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Answerman - What Happened To DVD "Easter Eggs"?


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dragonmastr



Joined: 09 Feb 2012
Posts: 205
PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 6:42 pm Reply with quote
Has anyone found where the Time of Eve Easter Egg is? I've spent the last few minutes looking through the menus but haven't been able to find it.
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Joined: 17 Apr 2015
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 6:51 pm Reply with quote
dragonmastr wrote:
Has anyone found where the Time of Eve Easter Egg is? I've spent the last few minutes looking through the menus but haven't been able to find it.


I've sent you an explanation via PM.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:00 pm Reply with quote
kawaiibunny3 wrote:
but my favorite Easter Egg is the "Last Disk" short AnimEigo made for Urusei Yatsura vol. 50. It's so silly but I know if I worked on putting out 50 (+ the OVAs & movies) discs for an old show like UY, I would certainly celebrate


That was a great moment for those of us who'd made the long, slow haul along with Woodhead and AE, from VHS's to single-disks, to the big four-year gap, to the last new Age of Boxsets releases.
1992-2005, we knew the feeling. Cool

Another favorite Easter egg was on the Spirit of Wonder disk--
Click on the map, from the menu scene of the Science Club making their journey to Mars, and we got a parody scene:
"As I stood on the surface of the planet Mars, I couldn't help being reminded of Capricorn One--I'd be James Brolin, of course, as the leader, and our navigator, he's the funny one, he'd be Sam Waterston..."

But because early DVD's and late-90's DVD players couldn't get along, disk menus were just more trouble than they were worth.
There was supposed to be a menu egg on ADV's Slayers Book of Spells disk that would lead to their new "ADV on DVD" Do-It-Now ad, and I haven't found a player yet that could access it.
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dragonmastr



Joined: 09 Feb 2012
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:05 pm Reply with quote
BodaciousSpacePirate wrote:
dragonmastr wrote:
Has anyone found where the Time of Eve Easter Egg is? I've spent the last few minutes looking through the menus but haven't been able to find it.


I've sent you an explanation via PM.


Thanks for the help! Although, I don't exactly know how it classifies as "didn't make them particularly hard to find". If this was supposed to be easy then I don't even want to know what his definition of "hard to find" is.
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Kalessin



Joined: 15 Aug 2007
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:06 pm Reply with quote
I confess that I've always hated DVD easter eggs. There's no way that I was ever going to spend the time to try and figure out whether there was anything hidden on a DVD, and even if a I did, how would you know if you ever found them all? Now, there's software that makes ripping DVDs and Blu-rays into .mkv files easy so that you could find all of the tracks, but 15 years ago? I certainly wasn't aware of any. I know that the Noir DVDs from ADV had some interesting easter eggs, but the only way that I could have known about them was by stumbling on something about them online. I mean, IIRC, one of them involved hitting a particular key 10 times in a specific scene in order to get a commentary track. Who's ever going to stumble on that. I am very glad that DVD easter eggs aren't really a thing any more.

Though fortunately, I'd likely find them every time now, since the only way that I watch DVDs or Blu-rays these days is to rip them to my computer to watch them as .mkv files. I don't distribute the rips, so it's all fair use, but I'm quite glad to be able to watch everything as normal video files with my normal video player software rather than having to use a special program that can play Blu-rays or having to use an actual Blu-ray player with a TV. I don't even own a TV.
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dreamingsamurai



Joined: 16 Apr 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:17 pm Reply with quote
I found the fun of finding an easter egg in the menu soon was replaced with the annoyance of having to go through the sequence to get to it with each subsequent time. It's a benefit with extreme diminished returns, imho.
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Key
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:30 pm Reply with quote
Hmmm, I was actually wondering about this question myself just a few days ago. . .

Though I understand why they are almost never done anymore, I do miss Easter Eggs. ADV's release of Excel Saga was particularly fun because of them, and the famous "sock puppet" parodies hidden in the Noir and Madlax DVDs were a treat. I can fondly recall the many other titles which had them, including those Melancholy DVDs.

Most titles which had them have notes about them in the Trivia headings of their Encyclopedia entries on this site.
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Levitz9



Joined: 06 Feb 2007
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:30 pm Reply with quote
Huh. I only ever knew of one Easter Egg on an Anime DVD. The old Kiddy Grade DVDs from Geneon (and later Funimation's old Veridian collection) had the old "Don't pirate these disks!" messages from the original Japanese DVDs hidden in the menus.
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leafy sea dragon



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 8:57 pm Reply with quote
Every DVD and Blu-Ray player I've used has a significant delay between pushing the button on the remote and it registering on-screen, usually about half a second. This would render almost all games on home video disks unplayable, as well as any hidden content involving timing. I wonder if devices like these are part of the reason easter eggs have become rare recently.

Lord Geo wrote:
I remember when Media Blasters apparently hid their announcement that they licensed Moribito as an Easter Egg on one of their DVDs... At least, that's what I recall; I could be wrong.

Anyway, I think any & all Easter Eggs should just be done by inputting a variant of the Konami Code. It's easy to remember, iconic, and simple to test out.


I think the idea, at least with the deeply hidden ones, is that they're supposed to be hard to find. Some people love looking for these things and experience an almost euphoric sense of discovery.

Top Gun wrote:
This infamous little rant is easily my favorite Easter egg of all time. For the uninitiated: if you fired up the final disk of ADV's Eva Platinum set, episode 26 had four separate audio tracks. There were the usual English and Japanese audio, plus (I think) a commentary track for the episode, but then there was one that appeared to be totally blank...until you made it to the credits. If I was stuck playing a character like Shinji for that many episodes, I'd probably need to vent as much as Spike Spencer did too. Very Happy

(And crap, now I'm gonna have to pour through all those Time of Eve menus to find that extra. Smile)


I definitely remember that one. I saw it at a small screening somewhere without even knowing it was a hidden extra. It's an interesting way to get around restrictions from the parent company, even though it can still be risky if they catch wind of it.

Gasero wrote:
I wouldn't go through all that trouble to HIDE content from my intended audience.

Unless, of course, the intended audience is people who enjoy looking for hidden items.


If you ask me, I'd rather just look up these lists online or somesuch, because I don't like searching for something via trial and error that might not even exist. But I do know there are people who, as I mentioned above, love looking for these things and love the sense of discovery.

It's probably why there are so many such easter eggs in video and computer games: The "Explorer" gamer archetype is pretty common (being one of the four major types of gamers in Bartle's Taxonomy). It's probably not as common as it used to be though, when people would think they found easter eggs when there was nothing, bordering on conspiracy theories. Remember "L is real 2401"?

I'll tell you this: Posting rules for pinball machines is considered spoilers in some places.

dragonmastr wrote:
Thanks for the help! Although, I don't exactly know how it classifies as "didn't make them particularly hard to find". If this was supposed to be easy then I don't even want to know what his definition of "hard to find" is.


A lot of the difficult-to-find ones involve pushing buttons on the DVD/Blu-Ray remote in menus where they would normally have no function. Stuff like 4-digit passcodes at the language selection menu followed by Enter/Return.

The only one I ever found on my own was in Osmosis Jones. A signpost on one of the menus is selectable, and it plays a short scene from near the end of the movie with Phlegmming getting farted out of Frank.
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Cecilthedarkknight_234



Joined: 02 Apr 2011
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 9:16 pm Reply with quote
MakoMori wrote:
Top Gun wrote:
This infamous little rant is easily my favorite Easter egg of all time.


Omigod, I was not aware this existed. Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention Laughing


God I love that rant, it more or less sums up the last episode of Eva nicely.
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yasako



Joined: 09 Sep 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:12 pm Reply with quote
I miss the DVD Easter Eggs, especially the Excel Saga ones--I remember buying each disk and pressing just about everything I could to find them, and there seemed to be a LOT on each disk, if I remember correctly.

Robert Woodhead programmed a few into the new Otaku no Video Blu-ray release that was Kickstarted (one of them is something I worked on). You can look up how to access some of them on the comments page from the Kickstarter. But I think that a lot of AnimEigo fans and customers are people who are part of that older era anyway, who enjoy the effort that it takes to put the Easter eggs into the disk--because from what I understand, programming those BDs is a HUGE pain and makes little sense to me.
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Covnam



Joined: 31 May 2005
Posts: 3795
PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:15 pm Reply with quote
BodaciousSpacePirate wrote:
Brand wrote:
I also remember a time when there was "extra" content on a DVD by putting it in your computer. I am pretty sure the old CPM Utena movie was like that. And I think that is also a feature we don't really see anymore.


A lot of my older CPM DVDs have those. Off the top of my head, Tokyo Babyon and all the VOTOMS stuff. Sometimes, you even got bonus manga on them.


Yeah, I remember CPM doing that a lot. I don't really remember anyone else doing it though, maybe Animeigo?
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K.o.R



Joined: 31 Mar 2005
Posts: 223
PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2016 1:58 am Reply with quote
Key wrote:
Hmmm, I was actually wondering about this question myself just a few days ago. . .

Though I understand why they are almost never done anymore, I do miss Easter Eggs. ADV's release of Excel Saga was particularly fun because of them, and the famous "sock puppet" parodies hidden in the Noir and Madlax DVDs were a treat. I can fondly recall the many other titles which had them, including those Melancholy DVDs.

Most titles which had them have notes about them in the Trivia headings of their Encyclopedia entries on this site.


Ah, I loved the extras on Noir. I think the UK DVDs were gimped in some way though, because I remember finding a commentary track for the first half of a two-part episode but nothing for the second half (and I'm sure they made it sound like they were going to carry on into part 2).

I started ff using the red 3D specs to read the secret codes in the boxes, but eventually just skipped through the titles to find them instead.
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BigOnAnime
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Joined: 01 Jul 2010
Posts: 1243
Location: Minnesota, USA
PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:01 am Reply with quote
I didn't even know about these things until you mentioned them in a similar Answerman about two years ago. I really need to start finding some through the Encyclopedia entries for shows as well as this below.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050403222810/http://www.animeondvd.com/omake/A.php

AOD I discovered has some stuff that were not entered into the Encyclopedia. I probably should get around to that soon in case something happens to the archive so it's not lost forever (sometimes the Internet Archive does unfortunately lose stuff, or later has problems with robots.txt from the new owner of a domain). BTW if anyone could, could they please go through the various lists located in the link above (go to the last saved date for each) and verify if they work? I don't want to enter wrong info into the Encyclopedia.
Kalessin wrote:
I know that the Noir DVDs from ADV had some interesting easter eggs, but the only way that I could have known about them was by stumbling on something about them online. I mean, IIRC, one of them involved hitting a particular key 10 times in a specific scene in order to get a commentary track. Who's ever going to stumble on that. I am very glad that DVD easter eggs aren't really a thing any more.
How people found them though was via the inserts and decoder glasses. Each single of Noir came with an insert with interviews and such, but on the back there was something you couldn't read unless you had the decoder glasses that came with Volume 1. That's where you had to go to find the Easter Eggs.
http://i.imgur.com/ktRlHdB.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/sw00OnM.jpg

Worth noting these Easter Eggs are now regular extras on the FUNimation releases. Somehow FUNi managed to get even the extras ADV Films made themselves.


Last edited by BigOnAnime on Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:56 am; edited 2 times in total
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AnimeLordLuis



Joined: 27 Jan 2015
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:34 am Reply with quote
I never took the time to find Easter eggs on my own since I knew that it would be a waste of time so instead I just went to the Internet to find out where they were. Wink
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