As a dude who watches a lot of movies (not that you’d notice, given that I haven’t updated my movie website in thirty thousand years), I naturally have encountered DVDs from a wide range of sources and manufactures. Often, these DVDs fill me with rage.

Attention, the makers of laser-encrusted picture wheels! You should be listening! It’s not just I who demands the following changes.

1. That shit at the beginning—FBI warnings and such—should always be skippable. DVDs from some studios will let you and those from others won’t, but all of them should. Home video is not exactly a cutting edge idea; we’ve all seen the warning a billion times, we all know what it says. We should be able to skip gaily past it because we fucking know already, leave us alone! It gets even worse when you can’t skip all the other legal disclaimers (Paramount, I’m looking at you right now). You know, the message about how “the opinions expressed in the interviews and commentary” yadda yadda yadda. We’ve seen that so often we all know it just as well as the FBI warning. Throwing it up on the screen in multiple languages, each as unskippable as the last, is just pissing us all off.

2. DVD menus should be as quiet as the grave. We don’t need a repeating fifteen seconds of music, we don’t need loud-ass clips from every episode of whatever show is on the disc (this means you, Family Guy), and we for damn sure don’t need the eternal screaming that comes with the menu for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We just need a quiet, unmoving screen with easily differentiated choices: “Play Movie,” “Scene Selection,” “Special Features,” “Setup.” BAM! You’re done.

3. If your DVD package includes two discs, and all the special features are on disc two, don’t give the menu on disc one a “Special Features” button that only yields the message “Insert Disc Two to Access Special Features.” What is that shit? If there aren’t any special features on disc one, just don’t put it on the menu at all.

4. Nobody is buying a DVD because they can’t wait to be entertained by the menu screens. They don’t need to move around and perform all kinds of tricks every time you select something. The Star Wars movies are particularly egregious examples of this. Any time you select anything, the menu has to swoop around and show you something fancy. WHO CARES? If I want to see moving cameras and exciting spaceships, I’ll watch the goddamn movie, and your damned menus are only postponing that activity. God help you if you want to use the scene selection on a Star Wars movie. There are a certain number of chapters on each screen (four, I think), and each time you move to a different set of four you’re treated to some bullshit where the background picture moves around. I don’t need this! Granted, in this case each movement only takes about three seconds, but considering it should take exactly zero seconds it’s very annoying.

5. If you’re watching a black-and-white movie with subtitles—Wild Strawberries, for instance—and the subtitles are white, it turns out you can’t fucking see them. Yellow subtitles on a black and white movie, guys. Common sense!

6. Finally, it goes without saying that the makers of those DVDs where, if you try to skip any of the million unnecessary legalese screens it goes all the way back to the first and makes you sit through them all again, should be executed.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Bizarre Nostalgia
• The State of Star Trek
• My Superman Woes
• Missed Opportunity
• The Problem with Home Video