No doubt you’ve noticed the recent buzz around Arnold Schwarzenegger’s audio commentary for the 1990 film Total Recall (IMDB) – if you haven’t, I’ve embedded it at the end of this post. While it is rather amusing and entertaining, it has raised a good point regarding DVD extras.

According to the Huffington Post, this audio track was recorded ten years ago. Ten years.

Now, I have (probably) never watched any kind of bonus feature on a DVD or Blu-Ray, except out-takes. I always thought, “there must be someone who watches all these bonus features," but, as it turns out, there isn’t.

With all this extra time and money put in to recording extra features, I’d have thought they’d be there for a reason. I’ve always seen deleted scenes as pretty pointless, for example – they were deleted for a reason. I suppose the ‘behind the scenes’ videos can be interesting in terms of set design and CGI animations, but the main features that really puzzle me most are the commentary tracks.

There’s nothing I hate more than someone talking over a film while I’m trying to watch it, so why I would deliberately sit through 2 hours of someone talking over the film, God only knows. That’s why I’m writing this post – I’m clearly not the only one who thinks this way.

Ten years it’s taken for this audio commentary to surface. Has it really taken this long for someone to watch it and think, “hang on, this is pretty funny! I know who’ll love this – the internet!”?

Thinking about it a bit more, I suppose it has more of an appeal these days since the Governator has had a shift in career since the film was made. An actor doing an audio commentary – not uncommon; a former governor for California doing one – fairly rare. Perhaps this was popular at the initial release time, as well…

I’ve never actually seen Total Recall (I know, I know…), but here’s the clip everyone’s talking about: