With the possible exception of Beck and Björk, no act has done as much to advance music videos as The Beastie Boys. Where most musicians seem to view the medium as a necessary evil, a commercial concession useful only as a means of getting the music across, the members of The Beastie Boys embrace the music video as an art form in and of itself, as yet another forum for their irreverent, anarchic wit. Assembled with a perfectionist's attention to detail, Criterion's two-disc The Beastie Boys DVD Video Anthology collects 18 of the group's videos, along with photos, video treatments, more than 40 remixes (from Moby, Fatboy Slim, Prince Paul, and others), and audio commentary from the band and the videos' directors. Conspicuously absent are works from The Beastie Boys' tenure at Def Jam—no doubt due to the group's less-than-amicable split with the label—but Anthology otherwise proves comprehensive enough to satisfy the most obsessive completist. Peerless pop-culture scavengers, the band members rummage through decades of trash culture here, drawing inspiration from cheesy spy movies ("Body Moving"), '70s sleaze ("Hey Ladies"), and, most famously, the tacky cop shows of the late '60s and early '70s ("Sabotage"). The set includes all of the group's ubiquitous post-Def Jam hits, but Anthology also throws in rarities such as 1982's pre-hip-hop "Holy Snappers" and "Netty's Girl," a wonderfully goofy clip featuring a lovelorn Mike D paddle-boating while crooning an off-key, seemingly improvised ode to the titular object of desire. The directors' commentaries are particularly illuminating, as Spike Jonze, Evan Bernard, Adam Yauch, and others discuss the motivations behind the giant octopus/breakdancing robot fight in "Intergalactic," and cop to borrowing from sources as disparate as Leroy Nieman, D.A. Pennebaker, Dolemite, and Diabolik. The band's informal commentary pales in comparison, but the DVD more than compensates with its wealth of supplementary material, including two silly short films, one an extended version of the robot-octopus battle, the other a Jonze-directed mock interview with the characters from "Sabotage." Equally entertaining is a slew of alternate versions of the videos, with the Mini-Me version of "Alive" turning the Boys into gyrating munchkins, and the Sir Stewart's Folly version of "Sabotage" offering an extended look at the arrest of Yauch's mustachioed drug smuggler. Not content with having raised the bar for creativity and originality in popular music, the band has created the standard against which all other music-video DVDs should be judged.