The Emperor's New Groove: The Ultimate Groove (2-Disc Collector's Edition), Disc 2 2001 DVD Overview

Distributor: Walt Disney Home Entertainment

Release date: May 1, 2001

We interrupt your regularly scheduled rotation of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, Totally Spies!, Johnny Test, and Grojband to bring you a special new video!

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 was the 21st birthday of my amazing romantic partner Sam (pronouns: they/him), which is also the first of their birthdays that I get to celebrate, having just gotten together with them last month. What a beautiful coincidence that Sam just so happened to be born six days ahead of Valentine’s Day. If that’s not a sign that Cupid brought them to this planet to be my angel, I don’t know what is. On Sam’s actual birthday, I celebrated the occasion by uploading a DVD overview video showcasing one of the releases of their all-time favorite Disney movie, The Emperor's New Groove. And since Sam’s most personally special day just so happens to be practically a week ahead of the worldwide day-long celebration of love, I’ve decided to make a special video to serve as a special video honoring both occasions for them in between those two days, which will be followed by another special upload on Valentine’s Day proper!

On the date listed in the “release date” section of this video description, the movie all about Kuzco was released on both VHS and DVD, with the latter format’s copies of the film coming in two flavors - a single-disc standard edition, and “The Ultimate Groove”, a pricey 2-disc Collector’s Edition set bundling that same standard DVD (just now sporting a different label) with an exclusive Bonus Features disc. Later on October 18, 2005, the standard DVD was reissued on its own with updated Sneak Peeks and a couple of new special features as “The New Groove Edition”, which sadly caused the 2-disc set to go out-of-print. It’s not too hard to find for a good price used on Amazon, though.

I own The Ultimate Groove Edition, but was only able to get Disc 1 of that set (which is also the original single-disc standard DVD release of the movie) working on my PC at first…until Disc 2 started playing properly right AFTER I had already finished making and uploading my video showcasing the menus and packaging for Disc 1. I know I said in the description for that video that I was saving my coverage of Disc 2 for Sam’s next birthday, but since I was able to finally boot it on my computer so soon after making that original video, I figured that I may as well get it done now instead of waiting an entire year for the sake of a meaningful publication date. Good thing I was able to make this video possible early enough to come up with another clever way to justify publishing this video at the time I did!

Just like how my video on the standard Emperor’s New Groove DVD release/Disc 1 of The Ultimate Groove set was my first ever video on this channel showcasing a physical media release of a Disney Animated Canon film, this new video on Disc 2 of The Ultimate Groove is the very first video on this channel to take a deep dive into a Bonus Features disc included on a deluxe 2-disc Disney DVD release. And when I say “deep dive”, I mean a VERY deep dive, meaning that you’ll get to enjoy nearly three hours of content related to the movie’s production that have ONLY ever been released on this DVD set, including behind-the-scenes featurettes, galleries of production artwork and backgrounds, trailers and TV spots, and even a sound-mixing activity! Additionally, the special installation screen and menus for the DVD-ROM features included on Disc 1 of the Ultimate Groove/the movie’s original single-disc DVD are shown here as well, just for the sake of making my rundown of this set as complete as possible.

The only thing that the extras on this disc don’t really touch on in a meaningful way (though there are a couple of references to it) is the movie’s troubled development under its original name of “Kingdom of the Sun”, though the tell-all documentary that reveals all those details, The Sweatbox, which has never been released by Disney on account of it making them look really bad (and also featuring plenty of hardcore swearing), IS available online via unofficial sources if you look hard enough. As far as I’m aware, however, an overwhelming majority (if not all) of the content featured within the disc covered HERE has never been uploaded to YouTube before, so I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor spent assembling all the content together.

DISCLAIMER: This video is NOT made specifically for kids, but for EVERYBODY.