No matter how much time you spend watching TV and DVDs, it's always comforting to know there are still people out there who spend more hours in front of the panel than you. Many, many, more hours.
Take the fans — whoever they may be — who have the time and ingenuity to stumble upon Easter eggs, those extra features hidden on a DVD and only available after a certain series of actions have been taken with the remote. Those people are like modern-day Sherlock Holmes's (mixed with a bit of those fanboys William Shatner mocked in that classic Saturday Night Live skit.)
Since 2006, Jim O'Connor has been running Hidden DVD Easter Eggs, a fairly extensive database of special features. Not only does the discovery of Easter Eggs make you feel like you're in a special club, O'Connor says Easter eggs are appealing from a value standpoint.
"You pay sometimes as much as $25 for a DVD and you want to get as much out of it as you can," he says.
We asked O'Connor to pick his top 10 DVD Easter eggs, and he obliged. In some cases, a single title yielded multiple picks, proving that some studios and directors take the hidden features more seriously than others.
Plot: Brendan Fraser is granted wishes by the devil (Elizabeth Hurley).
Instructions: When you go to any of the bonus materials menus, just point the cursor to the right instead of up or down. A devilish Elizabeth Hurley appears. Select her.
Egg: "There's a deleted scene for one of the wishes, in which Fraser wishes to be a rock star," says O'Connor. "So it's not just a scene, but a whole segment that was cut from the film. And it's only available on the DVD as an Easter egg."
Plot: Johnny Depp does pirate stuff
Instructions: On the Moonlight Serenade Scene Progression menu, navigate down to "Main Menu" then hit down to highlight the molar tooth on the impaled skeleton. Click on it.
Egg: "All the Pirates two-disc editions have tons of Easter eggs all over the place. This one is an interview with Keith Richards talking about how Johnny Depp based the character of Jack Sparrow on him."
Plot: Pixar animated flick in which a Parisian rat dreams of being a gourmet chef.
Instructions: While on the Main Menu, there are two pots in the background. When a rat pops out of the one on the left, click on it.
Egg: "There's a little gag in the movie about rat poison, and so Pixar went and created a fake TV commercial for the rat poison. The commercial has a late 1950s style to it I like because they actually went back and did new CG just for the DVD."
Plot: The prequels chronicle Anakin Skywalkers journey to becoming Darth Vader.
Instructions: From the main menu, type in 1138.
Egg: "On Episodes I and II, you'll get the outtakes reel, the gag reel. So on the second film, for example, you'll see Jango Fett doing a tap dance in the rain in front of his ship. On the third film, Revenge of the Sith, instead of the outtakes, you get a hip-hop Yoda. It's a CG Yoda doing a rap and hip-hop dance moves with two clone soldiers behind him snapping his fingers."
Plot: The Republic builds a clone army to quell separatists.
Instructions: On disc 2, press enter on Dex's Restaurant. Go to the main menu, then go to the left and highlight the poster behind Dex.
Egg: "You'll get access to the guerrilla marketing Lucasfilm did for Episode I. They posted a bunch of flyers around colleges with web addresses and those tear-off tabs at the bottom."
Plot: Pixar film about a family of superheroes.
Instructions: On Disc 2, allow the Set Up menu to go through its full cycle of animation. Scroll down to the Setup option and hit Enter. Once on the Setup screen, an icon of an Omnidroid will soon appear in the upper right corner. Press your Up arrow to highlight the Omnidroid, then click on Enter.
Egg: "You can find a sock puppet version of the film. It's not quite as long as the actual film itself, and the dialogue is somewhat edited, but it's acted out with sock puppets. It makes you wonder about the combined sanity of the people who work at Pixar."
Plot: See above.
Instructions: On Disc 2, allow the Deleted Scenes menu to go through its full cycle of animation. Have the back arrow button already highlighted. Near the end of the cycle, an icon of an Omnidroid will appear in the upper right corner. Press your Down button quickly.
Egg: "There's a deleted scene of Dash, the son, playing a prank on his teacher. In the finished film, we only see the teacher complaining about Dash and showing still photos of what he did. This scene actually shows the entire gag."
Plot: A young boy enrolls in a school for wizards.
Instructions: On Disc 2, go to Diagon Alley and pick the key, go get your money at Gringotts bank, then go buy your wand. It'll take you three tries to get your wand. Next, go to the main screen and go to the Classrooms area. Go to Transfiguration but don't click Enter on it. Just highlight and push the Down arrow. Two owls will appear below the torch. Highlight the owls and click Enter twice. The torch fire will turn off and you will be told that you have entered the third floor corridor. Now you'll need to answer some questions. The answer to the first is "the flute." The next choice involves keys; pick the key in the center. At Snape's potions, choose the gold colored liquid in the round bottle. Once you select it, you'll see the Mirror of Erised with the stone in it. Select the stone.
Egg: "This is the only way to get to the deleted scenes, and that's why they don't have any Easter eggs on the other Harry Potter films. I think what happened was, people were getting a little ticked off."
Plot: Second installment in director Peter Jackson's fantasy trilogy
Instructions: On disc 1, go to the chapter menu, and find Chapter 30. From there, hit the Down arrow once, then press the Enter button.
Egg: "They've included Gollum's acceptance speech from the MTV Movie Awards. It's funny beyond all belief. Half of it has to be bleeped out. Andy Sirkus, who does the voice of Gollum, is accepting the award for best CGI Character. Golum rushes in and grabs the award out of his hand and starts cussing up a storm. He's going off on Peter Jackson and then starts in about Dobby, the house elf from Harry Potter, being gay."
Plot: First installment in the trilogy
Instructions: On disc 1, highlight chapter 27 in the Scene Selection menu. Arrow down once.
Egg: "This is another MTV Movie Awards skit. It's Jack Black playing a hobbit and Sarah Michelle Gellar playing an elf. The two of them have been spliced into the Council of Elrond scene. This is when they're deciding what to do with the ring. In the skit, all the hobbits went out on a drinking binge the night before, and Jack Black had the One Ring put into a Prince Albert piercing. It's the funniest thing on earth. It comes with introduction from Peter Jackson. Most people don't realize what a sick sense of humor Jackson has, so it only makes sense that he decided to put these in as the Easter eggs on his films."
P.S. Easter eggs exclusive to Blu-Ray are still fairly rare. Many of the hi-def releases do come with eggs (The Simpsons Movie, Dan In Real Life, and the upcoming X-Files: I Want to Believe, for example), but more often than not, they're the same hidden features available on regular DVD. As the Blu-Ray market grows, expect to see more exclusives.