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 )

[Geoff D]

When I was a kid I always noticed how the credits for movies on TV would be in letterbox but not the rest of the movie, and how there was this really odd motion blur whenever the camera panned from side to side. Later I saw a piece about widescreen on Barry Norman's 'Film' review show, it was about Cleopatra I think, and from then on I only bought widescreen if I could help it.

I can still remember getting the letterboxed VHS of Die Hard (my favourite film) back in '91, it was like watching a different film. Reservoir Dogs in widescreen was my first exposure to Super 35 and how it actually matted the image for 2.35 letterbox rather than giving you more picture.

[Bucky]

First really noticed it when I got a DVD player and the first DVD I got was Meet the Parents. I did not like that it had black bars on the top and bottom so I actually set up the DVD player for 16:9 so that the image was stretched to fill the entire screen.

I don't think I truly appreciated the different with widescreen until there was an article on the Star Wars website that showed the difference between widescreen and full screen for Episode II.

[Captain Kirk]

I don't really remember. I know that 98% of all DVDs were widescreen unless they were sold out. I guess I was just used to a theater setup from going to the movies all the time and it didn't seem weird. I bought my first widescreen TV in 2002 (at 17) and haven't really looked back since.

[tigertron]

I prefer fullscreen, but not if it's at the expense of seeing the full picture, otherwise I'm ok with 2.35:1.

[legendarymatt92]

It seems like a lot of people's first experiences with widescreen is through the Star Wars films or articles written about them.

It's amazing how one series of films has had such an effect on multiple generations, both technically and creatively.

[Doomnaut]

Yeah it was Star Wars for me too.

[Student Driver]

Not sure what my first experience was with letterboxing. It was sometime in the 1980s, and I think I first became aware of the "picture preserving" aspects through reading Playboy (for the articles!). That magazine really pushed laserdisc hard for a while... probably helped that Pioneer routinely advertised with them. Letterboxing also showed up a lot in music videos of the day, and I even remember seeing it pop in TV ads for consumer products back then. Considering how long letterboxing has been around, I was surprised at how vehemently a lot of people attacked it when it became the norm for DVDs.

I did eventually get into laserdisc in 1992, and was a big OAR purist from that point forward (converting the wife along the way, not able to convince too many friends). Sure, a tiny picture on a 19" TV kinda sucked, but was a better option than losing a huge portion of the picture. One interesting side effect of LD fans' insistence on widescreen is that I was often able to get used copies of Academy or 1.33:1 ratio films for cheap; a lot of owners knew "widescreen = more picture," then dump their copies of Gone With the Wind or a TV movie thinking that they had bought the "wrong" version.

[Dubstar]

I was in a Best Buy recently and I overheard a conversation I hadn't heard in years, over some customer asking if the movie was full screen and how he didn't like the black borders - I was incredulous? (if you're tv is 4:3 - you're old and pathetic.. )

[Supaclyde]

I seem to recall there being both wide screen and full screen versions of Titanic on VHS back. Of course we all had big CRT 4:3 televisions and people were saying to not get the widescreen because you'd only use half your tv and the other half would be black bars. My family, of course, bought the full screen version.

It wasn't until I picked up the blu-ray version of 300 and went to compare the dvd and blu-ray side-by-side. I quickly realized that I had the full screen dvd and saw how much of the picture was cut off compared to the blu-ray.

[InspectorLupus]

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.

Hah, I remember that about The Cable Guy too! Man, that was terrible.

[pagemaster]

I got into widescreen with the 20th Century FOX Gold VHS movies of The Abyss, True Lies and Speed. After I saw those, I got my first laserdisc player. I then got my dvd player, today I still buy laserdisc, dvds, and blu rays and I enjoy the widescreen format.

[charlieray1]

My girlfriend (now wife of 20 years!) and I were collecting classic horror on VHS. It seems funny since it was video tape but we were really picky about the picture quality -- some tapes were available cheaper in the 4 hr speed, but we'd always look for the 2 hr ones.

Anyway, some of those films - probably the Roger Corman/Poe films - were issued as widescreen tapes, and from then on that's what I looked for. We always bought OAR when possible. I sure remember how tiny Ben Hur was seeing it letter-boxed on a 25" traditional TV screen!

[Shawn Elestren]

Saw Jaws 2 in 2.35:1 on TV in 1984. I understood what widescreen was from then on.

Gremlins and Innerspace were only available in 1.85:1 on VHS, but the first specifically widescreen VHS movies I got were Die Hard and Die Hard 2 when I was 13.

I tried very hard to explain to my alcoholic piece of shit mother and her deadbeat husband (not my dad) for YEARS that with widescreen you get the intended image but they always threw a shit-fit when I came home from shopping with a new movie...in widescreen.

Every single one of the kids I explained it to at school understood.

I guess grown-ups really hate kids who are smarter than them.