What was more expensive for the studio or video releasing company: Releasing a movie on VHS that's been 'panned-and-scanned' -OR- was it more costly to the releasing studio to issue a VHS release in WIDESCREEN like the theatrical presentation? Or maybe it was less expensive to do something like what Magnetic Video did with their 1978 release of "Bus Stop". It's not panned-and-scanned it's just that the /sides/ of the picture were cut off and the entire movie is seen from the ((center)) portion of the frame so it's not actually 'panned-n-scanned'). I've got all these tapes around here yet I don't know the answer. Maybe someone on-site knows which was cheaper and which was more expensive to do? The thought popped in to my head as I've picked up some late '90s Warner Home Video releases of various movies in the recent past which feature a box with a red header on the top that says "SPECIAL WIDESCREEN EDITION". (Pale Rider, Absolute Power, True Crime, L.A. Confidential, Conspiracy Theory, Heat, The Wild Bunch, Contact, et al.).
Paying one more time for another transfer, only this time you're shrinking a larger rectangle to fit on a square. Of course that transfer would look better on laserdisc and DVD but I digress.
What was the first letterboxed VHS? I sold VHS for 10 years and those all seemed to later years, and often foreign films (non English.)
Probably Woody Allen's Manhattan. That would have been an earlier title. I'm only a QC guy, but I imagine that a letterboxed or pillarboxed title is a "set and forget" sort of transfer(once it IS set), but the pan and scan moves probably had to be "insert" edited into the master. A notable exception is any James Cameron Super 35 title; he claims that he reframed (via tilt and scan) 75% of the full frame shots for Titanic. Dan
By the early 90s most major releases had a pan and scan transfer and a widescreen transfer for laserdisc. I don’t think cost was the concern. There was just no market for widescreen on VHS for the most part. Lines of resolution were too low and sets were too small. People who cared enough had larger TVs and laserdisc players which offered widescreen versions. When widescreen only movies came out on VHS (Last of The Mohicans, Blade Runner Directors Cut) it was incredibly difficult to explain to the average person why “some of the movie was covered up.” Your average person didn’t even have a concept of different aspect ratios.
@Crack To The Egg: I have a FOX VIDEO W/S tape of "Last of the Mohicans". It was part of that "20th Century Fox Widescreen Series" with the gold banners on the insert artwork and the tape was housed in a medium-sized clamshell -- very much like the clamshells Anchor Bay used at the time. They're probably the exact same type of case. Inside of the "Last of the Mohicans" clamshell was a little insert booklet extolling the virtues of W/S. → I saved one of these little insert booklets which asks the question: "What's The Appeal Of Widescreen?" and then helpfully answers it right below. What a thoughtful bunch. You're right about the lack of market for W/S tapes by the late 1990s. The best I can do in describing W/S tapes to those who don't know is that the ▬ BLACK BARS ▬ are actually un-needed screen space on your television set. There weren't many W/S VHS releases from the 1980s. VILLA RIDES! (1968) released by 'Kartes Video Communications, Inc.' in 1986 was a W/S tape. It came in a clamshell case with insert artwork and mentioned it on the back of the sleeve. "NOTICE: This video tape has not been "cropped" for TV. What you will see is the full image as it was originally seen in movie theaters. However, when you play this movie through your VCR, you'll notice a small area of blank space above and below the image on your TV screen. This was necessary to retain the film's original wide-screen PanaVision (R) format."
It looks like the answer is that it was more expensive for the studio or video company to pay for a 'pan-and-scan' job of putting a movie out on tape in 'Full Frame' as opposed to just issuing the movie on the tape as it was seen in theaters. (I have seen a few DVD releases in 'Full Frame'. Not a whole bunch of 'em, but a few).
I still keep quite a few Full Frame/Open Matte DVDs as a bonus to Blu-Ray editions. Blood Simple, The Driver etc.
I think one thing that worked against Pan and Scan on VHS was the low resolution of the format. With one movie released on VHS in letterbox , The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the video was so fuzzy that in many shots you couldn't make out, visually, what was going on. Due to that, I generally disregarded letterboxed VHS tapes. This was less of an issue with laserdisc and DVD.
To add to my previous post: A related factor in preferring letterbox over pan and scan, and my reason for going with laserdisc, is that many movies must be seen letterboxed to the point that in my opinion you haven't really seen the movie until you've seen it letterboxed. Among these are the films of Robert Altman, who often fills the entire screen with multiple scenes on the same screen. As an example, in M*A*S*H in at least one scene he had three different operations going on at the same time, and in Popeye he had a boat where there are multiple events going on all over the boat at the same time.
This is why the widescreen VHS tapes of the Star Wars trilogy still go for big bucks while the full frame tapes litter thrift stores.
I owned a letterboxed VHS cassette of Dawn of the Dead that I bought in 1998. That probably wasn't the first, of course, but I remember letterboxed VHS cassettes were not common at the time. This was a "special edition" in a plastic case.
@SmallDarkCloud: You're right about them not being common! Even though anyone could've bought these W/S presentations on tape hardly anyone did. I thought it was kinda funny how the various studios would put stuff on their video boxes like "DELUXE WIDESCREEN EDITION" or "SPECIAL WIDESCREEN EDITION". Deluxe? Special? Ok, I'll 'bite'. Such •puffery•! The 'Fullscreen' editions weren't "Special" or "Deluxe".
I used to buy VHS widescreen as much as possible. There WAS a big difference even for VHS. It's the fact that 99% of movies on TV back then was shown pan&scan that people didnt have a clue. You zoom in and the grain gets bigger etc. etc. Plus often the widescreen versions had had some work done to them at least. Dug out a decent version of the print or whatever. I remember the TV stations would show the movie in widescreen and you'd think "oh great gonna get to see Die hard in WS for once!" and then as soon as the titles ended it would zoom into Bruce's thining hair. Grrrr!!!!!!! I had a Pan&Scan version of The Searchers and I also had the Widescreen version. I used to show them to people and they all remarked how much better the widescreen looked over the P&S. It was the best we had at the time other than Laserdisc...that no one I knew ever bothered with. I only have one VHS movie left and thats my original first widescreen release of Star Wars. Not the one with the crappy single character covers, the one with the proper movie poster. Watched twice!
Very true! I remember a lot of gripes back then. A lot of tapes even had a disclaimer that the black bars at the top and bottom are normal. I had The Wild Bunch WS and it had a demonstration of WS vs P&S in the beginning to show how much different of a picture that was seen between the two ratios.
The 1997 Titanic movie has widescreen VHS tapes available as well and I have seen these in thrift stores just as often as the P&S versions.
I find this hard to believe. There was a widescreen (albeit non-anamorphic) release of the same Star Wars trilogy on DVD in 2006. The store may ask a big price, but I would be shocked to see anyone actually pay $5 for this.
Once I knew the option of widescreen was available, even on VHS I always sought them out. I hated the idea of losing parts of the image that I would have seen in the theater. I especially remember being happy to find Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet on VHS letterbox…I can’t imagine what a pan-n-scan of a 70mm film would look like…lots of panning!
Yet, in the standard DVD era, many children's movies and also the Grumpy Old Men series were most commonly released in P&S or Full Frame 4:3 only in Region 1 while Region 2 and Region 4 had widescreen DVDs of the same movie. Widescreen versions of these would later be issued on Blu-Ray worldwide.
If I'm not mistaken, the 2006 DVDs are George Lucas's updated edits of the films, while the widescreen VHS tapes were the original theatrical edits. The latter are sometimes coveted by fans for that reason.
The edited versions you’re describing came with a ‘bonus’ DVD of the unaltered versions. Which were digital releases of the VHS described. Star Wars Original Trilogy Unaltered DVD | Comic Cons 2023 Dates
@DIYmusic: I'm surprised your Goodwill still has them. I have a friend who volunteers at a couple of Goodwill stores in Jensen Beach, FL and he says they don't take tapes anymore. They put them outside in boxes near the dumpster so anyone seeking free tapes can grab them before the garbage man comes. He also mentioned the DVD's they do keep on the shelves sell for peanuts if they can sell them at all. Not much use for them, either, apparently by Goodwill buyers in the Jensen Beach area.
I remember watching a letterboxed VHS for the first time and we all hated it because it made the picture even smaller than our already tiny 13" TV. We did know anything about aspect ratio, etc. Don't remember which movie it was, my guess would be Jurassic Park.
