Ordinary Gweilo

My son called me this afternoon whilst I was at work, complaining that his DVD of ‘Spy Kids’ was in Chinese and our helper couldn’t switch the language to English. This is true – for some reason, the normal method of pressing the ‘language’ button the remote control does nothing on this DVD. Instead you have to go back to the initial menu, select ‘audio options’ and then choose from a selection of different versions of Dolby, some in English, some in Chinese.

I love DVDs, especially now that they are so cheap. This one only cost US$3, and there are plenty of titles available for less than that. But why is that the people who design DVDs can’t keep it simple. I do not want animated menus, I do not want to have to select subtitles or language options from a menu, I don’t really want a summary of the episode I am about to watch, I certainly don’t want a series of advertisements for other products to appear automatically before the film starts. If there really is a demand for this stuff, surely it must be possible to make it optional!

The Simpsons Season 2 DVD really annoys me because when you switch it on you get an irritating and very noisy screen where the four main characters heads spin around very rapidly. Then you have to press ‘play’ and it happens again. Then one more time. It wasn’t even funny the first time, guys!

‘Ice Age’ manages to excel itself by forcing you to plough through the animated menus to switch on the subtitles, and several Disney titles have a succession of trailers for other films that you can only bypass if you press the ‘menu’ button before they start. And is it really necessary to force us to watch a Dolby advertisement? It almost makes you want to buy pirate DVDs!