Hotel Transylvania is now out on DVD and Blu-ray. My wife and I picked up a copy of the latter yesterday and watched it today. We had already seen it in the theaters and found it worthwhile. (My previous review can be read here.) I was especially looking forward to the Blu-ray extras. While these were good, I noticed a glaring omission. The film draws upon the classic monsters who have become icons in our culture, and it even includes a segment in a monster convention involving “monster geeks,” and yet there is not a single mention of these monsters to our culture, or the subculture they have created. Perhaps that itself is a testament to their influence, that they are so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted. Still, it would have been nice for Sony Animation to at least acknowledge, if not devote a Blu-ray extra feature, to a salute to our monsters.
The omission could be courtesy of Sony’s legal department not wanting to incur costs to license copyrighted materials from rival studios.
That answers why they was no explicit mention, but surely they could have acknowledged our monstrous heritage in ways that would have sidestepped such legal and financial concerns. At least that’s my take.