Games, gags, hidden treasures, extra films and clips of the director cooking aloo gobi … is it any wonder the hashtag #DVDmenu has 15m views? We look back on an explosively creative era
t’s likely that you’ve seen Thomas Fletcher’s work, but it’s also likely that you’ve never thought twice about it. Twenty or so years ago, the designer’s job required him to shove his screaming face through a sheet of latex, create 3D models of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, motion-capture a dancer seductively sauntering across a room and play around with props from thefilms.
At the dawn of the DVD, menus were essential, as they listed – sometimes in very inventive ways – all the extras that were intended to enhance your viewing pleasure. “We had to convince people what made a DVD so special,” says Fletcher, who worked on some of the very first to be released in the US. The new format offered interactivity: games, gags, alternative scenes and hidden extras known as “Easter eggs” that persuaded people to drop £20 on their first ever Digital Versatile Disc.
Is this just pointless nostalgia or is it right to mourn the lost art of the DVD menu? Some turn-of-the-century landing pages were so imaginative they cut through into popular consciousness: 2003’s House of 1,000 Corpses featured adirectly addressing the viewer, while the aforementioned Harry Potter DVD let viewers choose a wand, cast spells and solve puzzles to access deleted scenes.
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