But does it have the limited edition Ridley Scott jizz rag?

As soon as the sales of a DVD start to go down it's time for the studio's to whip out the special editions. If you're lucky this means a director's cut which can add a lot of story or depth to a movie but mostly it means they stuffed the box with special or extra features that you'll never care about. This can mean a don't-need-sleeping-pills-anymore-dreary set of 6 pictures of international movie posters to my personal absolute favorite: the gag real.

Seeing the actors mess up or mess about with their co-stars and causing much merriment on set just makes me want to be one of them (the money is just a bonus). So much fun I could have at work, how can you not get jealous?

The deleted scenes can be a good addition although I still have nightmares about Deep Blue Sea. Not because of the sharks but because of the deleted scenes which could have made it a great film. Those were the ones with good acting and story and by condemning them to the edit-room floor they reduced the movie to an Anaconda level waste of time.

Alternate endings, another one that can be interesting or make you bang your head on the table. Ever seen the alternate ending of Die Hard: With a Vengeance? The bazooka in a tearoom? So bad it was actually funny. I felt very differently about the alternate ending of Stigmata that was much better and more in line with the movie than the feel-good-Disney ending that they used.

The Behind the Scenes or Making-Of ones can be quite interesting, especially if they did interviews on set with the actors and directors. If it's a re-issue than there might be 20 years between the movie and the interview and people seem to forget a lot so they ramble on about other things they did in their life.

Legendary to me are the interviews with the survivors of Easy Company on the extra DVD in the tin box set of "Band of Brothers." Now that is something that adds a lot and it was already so good it didn't even need anything added.

If you're like me and got sick of all those useless extra's and mostly fish your DVD's out of the bargain bin then you still get the ads for other movies that you're usually not interested in. But compared to the time of VHS at least you can ignore them on DVD. It takes deliberate action to bore yourself with them.
But what if you are into the extras, which do you buy? The Special Edition? The Collector's Edition? Maybe the Limited Edition? Or what about the Redux or 1.5? or some other interesting sounding name they come up with.

Yes, I did buy the Special Extended Edition box set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have that mad plastic box of the Hulk and I absolutely love the 2-disc Special Edition of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Who can resist the Camelot song in Lego? (Featured at the end of this article, original here.)

But I've become very careful before buying any special edition. In the beginning they were usually worth the extra money but the last few years they just seem to throw any old rubbish on they could find lying around in the bin out back as long as there's enough for a second disc. They give it a special sounding name and flashy packaging tempting you to buy it while you already have the first release which was that boring 'normal' one.

You're left standing in the shop all insecure, should I buy it or not? It looks so good and just read all those extras mentioned on the back. Why do they do this to me? Bastards!

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