(This is adapted from a LiveJournal post which was featured by Consumerist. I figured this needed to be spread as far and wide as possible, so I'm posting about it to DKos as well...)
I had put Pixar's latest movie, Up, in my Netflix queue earlier this week. In a fit of amazing luck, it came in the day it was released in stores. So I stick the disc into my DVD player...
No closed captions.
Hm. OK, that's strange; DVDs distributed by Disney, as Pixar's are, usually include closed captions. Maybe it's one of those DVDs where you have to turn subtitles on through the DVD player rather than the TV, like some other studios have done...
...nope. Hitting the subtitle button on my DVD remote just gives me a big 'no' sign.
Maybe I have to go through the menu?
...nope, that gives me a big 'no' sign as well.
::blinks:: That's... really strange. Disney's been great about including subtitles on their DVDs since a couple years ago, even extending it to the bonus materials. What happened?
Apparently, as I've been gathering from some discussion on Twitter, Disney released a special bare-bones version of the DVD to major rental businesses— Netflix, Redbox, and Blockbuster are all confirmed— that not only lacks the bonus shorts from the retail DVD, but even lacks the closed captioning.
I was not pleased. I have auditory processing issues that make it difficult to understand movie dialogue, particularly amidst background noise; half the reason I rented the DVD in the first place rather than going to see it at the dollar theater was so that I could use captioning. And of course, the irony of a movie whose protagonist is a hard-of-hearing 78-year-old not having any sort of captioning on its rental DVD did not go unnoticed by me.
Of course, Disney didn't bother to actually inform any rental places that they got a different DVD from retailers. Netflix, until recently, listed captioning and bonus features as being present on the disc; it still lists foreign-language tracks and menus that also don't exist on the rental DVD. Not to be outdone, Blockbuster carries the rental disc in a case identical to the retail version— with an icon indicating that subtitles were present, along with a description of two bonus shorts that also aren't on the rental disc. (I actually had an employee at the local store try out the DVD; despite the indication of subtitles on the box, the actual disc was identical to the version I got from Netflix.)
So was this just a fluke, just an honest mistake by Disney? That's what I thought at first, but Twitter user TheFarmerJoe contacted Disney and got an explanation from a support rep. The removal of captioning was completely intentional, because they viewed subtitles as a bonus feature.
::facepalm:: I don't even think I need to go into how epic of a failure of reasoning that is.
The good news, incidentally, is that a locally owned indie rental store in town has confirmed that their copies are store-bought and include captions; I just have to wait for one of those copies to be returned. But seriously, did I really have to go through all of this just to make out the dialogue in a computer-animated cartoon?