pubs
My one niggle with the dvd releases is the use of story clips as part of the programme menus. Imagine me with my eyes tight shut, stabbing at the remote control to select an option before I see my favourite episode ending. Many of us will know the stories frame for frame but I’m still quite squeamish about seeing these ‘spoilers’ just before viewing.
Something to consider is that these snippets have no context: they’re just random lines and images. On their own, they’re absolutely meaningless. As such, their spoiler potential is practically nil. Even if they show the final shot in the final episode, there’s no possible way you could know that’s the final shot, or that you could know what that shot means in the context of the story, unless you watch the main feature.
Hell, much of the time I have trouble placing the origin of the clips even if I’ve watched the feature several times — simply because of the lack of narrative context.
This is the reason why even large “spoilers” have absolutely no effect on my viewing, and why I find the whole concept perplexing. Without context, facts are effectively meaningless. Information isn’t experience, and only the latter leads to understanding.
So what DVD’s he talking about there?
For me, a spoiler is something like a trailer showing all the best bits of the movie, and the rest of it is just crap. Sometimes trailers show practically the entire storyline of a movie, or at least all you need to know.(like, say, if it’s a romantic comedy, you can usually extrapolate out everything else in the movie from the trailer, know that it will work out happy in the end, etc.) This isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes it’s a real time saver. “Thanks! I don’t need to see that now!”
Sometimes things might look like spoilers, but really aren’t, because of the order the clips are put in a preview or trailer or whatever, makes it look like a certain thing is going on, but in the movie it’s actually completely different. People have played on this with their own joke trailers, like “Shining”, depicted The Shining as a family feelgood movie, and another one that depicts Sleepless in Seattle as a horror thriller.
Usually in cases like that, where everything worth seeing can be compressed into a trailer, the movie isn’t worth the time anyway. Otherwise there’d be something more substantial to it.
It’s kind of like movies with a big shock ending. If “spoiling” the ending ruins the entire movie, maybe that says something about the quality of the movie as a whole.
Anyway! This was in response to Doctor Who DVDs, which have an unending loop of random scenes and lines behind the menus, never more than two or three seconds long. The typical cycle might go something like this:
(synthesized “wor-wor-wor…”) noise
“… something to laugh at! Ungh!”
(comical music)
(someone looking concerned)
(someone screaming)
“That’s what I don’t understand, Doctor!”
(dramatic music)
Now, that just ruined everything!!
i agree. i started rewatching the x-files and buffy dvds and they have a TON of spoilers, even just in the episode mainscreen artwork. but i can never remember how significant it all is until i have the plot fresh in my mind. whoever’s complaining there must have a superhuman memory.
same thing goes for the harry potter book cover art, actually. no context= you can HAVE hermione and harry riding around on a gryphon on the cover with no problem.
the only out-of-context spoiler that would suck is someone being killed off, i suppose.