One with everything, please.

You suspect that if the DVD had been around in Monty Python's day, they'd have done it with, say, The Life of Brian or The Meaning of Life: "The Slightly Over-Extended and Probably Completely Unnecessary Version." And many of us would snap it right up.

When movies, particularly series of movies, do an especially fine job of conjuring an alternative universe, some want to step in and not come back out again for a long, long time. They want to explore every nook and cranny of that universe as if it were the virtual world of an interactive game (which, of course, many game-makers recognize, and they oblige accordingly). Take the case of Jason Bovberg, for example. He was 11 in 1979 and his father took him to "the new whispered-about R-rated science-fiction horror flick Alien... Little did I realize at the time that my first viewing of Alien would become one of the defining moments of this film fan's life."

The keyword here is "fan." On the one hand, his rave in DVD Talk for the "behemoth" nine-disc Alien Quadrilogy might be expected. For Bovberg, the more Alien the better, right? Not necessarily. A fan could just as well be a harsher critic than anyone if the set were a botched job. A more telling measure of how these multi-disc sets are being received might be Laura Miller's take on the newly released Extended Version of Peter Jackson's Two Towers; she does manage to find "the upside of a DVD made by a bunch of artists who are running low on their initial surge of adrenaline and gathering their strength for the final stretch," but you can tell she's not a deeply dedicated, fan site-building, merchandise-collecting fan. And yet she's had a good time. 43 extra minutes - more than were added to the EE version of Fellowship - may be a few too many, but she's enjoyed them nonetheless.

This more relaxed sort of appreciation is going to be what counts in the end when it comes to studios' deciding to what distances they'll go in creating such packages. Hardcore fandom stretches far and wide enough to extend and sustain very, very few movie universes. But the vast soft middlelands of consumerdom seem to be able to support more than most of us might have imagined. I, at least, found the quote from the VP at Fox Home Entertainment in Peter M Nichols's story in the New York Times today pretty amazing: "For example, a lot of effects shots, especially in Alien3 and Resurrection, were never finished, so the home entertainment division went to the effects houses and got the computer imaging done. It's not a question of cleaning a film up, but having it made as well. We've been able to increase the scope and stature of the restoration department because of the revenue DVD is producing."

It's interesting to ponder what, specifically, is justifying the costs. It can't be, just as an example, the total number of people rabidly eager to sit down and consciously take in 62 hours of Alien stuff (and maybe more than once, too); there are a lot of Alien fans out there that serious about all this, but that many? Could it be precisely the sort of person who could take it or leave it, who can casually wander in and out of that universe and is, in fact, so uninterested in paying such close attention to the film on her own that she'd rather watch it in the company of someone else, as it were, with a commentary track running this time, and a different one next time.

Extras are usually perceived either as hardcore fan fodder or as terribly film school, but in reality, they may be received very differently. Perhaps what the actual packaging of these packages is really saying is, "You kind of liked this movie, remember? Well, for at least a couple of nights, here's a way of experiencing that rather pleasant feeling all over again when there's nothing else on."

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2003 5:43 AM