Your Introduction To Letterboxing/Widescreen Presentations

[Member-222782]

Originally Posted by animefan77

I got introduced to my first widescreen when I went to my friend's house with laser disc player. The movie was John Woo's the "Killer"
This was the beginning of it all. I hated that everything on TV was fullscreen so I began to buy widescreen VHS(couldn't afford laser discs - I was only a student). I think my first purchase was Star Wars, Abyss and T2. From then on, I started buying movies and not just watching it on cable TV. Then when the DVD came out with the widescreen + Special Features!!!, I got addicted. From about 15 widescreen VHS to over 2500 DVDs and now over 1200 blu-rays.

You bring up an interesting side-topic regarding not watching movies on cable TV. I've literally stopped watching anything on cable except the occasional news program. When cable first came to my neighborhood I was ecstatic - there were all these channels showing movies: TBS, USA, AMC, etc. so I thought I was in movie and TV heaven. After the widescreen bug hit me I found myself watching less and less TV, esp. movies because no one except AMC was showing movies in their OAR (and now AMC is completely useless). Today, I never watch any movie on cable, not even on the premium channels, because they're either cut to ribbons, "compressed for time" or other BS and worse of all they're not shown in widescreen. So cable is a thing of the past for me (except, of course, the occasional news program )