My top 5 favorite DVD menu screens. What, you think I don't have a top 5 list for something as dumb as this?
5. Van Wilder
A never-ending loop of a big-boobied girl preparing to take her shirt off, set to this song. It offers little else, so depending on your feelings on big-boobied girls, #5 is either too high or too low.
4. Are You Afraid of the Dark?
This show was super-creepy when I was a youngster. A few years ago I bought a bunch of the DVDs and we had our own Midnight Society at Culligan Manor, but it was mostly for the laughs, as pretty much nothing holds up into your mid-twenties (there was one moment in one episode that was legitimately scary, and it was doubly so because we weren't expecting to be scared at all. Then we re-wound it and watched it enough times so that it became funny and not scary anymore. Can't be going to bed with nightmares now.) But the theme song and DVD menu screen remain creepy, in my opinion. How sweet was Nickelodeon in the early 90's?
3. Snatch
Back in our poker heyday (for our group of friends, early 2004-late 2005) when Ike built a sweet table from scratch, we all had our own sets of chips, and our "poker night" quickly became multiple nights per week, multiple hours per night (to the chagrin of the girls we usually partied with, who quickly became an afterthought) we used to put DVDs on in the background, so there would be some background entertainment once you were out of a hand, or out of the game altogether. A lot of times we'd just pick one movie and play it over and over and over and over-- a big reason why I burned through my first Anchorman DVD within a year. One time we played Snatch, and when the movie ended, it flipped back to the menu screen, and since it was an intense hand, nobody popped up to restart the movie for awhile. That's when we realized that this song was fucking awesome, and so we began just putting in the DVD and never starting it, just letting it sit on the menu screen for the duration of the night. You'd be surprised how many consecutive hours you can listen to this song before it starts getting old. Go ahead, try it. I'll wait.
2. Old School
Everybody around my age knows this little tune from the menu screen, even if you don't know it yet (down towards the bottom of the screen is where you can preview the song without downloading it.) If you haven't woken up on someone else's couch at 6 am, hung to the gills, people passed out all around you, empty beer cans everywhere, with this menu screen blaring at the highest possible volume.....then either you did not go to college in the previous decade-- or you did, and your college experience was incomplete.
(Also in this category for me personally is Anchorman, Zoolander, and Night at the Roxbury. Most of these instances are when Paul and I would pass out together, and there was a 98% chance that one of those three movies was playing at the end of the night. It's to the point where I can't watch Zoolander or Night at the Roxbury anymore now that we live in separate states, it feels like cheating on him a little bit. We would often wake up with one of us spooning the other one, or at least with a hand resting on each other....you know what, I'm reminiscing too much again. Somebody cut me off.)
1. Ghostbusters
All things considered, one of the best musical compositions in history. This song always gets me pumped up, without fail. So the DVD menu playing this on a loop, while the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man wanders around New York City in the background, becomes a lock for the top spot. Truer lyrics have never been spoken: "Bustin' makes me feel good!"
