Speaking of Audio Commentaries, the main feature has two of them. The first features producer John Walker and writer/director Brad Bird, who spends a lot of time regretting the fact that he can’t mention and thank each and every person that worked on the film. And while that makes him a heckuva nice guy to work for, it doesn’t make for much of a listening experience. Nonetheless, here’s

1. The Incredibles was the first Pixar film to not use the Randy Newman music under the opening Disney and Pixar logos.
2. In Bird’s original story, all the supers could fly … except Mr. Incredible.
3. The baddie Bomb Voyage (voiced by production designer Dominique Louis) was originally named Bomb Perignon, but the Dom Perignon people weren’t too thrilled with that idea.
4. Jason Lee did do the voice of ultimate fan boy Buddy Pine both as a kid and as an adult.
5. Other Pixar staff cameos include producer Walker as the priest in the wedding scene and production designer Lou Romano as Dash’s thumb-tacked teacher.
6. At 107 minutes, The Incredibles is the longest Pixar film to date.
7. Whatever you do, don’t refer to animation as a “genre�? to Brad Bird …
8. Among the memorabilia on the wall of Bob Parr’s home office is the record album “Mr. Incredible Sings!�?.
9. The biggest challenge in the film: the clothing, especially the shot of Bob sticking his hand through the tear in his Mr. Incredible costume.
10. Keeping it all in the family, Bird’s son Nick is the voice of the little boy on the Big Wheel, his son Michael is the voice of Violet’s crush Tony, and his son Jack was the inspiration for, of course, Jack-Jack.

(Bird does make note in the commentary that it was recorded not only prior to the film’s phenomenally successful release, but also one day after the death of his mentor, beloved Disney animator Frank Thomas.)

In contrast to the two participants on the first one, the Animators’ Audio Commentary collects a slew of artists, a full house that includes the trio of Supervising Animators (a.k.a. the “Three Caballeros�?) Tony Fucile, Steven Hunter and Alan Barillaro. There are some interesting comments from the traditional animators who made the transition to CGI with this film, but overall there’s an abundance of technical jargon that may prove interesting to animation students, but for the layman reveals a little too much of the man behind the curtain.

Brad Bird returns, along with story supervisor Mark Andrews, to introduce the six Deleted Scenes, including an extensive alternate opening and scenes further exploring the controversial “adultery�? subplot. One can see some darker takes on the story (in one version, supers weren’t even allowed to “breed�?), and mentions are also made of such deleted characters as Zarek, the film’s original main villain, and Snug Porter, Helen’s ill-fated pilot friend who is still briefly mentioned in the final film. This section, more then most DVDs, really delves into the creative process of why these sequences were developed and eventually discarded.

Going even further into the making of the film is, naturally, The Making of ‘The Incredibles’, which details the increased challenges of this film over previous Pixar productions, the biggest being, apparently, Bird himself. He is revealed here, quite surprisingly, to be quite a handful, as most talented filmmakers who are passionate about their art are; adding to the difficulty is the fact that this was Bird’s first foray into a fully computer animated feature (his The Iron Giant, a contemporary classic of animation, did have some CGI elements, but was mostly hand-drawn).

Whereas The Making of …is a more general overview of … the making of, the next feature, called More Making of ‘The Incredibles’, digs even deeper into the nuts and bolts of creating the film, with individual segments (viewable separately or as “Play All�?) spotlighting such other artists on the picture as Mark Andrews (Story Supervisor), Lou Romano (Production Design), Bill Wise (who, as Character Supervisor, had to deal with the problems of an all-human cast: clothing, hair, muscles and skin), Rick Sayre (Supervising Technical Director, who assisted in the film’s retro futuristic look, circa the mid-1960s), Randy Thom (Sound Designer), Michael Giacchino (Composer) and Janet Lucroy (Director of Photography, who discusses in-depth the importance of lighting in a CGI film), as well as a special section titled E Volution, focusing on the enigmatic scene stealer Edna Mode, most recently seen upstaging Pierce Brosnan on the Oscar telecast. Overall, the filmmakers main goal was to exploit what they refer to as “the mundane alongside the fantastic�?, a theme that can clearly be seen all throughout The Incredibles.

With a section called Incredi-Blunders, one would expect more of the same bloopers as seen in the end credits for A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc., right? Not exactly, these are actually clips of very rough CGI, sort of the technical rehearsals for a computer animated film, revealing glimpses into an alternate Bizarro Incredibles World where the characters move and look in that disturbingly creepy way that, say, the cast of The Polar Express did … scary …

Next is Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell, who is the sardonic National Public Radio personality and author of a book about presidential assassination sites and the tourist traps that have sprung up around them, as well as the voice of The Incredibles’ own shrinking violet, Violet Parr. Includes early test animation of Violet using Vowell’s vocals.