things vanish as well. When I am at work at the video store, customers often ask why there are two discs for many releases (they never seem to figure out the trend). It's special features, I tell them, to which they invariably respond: oh, that's stupid. Does anyone actually watch that crap?.

Yup, some of us do, and it's the same ones that like to get a nice insert with our discs, and the same ones that made DVD a big phenomenon in the first place. Hopefully, enough of us still care that we won't begin to lose the added value on DVDs.