When the combined Disney/Pixar venture Up was released on DVD, lots of people bought it. Other people rented it, either at a store or through mail-rental services like Netflix.
And the people who rented it found a funny thing: There was no closed-captioning. Of course, if you're a deaf person, "funny" isn't so funny, because closed-captioning is the main way you watch movies and TV shows. Lip-reading isn't always easy with folks on a screen.
It turns out that the company had pressed a bunch of no-frills copies of the movie so those could be released to the rental services. Lots of DVDs these days come with special add-ons, such as "making of" short features, previews, deleted scenes, documentaries and so on. Movie companies rely on those add-ons to sell more expensive editions of the DVD.
On the one hand, someone with Disney lacks some gray matter if they figure closed-captioning as a "special feature." For someone without hearing, it's not an add-on. It's vital to their understanding the movie they're watching.
And this move also says something interesting about all of these "special" add-ons. Namely, that they're not all that special. Evidently the company figures that if you just rent the full-featured edition and watch the extras once, you'll see all you want to. They're not special enough to watch more than once. Which makes me wonder why they're special enough to add ten or twenty bucks to the price of the DVD, but I'm betting that the movie studios would develop their own hearing problem if people started asking them that.
Depending on the movie and what extras are available, my kids watch the extras as many times as they watch the movie. Sometimes more.
ReplyDeleteYes, but they're children... ;-)
ReplyDelete(and of course, sometimes the extras are better than the movie, but I wouldn't be renting those DVDs anyway)