It's not usual for a film's deleted scenes to come out on DVD while that film is still in theaters. Not content with his three-hour-long, hyper-dense feature, director Zack Snyder has executive-produced two supplemental short films for DVD, both based on material absent in Watchmen, but present in the comic books the film is based on.

In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen comics, two meta-textual stories weave in and out of the core story. The first is Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic within a comic about a shipwrecked man driven to madness. The second is Under the Hood: prose selections from the faux memoir of retired superhero Hollis Mason. While the grim, lurid Black Freighter works as an allegorical parallel to Watchmen's main narrative, Under the Hood details the book's meticulously constructed world.

Now, Black Freighter has been adapted to a 26-minute-long animated short, while Hood has become a 40-minute-long, 60 Minutes-style news program from 1985.

Both of these shorts are on one disc, but Under the Hood easily overshadows Black Freighter. Despite a voiceover from 300's Gerard Butler and a pretty sharp use of Nina Simone's "Pirate Jenny," Black Freighter's animation looks stiff and cheap, and the film never captures the existential dread it should. The campy Under the Hood, though, crafts an alternate history of the United States through "interviews" with the film's characters, mock photos, and goofily surreal footage of events like superheroes testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hood feels more like a cheesy curiosity than anything else, but like most Snyder productions, the attention to detail is astounding, and it offers an added layer to the experience of seeing Watchmen in the theater.

If you're looking for the real Watchmen experience, you're still better off with the book—but now, even more than before, it's impossible not to be impressed by the filmmakers' dedication to getting as much of Watchmen onscreen as possible.