I disagree; it's because we prefer disks with very simple menus, and care very little about the special features.

Let's think about the alternatives:

VHS: No menus; it would just start the ^%$^# movie (or would have trailers that were easy to fast forward through.)

Streaming: Standard menu no matter what you're watching, and then just starts the ^%$#^$ movie.

FWIW: Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube are all much "faster" than my BluRay player when it comes to getting to the actual content.

Regarding the special features: They were very cool on late 1990s and early 2000s disks, because most of them were promotional bits that would air on TV to promote the movie. They quickly devolved to be more like home movies filmed on the set where the cast and crew would just slap each others' backs for an hour. Useful maybe if you were cast or crew reminiscing, but otherwise rather boring compared to a planned interview or documentary.

This is totally normal, compared to VHS that often had trailers before the feature.

Full of stylized video transitions, menu selections that were fully graphical (not using the 2-bit overlays, DVD Studio Pro supported Photoshop layers), pointless special features (gotta fill out that list on the back of the box), poorly-translated subtitle tracks, and easter eggs in various menus when you hit a special button combination on your remote.

It was a really fun format to mess around with!

It's ironic that the author chose the much simpler/inferior Shrek 2 DVD menu to showcase.

I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.

They might be bland and boring, but the menus employed today by the vast majority of discs produced are infinitely preferable in my opinion. Play Movie/Episode, Audio, Subtitles, Special Features. They're made from just a few templates and generally work the same across all discs from a studio. Doesn't bog you down with cutesy animations or wild layout choices, lets you just watch your movie in peace.

This was used to reward people who had actually paid for the movie with being forced to endure obnoxious and long “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy appeals before they could watch the main feature.

An interesting effect of them doing this is that it made the pirated version of the product objectively better than the legal version. Great thinking by movie studios.

There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...

Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMztEUXXF00

They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.

I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.

Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.

The only use I had for DVD menus is adjusting subtitles and dubbing. I found that changing the language in the video was a good way to study a foreign language.

I miss them.

1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.

2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.

I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.

I was just utterly incapable of conducting business in these screens, but it could have been a massive web of combinatronics between poorly engineered hardware in the form of remote control buttons, low patience, and some cognitive dissonance after so many years of downloading warez films on Limewire.

- randomized menu backgrounds/environments

IIRC there was a game (maybe more than one?) about picking parts as they went by on a conveyor belt in order to build a robot. At the end it would play a little animation based on the parts you chose, if you missed parts or chose bad/incompatible parts, the robot would break down in hilarious fashion.