Your Introduction To Letterboxing/Widescreen Presentations

[Croweyes1121]

Chalk up another vote for "Always" and "Innerspace". Those were also my first 1.85:1 letterbox experiences. The next one I recall was "Jurassic Park" on VHS (the little red banner across the top?).

Now, as for 2.39:1, I bought the Star Wars Trilogy on VHS letterboxed (that dark blue box with the holographic front?), and I was...well...I mean, I had a 13" television, so...lol...I was like "what on Earth have I bought here"? I watched the first film and was rather confused.

I sat in class the next day bummed out with my purchase...but then I started thinking about TV dimensions...and theater screen dimensions...put two and two together...the light turned on...

...and I faked getting sick so I could go home and watch Empire and Jedi. LOL

Jedi's letterbox wasn't centered, though (the bar at the bottom was a lot larger than the one at the bottom), and I found it terribly distracting. Was thrilled to have a copy that was centered on Laserdisc a few years later.

The film that got me into Laserdiscs was "Speed". At first, there was no widescreen version on VHS (though it *was* released that way later on), and it was my favorite movie at the time. Laserdisc was the only way to see it widescreen, and the pan and scan on that film was atrocious. So now I have to credit "Speed" for getting me into home theater, televisions, blu-ray, etc. LOL

[scissorpuppy]

I remember when it was announced that Widescreen would be the standard presentation of the DVD format, I was so excited.

God, some pan/scan jobs were so bad! I remember that sometime in 1996 Sony must have switched from Telecine to some sort of Digital software for the Pan&Scan process. I distinctly remember The Cable Guy having this strange "90's Digital/pixeled" looking effect when the image would Pan/Scan. This continued for the next year or so, eventually Sony either had better software or went back to the standard process.

There was a TV master in the 80's of Die Hard that was very strange (I say TV because I don't remember my CBS/FOX VHS looking this way), instead of the pan/scan method it seems they zoomed into the frame to create a more 16x9 image, and then squeezed that framing to fit 4x3. So everyone's head was insanely thin. This practice was also done for credit sequences in some films.

[blonde_devil]

I don't remember when I actually became aware of widescreen as I always remember knowing it existed, just didn't know why. didn't go to the theatre a lot as a kid so for me, 4:3 was what I knew so to see a widescreen movie on tv was really annoying(mostly because we had a smaller tv so it make the picture look even smaller). I finally found out that widescreen was how the movie looked in the theatre around 1993 when I went to university and started to see more movies and it all started to make sense. From then on, I tried to get movies in widescreen when possible but it wasn't easy as most weren't available on VHS and if they were, they usually costed a lot more - I remember it was hard to find a copy of Star Trek Generations in widescreen to begin with and most of those didn't have the foil cover like the regular release did. only one place sold a widescreen copy with the cover and it cost a lot more then the pan and scan version. dvd helped a lot since pretty much everything had the widescreen version as an option and 16:9 tv pretty much made it standard.

I know what people mean about the pan and scan looking bad. some of those shots where they slide across the screen to see who is talking were horrible. but that was what you had at the time so you accepted it.

[cinemaphile]

Originally Posted by scissorpuppy

I remember when it was announced that Widescreen would be the standard presentation of the DVD format, I was so excited.

God, some pan/scan jobs were so bad! I remember that sometime in 1996 Sony must have switched from Telecine to some sort of Digital software for the Pan&Scan process. I distinctly remember The Cable Guy having this strange "90's Digital/pixeled" looking effect when the image would Pan/Scan. This continued for the next year or so, eventually Sony either had better software or went back to the standard process.

Sony was the worst and every artificial pan was painfully obvious and jarring. Cable Guy was one of the worst examples, along with Multiplicity, Annie, Few Good Men, and a many others.

[singhcr]

For me, the first time I had experienced the advantage of widescreen presentations was when we first got a DVD player. I think one or two VHS tapes we rented were partially in widescreen (the opening of Mrs. Doubtfire, for example) and I remember yelling at the TV for the “stupid black bars to go away.” When my brother and I were looking into getting a DVD player we found out the DVD’s would be widescreen only and we were worried about losing a lot of our TV’s picture to black bars, but we figured there was no way around it and got the DVD player anyway. Goldeneye was my favorite movie at the time and I had seen the VHS copy we owned several times so Goldeneye was one of the first movies that I saw on DVD. I remember seeing the title sequence for the first time in 2.35:1 and I was amazed at how much picture information I was missing even though I didn’t understand the reason for letterboxing until later on.

OAR actually saved another favorite movie of mine, License to Kill. I had seen the movie on TBS and the opening shows a man and woman in bed. The movie cuts to Sanchez firing a handgun and then it cuts back to the man who jumps a bit in bed at the same time the gun fires. This always annoyed me because the gun shot sound was in the middle of the cut so I always thought the man was reacting to being shot, but there was no blood or anything and he was just fine afterwards so I dismissed the movie as being overly fake. What I didn’t know until watching the DVD was that Sanchez actually shot the lamp next to the bed and the man in the bed was jumping as a reaction to the sound. When I saw the DVD I said out loud “Oh… it was the lamp!” and I kept on watching from there as I never bothered to do so when I saw it previously. It turned out to be one of the best Bond movies and is still a cherished classic of mine.

The final straw for me with P&S was when the Anthony Hopkins/Cuba Gooding Jr. movie “Instinct” came out on video a few years after we got our first DVD player. Our family is a big Hopkins fan so we tried to rent the DVD from Blockbuster and they were all out, but there was a VHS copy available. I said “it isn’t a huge deal, let’s just get the VHS this time because I really want to watch it” and Instinct’s OAR is 2.35:1. There’s a scene about 20 minutes into the movie where Cuba and Anthony are talking to each other on opposite sides of a bleacher in a school gym. On the DVD, each person’s entire body is clearly visible on the edges of the frame. On the VHS, you saw one person’s body and less than half of the other person and it kept cutting from person to person depending on who was talking because the 1.33:1 frame wasn’t wide enough to fit both characters in the same shot. After seeing that scene I told my dad to return the tape and wait for the DVD to be available so we could finish the movie. I’ve never looked back since.

[thrillmygorilla]

I saw a widescreen verison of Once Upon a Time in the West on AMC back in 1992. Been an advocate of the format ever since.

[Monkey_Boy]

Gotta admit, I was one of the people who didn't REALLY think you were missing much with fullscreen. I wanted my television filled from top to bottom! The ONLY movie I had on VHS in widescreen was "Jaws", and that was because it's my most favoritest of movies and I thought that owning this particular release was very important, but I never really noticed a difference between it and fullscreen except for the bars.

Wasn't until I bought "X-Men" on VHS, in fullscreen, and I suddenly realized that I was missing a part of the movie because this time I was looking for it: Magneto's stress balls falling to the ground when he walked away from his desk. I HEARD 'em, but I didn't SEE 'em fall because the picture was cut off! It was at that moment I had decided that widescreen is the ONLY way to watch a movie! That was my last VHS purchase because a very good friend of mine gave me a DVD player for X-Mas that year, with "X-Men" in WIDESCREEN! (That was one helluva great friend I had for awhile there!)

After I got my DVD player, I started grabbing every movie I could in widescreen, and noticed how much better the movie looked in its OAR. There was more space for the actors/characters! The elevator scene in "Ghostbusters" no longer looked squished! I saw IG-88 for the first time since the theater in "The Empire Strikes Back" because he/it had been cut off in the fullscreen version, and I watched it that way for sooooo long that I had actually forgotten he/it was in the movie at all! I have a few fullscreen DVDs in my library, but only because there were no other versions of those particular movies. Otherwise it's OAR (or as close as I can get) all the way, baby!

I was also one of those who expected my new widescreen television to make black bars a thing of the past. I remember my disappointment when I popped in "Star Wars", and I still saw the bars. I even went so far as to seperate my movies so that all of my 1.85:1-1.75:1 movies could easily be found. However, after awhile, I found that I really liked the wider picture of 2.35:1 and such. There is indeed more picture in that ratio, and that's what I want! So now, I no longer even notice the bars because I love that there is even more room for the picture with them there.

[ry35an]

Originally Posted by MEB

I bought my first Laserdisc player in 1981 and quickly became a vehement advocate for original aspect ratio. I watched them on a 27" Sony Trinitron and listened to them through my own homebrew surround sound dematrixing circuit. If any visitor to my home complained about the black bars he was not invited back for a second movie.

And thus the quest began for bigger and bigger TVs so that a letterboxed image could be as big as possible!

Mark

Such a nice guy, jeez.

But, you're right, thank God for bigger TV's. I had a 25" TV and it was hard to watch Bladerunner in its OAR

[L-Rouge]

I remember thinking a film was inferior if it had black bars, But the wider aspect ratio's gave life to movies like Bladerunner and Alien, seeing model effects and such in the proper aspect just seemed to breath life to these movies.

One unfortunate consequence happened with Star Wars. when this was recorded for me back in the 80's the television presentation squished wideangle shots into 4:3 so you recieved a very elongated aesthetic. In the opening Star Destroyer sequence the two moons above Tatooine actually appear oval (ironaically like an alien egg). I thought the concept of oval shaped moons was just mind boggling originality. When I saw the 97 anniversary re-release I quickly realized I was a victim of aspect ratio as the moons appeared to be naturalized moons (and I'll admit for a second I thought that was what we may look at in hindsight as a famed George Lucas unwanted change, the only thing I didn't want changed were my oval moons)

but anyway its been all good since because you can loose a heck of a lot in standard 4:3.

edit!
Oh and I totally enjoyed seeing the Super Star Destroyer crash into the death star on the right hand side of the screen haha.

[Nerdkiller likes BD]

This is something that I never actually questioned back in the day, whenever a film was playing on TV. I always thought it was just simply a film thing. In that you know you're watching a film if it has black bars in it. Although what I did question in some movies was why the black bars would only appear in the beginning and ending of a movie. So yeah, unlike most people, I simply ran with it.

However, on a related note, I love how in this day and age, Bluray has pretty much caused the extinction of the option of fullscreen versions of movies. And that my friend is a good thing.

[Top Dollar]

Akira VHS was my first exposure. Didn't like it. The Matrix when it first came out on DVD was what eventually converted me. Took a while though.

[AmrlKJaneway]

My parents had me convinced that the whole picture was somehow squashed into 4:3 in some unnoticeable fashion for home video. Upon seeing Star Wars in theatres in 1997, a movie I was familiar with every frame of, I realised this was wrong.

In the early 2000's we got out 68cm flat CRT and a DVD player. I was loving the option to view the original AR. My parents were furious! "Why did I buy a big screen TV, and spend more on movies, when I only get to watch half the screen!"

[Monterey Jack]

Originally Posted by Nerdkiller likes BD

However, on a related note, I love how in this day and age, Bluray has pretty much caused the extinction of the option of fullscreen versions of movies. And that my friend is a good thing.

Of course, in the day of widescreen TV sets and Blu-Ray, now we have the opposite problem...1:33.1 movies getting cropped on the top and bottom to create a faux-"widescreen" effect.

[Rizor]

I guess I wasn't really aware of widescreen until DVD came out? Most of my movie watching was TV/VHS in the 90s. Rarely went to the theater. I remember watching the movie "Multiplicity" on TV and was bothered by the horrible panning and wondering what was up. The first time I watched Star Wars in widescreen was an eye-opener.

Even crazier was watching R-rated movies like Predator or Die Hard for the first time uncut, since all I'd known of it were the edited TV versions.

[Spicoli]

My first movie owned Widescreen was VHS Terminator 2 I think.

The very first was Amorcord in 1984. Then Manahatan (Woody Allen insisted and was first to
would be first widescreen on Betamax and VHS)

They tried to push Letterbox in the late eighties with titles like Karate Kid III and Ghostbusters II who's first printing were all LB. Movie renters quickly returned them thinking they were missing half the movie. Rental places even called Columbia for they were not warned about the format. Soon after they were sold as pan and scan.

[Richard Graham]

The VHS of Innerspace. I had seen pieces of movies in widescreen before then, but that's when I first "got it".

[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.

[fitprod]

I had a LD player way back in 1982 and my first widescreen experience was probably Tron which we bought with the player.

Now I look at this experience in a different way, when I watched Tron's original P&S laser disc I knew something didn't look right. (I had not seen the film theatrically.) The poor pan and scan conversion was very noticeable during the wide shot of the solar sailer going across the screen as it exited the launch bay, moving left to right. Everything seemed off and un-natural.

I can't remember my first true wide screen LD experience, but it had to be the mid 80s, when I rented something from the Criterion collection. Maybe it was when I went to Japan during a school exchange program back in 1987, and saw one of the Star Wars films at the home of my host family.

Domestically, the big deal I remember was when Fox/Image decided to force the issue in 1989 by releasing Die Hard is wide screen only. I remember my mom was confused, but I told her that's the way the film was supposed to be seen. She got over it...

fitprod

[tigermoth]

When I was a kid I knew the difference between the two widescreens and Pan & Scan. I preferred Pan & Scan because the image was too fuzzy and small on a letterbox VHS using a CRT TV.

[Atreyu]

Not sure which film, but first heard about letterboxing and what it was from Siskel and Ebert, so I had to get me a laserdisc player.