DIMM031: Everything on the Bee Movie DVD
There's a new video out by the way but that's beside the point.
Hi, I am of the unpopular opinion that the Bee Movie starring Jerry Seinfeld as Barry B. Benson, is actually pretty good. Like it's not an incredible life-changing movie, but it is funny, quotable, and a just a good kids movie.
I recently got a DVD/CD reader/writer thingy because I love physical media. It is so fun to like unlock a new media format, suddenly this whole division of movies, TV shows, and music is accessible to me. I can just go to the thrift store and get whatever movie I want for like $3 and be able to watch it, forever. That's amazing.
Naturally, with these two things being true, the first thing that I did with my new DVD player was put in the Bee Movie disc that I have had since my childhood. It was... more scratched than I remember it. It scanned normally and I started playing it in VLC.
The disc starts with a looping animation title screen, which has a click interface by the way. You can just click on the buttons with your mouse which I did not expect (I thought it would only accept d-pad controls).
You can click on the top left to just play the movie. Cool, obviously you would be able to do that.
Top right is the special features section, the best button on any DVD. It leads to a section with separate animations, and has 6 special features: Tech of Bee Movie, Inside the Hive: The Cast of Bee Movie, Meet Barry B. Benson, "We Got The Bee" Music Video, Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox, and Previews.
The first one that I watched was Tech of Bee Movie, and it was just like a short thing about how there was apparently a lot of tech that went into this movie. It was also definitely just a way to say "thank you AMD for the computers", because they mentioned that a lot.
Fun fact, Jerry Seinfeld basically made bee movie over a zoom call, because he didn't want to leave his whole life in New York to work on a movie about bees. They rented out a room for him in NYC and put essentially a laptop with zoom on it in there, and that was how they made the movie.
Whether you use this to say, "this is why the movie was bad", or "the movie was surprisingly good given this circumstance" is up to you.
The "We Got The Bee" Music Video was just a spoof of "We Got The Beat" by the Go-Go's. It stars a bunch of kids in bee costumes getting out of a school bus in NYC and go the a Mets game and there are choreographed dancers and custom animations of the characters dancing. They throw black and yellow paint at each other which was probably not the best decision...
The kids get back on the bus and the destination sign changes from Beehatan to Bee Angeles and I thought that that was pretty funny.
And the last one I'll mention in the special features is the Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox. They have a ton of songs from every other Dreamworks movie you could think of in an on demand playlist. So if you want only songs from Shark Tale, you can just navigate over to the Shark Tale section, and you get all of those. Just Shrek 2? Go to the Shrek 2 section. All of this is just on the disc!
Back to the main menu there is Scene Selection on the bottom left, where you can easily skip to any part of the movie. More custom art and animations for this screen. Go to part 5 if you want to see the "Ya like jazz" part.
The Set Up section on the bottom left has a Spanish and French dub, as well as Spanish and French subtitles. Really freaking good and accessible!
And the bottom middle has Dreamworks Kids, which has 5 activities for kids. One was bee facts, one was a game, one was a quiz asking you what bee job you would have. I took it and it told me I would be the fucking bathroom cleaner. It's very much giving the like Wii Fit balance board telling you that you are obese.
The final part of the Dreamworks Kids section is called DVD-ROM. It says that if you put the disc in your computer's DVD drive, there are PDF's that you can print out. These include coloring pages, a sudoku game, and a bunch of recipes! For totally real foods, like "Peanut Butter and Honey Silly Sushi Rollups."
And finally, as if all of the rest of the things weren't enough, there is a cherry on top. The disc comes with a demo of the Bee Movie Video Game made by Activision.
This is a fever dream of a game, but the fact that it was even made at all, the fact that it is on the DVD for you to just download, is crazy!
This disc really got me thinking about how this used to be just the standard amount of content inside of a DVD. All of this extra stuff was just expected from a big movie studio like Dreamworks. And that a lot of this stuff will just be lost to time as streaming services get older and older. DVDs don't last forever, and none of this stuff is included on Netflix. Netflix can barely even give you the correct aspect ratio when you are watching an old show.
I think streaming services are really cool and probably ok for the world, but man look at what we lost. Even for a movie like the fucking Bee Movie, there was so much time and effort put in to every single part of the experience. The menus, the extras, the graphics, the music, the fucking recipes?!?! it was all high quality and completed when the disc came out. I feel like that is a super rare thing currently, where most media is only half completed on release, then you have to install an update that only gets it to 75% complete and the last 25% never comes...
There has been a recent movement by Louis Rossmann about how media and software has gotten complacent and that we need to go back to an age like Clippy. You have probably noticed a lot of people on youtube suddenly have clippy avatars, they are people who agree.
I think that I agree with this, I find it very frustrating just how much stuff I pay for but do not own. I love old technology that has only one purpose. And I love using technology that can let me consume physical media. We are not being unreasonable, we already had this stuff, it was taken away from us. It is not impossible to complete things before you release them, they just don't want to do that.
I hope that looking at what was on the Bee Movie disc was a nice way to see what it used to be like.