The biggest perk in watching Mamma Mia! The Movie on home video (Universal, $30 one-disc DVD, $35 two-disc DVD, $40 Blu-ray) is the fast-forward button on your remote control, which will rarely have seemed handier. Now you don't have to endure the film's dialogue passages, in which lots of famous actors pretend (badly) to be excited and giddy in order to get to the reason why the movie exists, which is the music.

In the confines of your living room, you can also sing along as loud as you want to the movie, unlike in the theater, where you had to keep your warblings at a low volume. Mamma Mia!, which was directed by Phillida Lloyd with the same manic energy she brought to the stage version, is a pretty terrible movie, but the musical numbers are terrific, and there are more than enough of them to make you forget -- or at least forgive -- the perfunctory nature of the script, which was adapted by Catherine Johnson from her own play.

The movie's Day-Glo color palette, a combination of location shooting in Greece and soundstages, is faithfully preserved on the discs, and the two-disc DVD set and Blu-ray versions contain an entertaining set of extras, beginning with a half-hour making-of featurette, which briskly recounts the project's journey from stage to screen and offers lots of amusing footage of the actors (including Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski and Stellan Skaarsgard) rehearsing for the song and dance numbers.

Another featurette, Becoming a Singer, focuses on the filmmakers' efforts to get the best musical performances possible out of the film's cast, although in some cases, such as Brosnan's, there was a built-in ceiling no one was ever going to get past. An assortment of deleted scenes includes one entire musical number cut from the film, The Name of the Game sung by Amanda Seyfried.

The Blu-ray disc also features several exclusive extras, such a picture-in-picture feature that features more comments from the cast and crew, including an amusing Streep, who at one point says she took the project primarily to embarrass her children. During the musical numbers, a pop-up window offers a thumbnail's worth of trivia about the song being performed, such as the fact that the background vocals for Voulez-Vous were recorded in the same Miami studio the Bee Gees mixed much of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

The most promising extra on the Blu-ray allows viewers whose players are connected to the Internet to record their own visual commentary for the film and upload it for the world to see. Mamma Mia! The Movie is best enjoyed in the company of a festive crowd who knows their ABBA, and now you, too, can show the world just how good your rendition of Take a Chance on Me really is.

`WHITE DOG'

Seen by almost no one, Sam Fuller's final Hollywood film, 1982's White Dog, has at last been released on DVD (The Criterion Collection, $30). Working from a script co-written by Curtis Hanson (who would go to direct L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys), the movie was Fuller's blistering exploration of racism, a recurring theme of some of his earlier films (including Shock Corridor).

But the story, about an out-of-work actress (Kristy McNichol, in an early lead film role) who discovers the white German shepherd she rescued has been trained to attack black people on sight, made executives at Paramount Pictures nervous: They were expecting a Jaws-with-paws horror film and instead got something far more muted and complex. After the Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP threatened the studio with protests over a misperception that the film preached racism, the movie was quietly shelved and never released to theaters.

Wildly uneven but undeniably fascinating, White Dog has the cut-and-paste feel of a project that endured a lot of studio tampering (a romantic subplot involving McNichol and her boyfriend, for example, literally disappears mid-film, never to return). But get past the film's at times unintentionally comic first half: Once Paul Winfield enters the picture, playing an animal trainer hellbent on rehabilitating the dog, White Dog becomes thoroughly compelling.

A metaphor for the way racism spreads through ignorance and hatred, White Dog remains a radical (and bleak) exploration of prejudice, draped in the trappings of a horror picture.

Criterion's excellent disc offers the film in a pristine widescreen transfer, accompanied by a fascinating documentary in which Hanson, producer Jon Davison and Fuller's widow recount the director's struggle to make the film. Fuller insisted on changing the ending of the Romain Gary book that inspired the film. The rewrite was an astute decision, because otherwise the ending would have rendered White Dog as racist. Seen today, though, it's hard to imagine anyone not grasping its actual message.

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