The lost art of the DVD menu

The screensaver of our lives

DVD menus for Shrek Fight Club Requiem for a Dream and La La Land.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Screenshot/YouTube, iStock/igorrita)

For almost as long as I've been watching movies, I've been falling asleep to them. As a kid, this would sometimes mean starting something on TV — You've Got Mail, maybe — and waking up hours later to Sleepless in Seattle. Most of the time, though, I watched movies we checked out from our grocery store; as a result, my late night crashes were primarily set to the soundtrack of the DVD menus that would pop back up again after the credits rolled.

While I don't fall asleep on the couch quite as often anymore, I did recently resubscribe to Netflix's DVD delivery service in order to access movies that aren't streaming for free. Now that I'm back to relying on physical media, I've rediscovered the DVD menus I'd been so familiar with in the aughts — an art I'd sorely missed in this age of on-demand viewing, shuttered video stores, and computers without CD drives.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.