Requiem for the DVD menu

Jessica MacLeish on the DVD menu, a disappearing digital relic.

“Play the movie! Ja, play!”

That dialogue, said by a German pig, is part of the soundtrack to the DVD menu of Shrek. I know this because I once fell asleep while watching Shrek and woke up later to hear it on a loop. Admittedly, this sounds like torture—the same line of dialogue assaulting my ears over and over again in a dark room. But this was once such a common occurrence that there’s a website dedicated to recreating the disorienting moment of being jolted awake by the DVD menu. The selection is limited, but it's a fun, nostalgic gimmick: A website like You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD memorializes the specific universality of the DVD menu experience.

Now that streaming has become the dominant form of at-home entertainment in recent years, DVDs and Blu-rays are quickly vanishing. The end of Netflix’s DVD mail rental service this September dealt another blow to DVD access. And as the DVD becomes a relic of the past, so too is the DVD menu.

If you ever watched movies at home before streaming, you know the DVD menu. It’s the screen that pops up when you put a disc in, the one that offers you options: play the movie, watch the original trailer, view extras such as director’s commentary or deleted scenes. Some DVD menus are mini works of art, animated with accompanying music or dialogue. Take the dizzying Cars menu, which features the titular cars zooming around a race track (and has 5 million views on YouTube!). Or feast your eyes on the Legally Blonde menu, which features an instrumental song, as well as clips from the movie and Legally Blonde-themed stock art graphics. The Fight Club menu hints at the chaotic ride to come, as does the Everything Everywhere All at Once menu (yes, DVDs are still made for recent popular films).

As the film scholar Tanya Goldman pointed out to me, “there’s artistry” in the DVD menu, as it’s designed in a way that “aligns with the film’s aesthetic.” Whether or not you, the viewer, consciously note that aesthetic is almost beside the point. Maybe you aren’t even meant to. The menus seamlessly fit into the movie’s overall packaging while also serving as a portal to the viewing experience.

For a time, there was no watching a movie at home without engaging with that interim portal. The menu represents possibility, and the opportunity to take a beat before diving into either the movie or the special features—but while still being in the world of what you’re about to watch. Maybe you’re not yet watching That Thing You Do!, but you’re hearing “That Thing You Do” play, a lovable earworm that you will forever associate with the movie. There’s no feature in the streaming world that’s quite comparable. Streaming services Netflix plays a clip of the movie/TV show on its landing page, but users can disable the autoplay function. Other apps sometimes house bonus features on content landing pages—HBO does this with original series, for example—but the pages themselves aren’t pieces of entertainment. That’s because streamers treat films and TV as interchangeable and virtual commodities, here one day and gone the next. With DVDs, each film is treated as a tangible, unique object. Most importantly, it becomes something you can own.

The DVD menu is interactive, and offers the viewer the opportunity to watch a movie or TV show in a non-linear manner. In the “classic model of watching film, you’re sort of a passive audience,” Goldman says. “Whereas [the DVD menu presents] this interesting model of being much more interactive, because you’re able to…click through and go to alternate features.”

The gateway function, the stylized graphics, and the non-linear potential of exploring a story, these are all part of the DVD menu. The actual menus are also a “ubiquitous artifact,” Goldman says. She suggests that the DVD menu “serves a paratextual function,” the way a film’s trailer or contemporaneous reviews might—paratextual referring to “all the materials that surround the main text” that provide additional context for understanding the text (in this case, film) itself. That interpretation casts the DVD menu as an important piece of film history. And she worries that “no one in the film preservation world is thinking to preserve these [menus].”

It's not too late for an intrepid film archivist to do so. But here, today, I say a soft farewell to a technological relic that once touched many people’s lives, mostly for function but not without its own artistic flair. RIP to the DVD menu as a portal into a world of a movie or TV show.

Though I can’t say I’ll miss that Shrek pig chirping at me.

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