How about Favorite DVD Menu? The animated menus featured on the Shout Factory DVDs can be entertaining in their own right (which almost makes up for the lack of any scene selection menus) For me, it can be a bit hard to decide, so I’ll narrow it down to three Second runner-up: Tom fails to make Crow his Final Sacrifice (a fun bit of slapstick in that one). First runner-up: Tom and Crow trek through The Lost Continent (love how, just before the loop starts over, Crow say, “Haven’t we seen this before?”). And the winner: It’s the Wacky Fun Time Revue starring Tom Servo and his Devil Doll (Debbie!!!!!).
Then again, there are people who hate the Shout menus. If that’s the case, then go and name your favorite Rhino menus, whether due to a music selection or a chapter title. For me, it would be I accuse My Parents for Tom’s singing.
Alert reader Troy Thomas agrees, noting:
My choice would be “The Crawling Eye,” probably because I love the silly visuals mixed with the booming, dramatic score from the movie. A runner-up would be “Robot Monster.” I love that conversation the bots have that’s taken from riffs in the episode.
I think the raw violence of the menu for Episode 1005- Blood Waters of Dr. Z would be my pick. What’s yours?
By they way, for your reference pleasure, the DVD lists are here (we haven’t updated it with the latest set yet…maybe this weekend if I can find the time…
) to help our users cope with "trolls" and other commenters whom they find annoying. Go to our
My favorite are the quietest ones. I hate the loud blaring ones, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what the hell all the noise is from.
One night I woke up scared to death from my ‘Prince of Space’ dvd.
Also the ones that utilize music that had absolutely nothing to do with the episodes, like the crappy music they used for ‘Girl in Gold Boots’. I wish they would just go with silence.
Also I am annoyed by ones that take a long time to get to the ‘Play’ button. The longer it takes, the more annoyed I get. I don’t even like the door sequence.
Really dislike the childish, cartoon art for the covers and I totally ignore those animated intros. I’m just interested in the movie, not feel like I’m watching a Nickelodeon short.
I kind of liked the Monster-A-Go-Go (Monster-A-Go-Go, Joel!) opening. The swinging 60s music playing, and Tom “dancing”.
As for the Shout! Factory releases, I think I’m gonna have to go with the entire Gamera series. Having Gamera coming at you through the tunnel is creepy (not really), and then seeing what those little nut-nuts Tom & Crow are up to…
The intros do seem like a fun little bonus, hardly the reason I buy the sets, but still creative. I like the Jack Frost menu, with Father Mushroom popping in and annoying the bots.
Totally agree about Gamera running through the tunnel; suprisingly effective & clever.
I agree with #2. I just want to watch the episode. Some of the intros take too long just to get to the Play button. Just let me watch the show!
I guess Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders was a good menu for Rhino because of the music. A few other Rhino menus had good music too.
As for Shout, I guess Bride of the Monster, with Tor getting attacked by the octopus. XD
watching Night of the Bloodbeast on Rhino, which includes the Turkey Day version, Turkey Day ’95 intros, and Original Night of the Blood Beast Trailer. The Turkey Day Intros are a hoot with Dr. Forrester, Jack Perkins, Mr. B. Natural, Pitch, Kitten with a Whip, Michael Feinstein, and Clayton’s mother.
I love the SHOUT Menus. Especially BRIDE OF THE MONSTER and THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS. More Tor Johnson!
#1: The PRINCE OF SPACE Menu IS Quiet. There’s just the spinning Lemon Zester of Death and a New-Age Yanni music hook going on. (I’m watching it right now.)
Also, RHINO was very thrifty with their menus using the same music for different episodes. The music for MONSTER A-GO GO can be heard on TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.
And I have an Idea for another discussion: What is your favorite DVD? Not just the movie but the way the Disc is laid out.
For instance I was impressed with the way you could choose either the Normal or Turkey Day version of NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST
Are you guys actually watching these things? Or do you wrap them in plastic like comic books?
On the MANOS DVD (the Rhino Essentials one), the DVD menu is a looping of the burning hand and, you guessed it, the gripping Torgo theme. Go ahead and put it on late at night and fall asleep. It will invade your sweet dreams, turning all to darkness and horrible nightmarish images.
I actually really love the new Shout! animated menus. I think it’s quite inventive how they string together sound clips.
Currently I enjoy “Devil Fish”.
Also . . . I set my dvd player to “repeat all” if I’m leaving an episode on at night so that the menu never comes back up.
Put me down as someone else who loves the “Lost Continent” one. I particularly love them using Crow’s “Rules of the road boys, see anything shoot to kill… I mean don’t shoot it if it’s going to advance the plot though” line.
I also like the Gamera ones so far. I think the idea of Gamera invading the SoL is pretty funny.
The new menus are sort of like those “voice bubble” covers for the old Rhino VHS’s, only with actual quotes from the riffing–They can’t market licensed images of Joel or Mike, so Shout and the Brains can only market the comic-strip adventures of Crow & Servo on the covers and in the menus.
Between the “goofy PD music library” Rhino menus and the “cult in-joke” Shout menus, hard to choose, but the Shouts are less annoying and don’t look like they were thrown together by an office intern in five minutes. (Ten, maybe…)
Although I miss the punny cult-line chapter titles back when the Rhinos actually had Scene Selection menus.
(Haven’t seen the Gamera set yet, but “Magic Voyage of Sinbad”‘s was pretty funny, with Crow, Servo, and a mouth-animated Sinbad in the dragon boat:
o/` “Is there a place for me?…”o/`
“Is there a place you could SHUT UP?”
“‘Kill me, kill me!'”)
Love the menus of BRIDE OF THE MONSTER and BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS as well as the one for GAMERA VS. ZIGRA(love the Monty Python foot that squashes Crow).Of course I want to get to the episode right away(if only they had scene selection,but I can live without it),so I don’t think a minute(or however long they are)or 2 is too long before I watch the show..As far as the Rhino menus,I can’t think of one that stands out among the others.
I really like the Shout! animated menus. The two Master Ninja animations are fun. I think they both mix audio clips from both episodes. I’m surprised by all the vitriol thrown at the menus. Isn’t it fun to see your favorite characters in new adventures, even if the stories aren’t from the original creative group?
EricJ #12: Is that why Joel or Mike aren’t on the Shout! covers? I thought that was just because the bots were the only constants across the whole series.
I was lost with the whole “American Gothic” motif of the first GAMERA menu. Was it just for the purpose of taking a picture?
It was great to see Cambot though.
Sorry, not a fan of animated menu’s. I prefer the DAP DVD’s where I can just hit enter/play and get right to the riffing action.
@14 – Crow and Servo are characters that can be copyrighted by the Brains (they’re not, like, real, y’know), while Joel Hodgson and Michael J. Nelson are real people who have to be paid. (Especially Mike, he needs the money.)
Guess which was cheaper for the website/license-image to market. :)
“Favorite DVD menus” ????????
We are really scraping the bottom of the discussion thread barrel aren’t we?
:-))
Jack Frost’s menu. Crow and Servo get annoyed by the mushroom guy, Crow turns into a bear, and Servo calls Crow a “feeb.” What’s not to like?
Robot Monster’s menu is pretty good also. You got the bubble machine, Tom contacting Crow and Joel on that device, and Ro-man riding around on a dinosaur.
I think whoever puts those things together deserves a little credit. Not just coming up with the little skit for the bots to act out and doing the animation, but also combing through the episode to find stuff the bots can say that make it sound like they’re having a conversation, reacting to whatever’s thrown at them, etc.
I’ll have to second ROBOT MONSTER (“Here comes rompin’, rowdy Ro-Man!”) and DEVIL DOLL (“Your life is in danger and you may die at any moment.” “Why so negative?”) and add BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (“Hey, hey! Bela, don’t even think about it!”).
Well… Time for booze.
While I appreciate the time and effort that Shout! puts into their MST3K DVD menus (and actually find myself enjoying most of them) I’m with torgo367: the Rhino DVD’s “Manos” menu with the haunting ‘Torgo’ theme looping endlessly in the background is my favorite by far. Not once when I’ve watched this DVD have I been unable to let the DVD just sit there for minutes while the charred hand and looped song just completely lull me into a state of hypnotic anticipation. A stellar one-of-a-kind experiment like “Manos” deserved a weird one-off DVD menu, and Rhino delivered it back in the day.
#18 That’s where the best beer comes from
Favorite DVD menu: Devil Fish (“After this beer, we should have a beer sometime.”)
Most disturbing DVD menu: Girl in Lovers Lane (Horn sections are anathema!)
Rather have the scene selection menus. Come on, I can make them for my DVDs using a $100 piece of shareware.
To me those cartoon intros are a little childish and not a bit interesting. Sorry to be negative but that’s how I feel.
I like the menu to the Tormented Dvd. Seeing Servo fall off the lighthouse was funny.
I can’t recall them all off-hand, but some that come to mind are:
Gunslinger Girl, with cowpokes Tom and Crow peeking out from corners ala the intro
Mitchell & The Hellcats, for the looping theme music
I always like it when Joel/Mike and the ‘bots mimic the movie, dress up like its characters, or make mock-sets and such, and to me the menus are often a kind of an extension of that, so I quite enjoy them.
Rather have the scene selection menus. Come on, I can make them for my DVDs using a $100 piece of shareware.
Back before the DAP started making their own burnables, I used to have to burn my own disks from my old tapes on Apple’s iDVD program–
And, in true Rhino tradition, always put cute chapter titles on the scene selections (“Sampo Means Flavor”, “Failure Frolics”), and funny episode-appropriate background art (foggy scenes of rock-climbing for Lost Continent)
…Now that’s how you do it, Shout. No need to cut corners about it.
Alert reader DICKWEED 1 ask… What’s the weakest “Weekend Discusion” ever???!!! LOL!! Have a great weekend all!!!!!
The hot tube one from Zombie Nightmare.
The new Gamera menus are some of the best. I especially like the one for Gamera Vs. Guiron. The Magic Voyage Of Sinbad and Crawling Eye are also quite good.
INtersting topic, if for nothing other than I haven’t seen most of the menus, and while they aren’t real BBI material or even funny sometimes, they did make the effort. I was amused by the Zombie Nightmare hot tub, but even better, I like the “Crash of the Moons.” The lines all made sense strung togther to show them sitting around watching (and controlling) the crash, all with audio from the show.
Warrior of the lost World just for the theme playing in the background.
I actually have an affinity for the Rhino menus. Especially the later ones. You could argue that they paved the way for the Shout DVD menus. It would have sucked if all the episode menus were the same thing. It would prove the company didn’t care about the show *Cough* Fox Home Video *Cough*
This discussion thread is about as silly as the animated opening scenes. Not really worth talking about. Maybe next week we can discuss which host has the better fingernails.
I much prefer my Skyroniter dvds that just have play and no sound. Then when I wake up in the middle of the night I’m not blasted by noise.
I hate waiting for the play button, and forward through it until I get to an opening segment.
And I didnt say Prince of Space was loud, it just scared the sh!t out of me because I had the volume up from listening to the movie from another room. I fell asleep only to wake up to these weird sounds throughout the house.
================
On the shout ‘Devil Doll’, why did they change the pitch of the riffs spoken? that made no sense to me.
===========
I rarely make use of the extras, but the Devil Doll ‘making of’ thing was pretty neat. But rather than figurines, I think something I could use, like free money would be better.
@34
Actually, I’m maybe a little embarassed to admit this but I’ve probably spent waaaayyy too much time trying to figure out Joel’s rings. He pretty much always wore the one with the red stone and I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s a high school or college class ring or what. And then there’s the elusive one that would appear and disappear from the middle finger of his left hand….. Yeah, I’m weird.
I like a few of the little “skits” in concept. But I HATE HATE HATE that they are in CGI. No! That is completely wrong for MST3K! How hard could it have been to make some puppets and a cheap set and do this?!
First off I’m glad we have anything to do with the show. The DVD’S, the stuff they put on the DVD’S, the boxed sets and the singles, the figurines and the stress ball. But most of all I’m glad for this page and all the time that goes into it, I look at this every day and have been for years now. Really scraping the bottom of the discussion thread barrel aren’t we? #18. Why don’t you take over the upkeep of this page, and use your vast knowledge of M.S.T. to keep us all entertained. The one thing I’ve noticed after this many years is that some of the fans love to whine about everything. The Roman numerals ,the figurines, the art work, the stress ball color, the mini posters, the bonus features, the price of the sets. Sad to say the days gonna come when all the movies will be out and the weekend discussion thread will be Remember when we all had something to whine about? OR WELCOME TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL BABY!
I don’t object to the menus, but I’d rather cut straight to PLAY, and I don’t prefer the fact that they run in a loop.
Like others have noted, it totally freaks you out if you fall asleep to a DVD — the music and sound clips invade my dreams, turning them into nightmares, with the bots saying the same things over and over and over and it JUST WON’T STOP.
Freaks me out! I have one of two episodes that I’ve re-recorded so as to skip the menus for this reason. “Killer Shrews” was the first of these–I literally had nightmares of kids chanting those lyrics at me, and they wouldn’t stop no matter how I abused them. Not a happy memory.
First off, I’m with 38. Some (emphasis on some) of you are just whining for the sake of it. I don’t mind someone, like Fathermushroom at 39, saying that they prefer getting to the menu and I myself think the Gamera ones are way too long. But come on, be civil about it for goodness sake.
As for the topic at hand, I go with Merlin’s Shop for Rhino as that music is soothing. Plus, I am also one of those who falls asleep to MST eps, so I much prefer quiet intros rather than loud ones.
For Shout, I go with the Master Ninja intros. Good, fun stuff.
BTW, and this might be a subset of the topic, but I have to be negative and tell Rhino that I will never forgive them for the Great American Spider Invasion menu. Well, the menu is actually all right, but if you go to any other choice off the main menu (the Jukebox or even the Scene Selections menus), you get a really loud and obnoxious spider sound and visual. That freaks me out every time.
The Monty Python-themed menu for GAMERA VS. ZIGRA instantly became my favorite MST menu of all time.
It’s rather disheartening to see Sampo feature a topic I suggested for the Weekend Discussion and right out the gate the sour grapes whine about it being barrel scraping. To you I say consider this. There have been more than a few times when the Weekend Discussion topic bored me to tears. But rather than taking the dickweed route by using the offending thread to air my complaints about how lame the topic is, I simply skip it and hope that the next one will be more interesting. Try it. You’ll be glad you did.
@SuperSwift: Oh come on, now you’re just being silly. Mike’s nails own Joel’s, no question about it. Joel’s totally got the better set of eyebrows though.
Me, I always liked the Parts: The Clonus Horror menu, with its clone Toms. It’s a nice reference to all the Tom clones that pop up throughout the series.
Obviously, my opriginal suggestion was written before I got my Gamera set. I too love the Monty Python-ness of the Gamera Vs. Zigra menu.
With all due respect, this is a rather poor discussion topic for somebody who was waiting a week to contribute to find.
Having said that, my favorite menu is the one for “The Crawling Eye” for the way it almost parodies the set of the show’s first season.
Now to get back to the “Sinbad” problem, I’d like to suggest, (if you shall allow me to do so) for a new discussion thread to be:
Your Personal Appeal to Get Criterion to do a Treatment of the Movie,
of course, if you disagree, tell why.
Also, if you WOULD like to give your appeal, please give suggestions for special features, menus, artwork, back-cover summaries, the works.
Thank you for your time.
42: Again, with all due respect, we’re not whining about your topic. Some of us, me for instance, having read your suggestion, have realized for the first time our dissatisfaction with some of the menus, especially, for me at least, the early SHOUT! ones, which seem very cheap to me, more so than some of the RHINO ones. Of course, we are still indebted to both companies for allowing us to see high-quality copies of our favorite show.
I like the menu screens. I think they’re a nice little bonus. Especially the Shout ones. My picks would probably be for ‘Jack Frost’, ‘Lost Continent’, and ‘Santa Claus’. They did a great job on the others, too. Especially for ‘Crash of the Moons’, with the bits of dialog from the episode turned into conversation.
Sorry for those who thought this thread was kind of a dud. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ll try to do better next week.
@39 fathermushroom et al – it was kind of nice falling asleep with the “Mitchell” theme music; not so with the Starfighters military drums (not from the film; why couldn’t they have the lame jazz chorus from refueling?) I woke up cranky, but hey, that’s my fault.
My old roommate and I had a music room, and several times if I was napping he would jam an incredibly annoying riff, add a few dozen vocal overdubs that sounded like quacking. Then he would go to work with the volume cranked up and looping, knowing I would wake up hours later with hellish nightmares. I didn’t have the heart to do it back.
#48 – No apologies needed, Sampo. I thought this was a good weekend discussion thread.