Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of the original National Treasure movie. It is standard fare at our house and we've watched it dozens of times. It's considered absolute comfort food at the end of a hard week at work, or just fun family fare.

The just-released two-disc Collector's Edition DVD promised new deleted scenes plus four new featurettes, a treasure trove for a fan. I eagerly looked forward to exploring the new features, having already delved deep into the previous "treasure hunt" offerings in the original DVD, which included commentary, alternate endings, deleted scenes, three decoding puzzles, and a documentary on the Knights Templar, those crusading favorites of conspiracy theories most recently made famous by The Da Vinci Code.

The new bonus features on the two-disc DVD include a documentary, "Ciphers, Codes, & Codebreakers," and on-set, behind-the-scenes featurettes "On the Set of American History," "To Steal a National Treasure," and "Exploding Charlotte." While these were interesting to watch, they didn't include much in the way of cast interviews, delving instead into the technical aspects of the movie.

In fact, the more exciting "extra" was found on the Disney website, where fans were invited to join an "amazing race" of sorts by engaging in an online treasure hunt with real prizes. I was looking forward to something along those lines on the DVD set. While I'm not much of a gamer, it would have been fun to come back to National Treasure on my own time and work a mystery. But we find none of that fun on this two-disc DVD set.

So, if you already own the original National Treasure DVD, I wouldn't recommend you go out and spend money to get the new 2-disc set unless you just really, really want to know how they exploded The Charlotte. Everything else you can get, more or less, watching science and history programming on cable or satellite TV. And if you don't already own it and want the movie on DVD, the original release is probably still your better buy, unless the additional technical featurettes really float your boat (or, in the case of The Charlotte, sink it!).
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