That's a tiny TV! The last time I had a television that small was the mid-1980s when I was 12 and had a black-and-white set in my small bedroom. (Think it was a 'Hitachi').
Our TV was color at least. One of the best Christmas' ever was when our Mom bought a 27" TV and a DVD player. She needed my brother's help to bring it in the house, so she bought it a couple days before Christmas. She thought she ruined Christmas with the early gifts, but it was far from ruined. We got to enjoy it a few extra days!
It did, and so did the first laserdisc edition. I remember having to re-buy it when it was reissued with black bars (and in a gatefold cover)
I don't recall seeing any of the W/S tapes I've watched as of yet with a grey border as opposed to the ▬black bars▬ (really un-needed screen space).
Around here, Goodwill charges $2.00/each for VHS tapes, although I don't see tons of them on the shelves, and when I do, they're usually Disney/kids titles in the big plastic cases. Another store I go to charges $1.85/each and they seem to sell a fair amount of them (I know Ive bought a few of them, but that was usually if they were marked with one of the "percent off" colored price tags for that week). I *do* think it was stupid of them to jack up the price as high as they did, considering when I started going in there, they were .50c/each. Around the same time they starte to mark up the DVDs/Blu-Rays and CDs, so it seems they just wanted even pricing across their used media. (LPs are also $1.85/each, but they have cassette tapes at about .50c/each.) PS: I am not trying to turn this into a thrift store thread, just pointing out that around here, used media sells, whereas @64FALCON said in a different area, they can't move the stuff...
The 2006 2DVD sets with the 'original theatrical cuts released for the final time' were the non-anamorphic 1993 laserdisc scans with black boxes on all four sides (so on modern TV's the only way to have maximum picture size is to zoom the image with the resultant quality loss. Pan And Scan versions were often subtle re-edits, inserting shot changes i.e. cutting full left or full right, whereas Widescreen didn't need them. The whole rationale for Pan And Scan was that uninformed morons thought that if they were getting widescreen they were 'missing' the information above and below the black bars and were getting ripped off. For a brief period, they did Pan And Scan and Widescreen on flipper DVD discs. Once widescreen TV's became default that rubbish stopped. Some filmmakers - very few, shot 1.33:1 for TV but also cropped to 1.85:1 for cinemas, with the information above and below the black bars being unnecessary filler.
Technically correct, but this is still better image quality than the equivalent VHS or LaserDisc. Which reenforces my original comment - there is no need for anyone to buy (or hang onto) the VHS. We have DVD equivalents readily available.
I copied my family VHS to DVD and a few copied from TV movies, so they would have been non widescreen at the time.. Fun times.... Sorry, way off topic!!!
I saw The Strangers (2008) in 4:3 and thought it actually gained from being in that format, with a lot of unexpected sounds and things happening at one side of the screen that you didn't see properly.
@SamS: I must disagree with you a lil' bit. If you have the first-release 1982 '20th Century Fox Video' release of STAR WARS (1977) it's worth keeping if it's decent condition. I have one in nice shape and it's definitely worth hanging on to. Plays well. Han blows away Greedo first in the Space Cantina and that's always fun! Plus, it's the least tampered-with version of the movie I've run across. (Except it's not W/S. Can't have everything). 'Vidiot' mentioned to me in a post on a different thread about missing some 35% - 40% of the picture on the '82-issue tape of "Star Wars" and so I must accept that fact when I watch it because there's no use complaining! It is what it is: An old, heavy VHS videocassette from 40+ years ago and it wasn't going to be W/S.
@BrentB: Re: Post #17 on the Previous Page. Every WARNER HOME VIDEO widescreen tape I have features a 'Disclaimer' on the back of the box. The Disclaimer, however, is not universally the same on the back of every W/S box. More than one description was written up at Warner because the ▬ Rectangular-Shaped Disclaimers▬ on the back of every W/S box is not the same. I won't bore you with explicit details (unless you ask, of course, in which case I *will* bore you with details! ), but the disclaimers on the back of the "Special Widescreen Edition" boxes for SPHERE, PALE RIDER, TRUE CRIME are not the same. → SPHERE (1997) is actually pretty rare on a Warner W/S tape. So is KLUTE (1971) and PALE RIDER (1985). Meanwhile, THE COLOR PURPLE (1985) is easy to find on a W/S VHS from Warner. I saw a bunch of "Color Purple's" on W/S tapes for sale on eBay last week. 25 of 'em? A bunch!
If you really want to be a 'May 1977 purist', we have easily-available 4K restorations of original film transfers. The point being, no matter how purist you want to be, VHS (even the 2006 bonus DVD) is never a good choice.
But would you agree VHS and the 2006 "Limited Edition" DVDs are the easiest available option at seeing the original theatrical versions?
No. If you are serious enough to know/appreciate the differences between what the commonly-available Blu-ray/streaming 'enhanced' versions and what was shown via theatrical releases, you can dig into the following. Project 4K77 | The Star Wars Trilogy The original version VHS came out literally 25 years ago, and the DVDs 15+ years ago. If you have them sitting on your shelf, fine. But if you're seeking something 'better' out, spend time at the link above.
The studios were terrified of letterbox releases on tape because they were convinced (with good evidence) that unsophisticated customers would complain that "some of the picture is cut off at the top and bottom," not understanding that they're seeing all of the widescreen image. Some early scope films were transferred for home video from an "optically-scanned" print done in the lab, and they're basically center-scanned, with occasional repositions hard left or hard right when necessary. The movie that began to chane mass-market attitudes was Manhattan, and I had a tiny bit to do with that. We did that Woody Allen film at Modern Videofilm in Hollywood around 1981 or so, sent a "check cassette" for the director to approve to NY. Woody rejected it without comment. We did another version, sent it out, another rejection. I was one of two people who suggested we do it in letterbox -- either full 2.39, or a compromise 2.00 aspect ratio -- and they tried it. The post supervisor from UA said "we're afraid if we send it out with black borders top and bottom, people will be annoyed," so that guy (incredibly) ordered us to put gray borders top and bottom, which I found appalling. But the tape was sent to Woody and he finally approved it. Remember in this era, standard-def TV resolution in America was only about 640x480, but a VHS tape could only handle about half that (240 lines). If you throw 40% of the vertical resolution away with letterbox borders top and bottom, you don't got a lot left. Laserdisc was far sharper, and letterbox images held up pretty well in that format. DVD went even further, and Blu-ray further still. BTW, I haven't done a pan/scan job in years, but I just did one the other day for a distributor who had me do a 2.39 'scope film in both widescreen and in 16x9. You'd be surprised how much panning & scanning was necessary to get everything important into the 16x9 frame. Not easy at all. They were shocked when I told them it took an entire day just for that version.
All very true. One of the tricks we used to use in 4x3 pan/scan versions of 2.39 scope films was to cut from one side of the frame to another, particularly in rapid-fire dialogue scenes. If we didn't, it turned into a ping-pong match, where we'd pan to one guy, then pan over to the other guy, then pan back to the first guy, then pan again to the other guy, and on and on and on. A good friend of mine did the initial transfer of Raiders of the Lost Ark for Spielberg, and Steven hit the roof, saying, "YOU'VE RE-CUT MY MOVIE!" No question, cutting from one side of the frame to the other did represent a change in edit tempo and was abrupt. He went for the ping-pong solution. There was also Universal, who asked us to use what they called "The 7% Solution," which meant we would subtly squeeze the image for 4x3 so that the pan/scan would be a little easier. (This was not a full desqueeze, which would look insane, but just a partial squeeze.) It was also a flawed approach. To me, the only uncompromised solutions were: 1) widescreen TV sets; 2) high definition (or better); and 3) sticking with the movie's original aspect ratio. Anything else is a compromise. Of course, there's the issue of transferring flat 1.85 or 1.66 films by just opening up the top and bottom, but the danger there is revealing "too much," which infamously happened on the initial home video release of Pee Wee's Big Adventure, exposing many sight gags (trap doors, props where they weren't supposed to be, etc.). I think Warner Bros. was extremely embarrassed and quietly redid the video transfer and recalled as many tapes as they could. There was also that DVD release of Back to the Future where some ***** at Universal framed the picture wrong, and that also involved a recall. I've often said, "just because the picture has the same aspect ratio as the original film doesn't mean it's framed correctly." Basically, all the tech people involved have to pay very close attention and never blink.
Thanks for the info, Vidiot, about BUS STOP and the ((center)) scanning done and various other movies nuggets of info about tapes and discs. → The studios were surely right about the customers of the time and the "Why isn't my television screen all filled up?!". ---------------
As god is my witness, there was a neat, hand-lettered sign by the Tower Video cash register on the Sunset Strip that said, "NO! Your letterboxed tape/disc is not defective! There is no missing picture underneath the black bars. You are seeing the full extent of the horizontal picture as shown in theaters!" And they made it clear that they wouldn't offer refunds for letterboxed releases. Interesting that the forum software censored me saying something like "Moe" (from the Three Stooges) and "ron" as one word. I wasn't calling anybody here that word; I was referring to a nameless studio technician.
I suppose we should bring up Super 35 for a minute, mostly to say that just because you shoot perf to perf doesn't mean the 4x3 transfer uses all that space.
If there is one film that sticks with me in regards to this method is Terminator 2, when Arnold smashes the pay phone to get coins so young John Conner can call his foster parents. In the VHS version, you see clearly see the phone already pre-cracked in the right places while they are talking before Arnold pounds his fist into it. In the remastered version for DVD, it is cropped so you don't see the cracks until the camera pans down quickly when Arnold is just about to smash it.
Yeah, James Cameron was one of the first filmmakers to insist on shooting in Super 35mm, which provides a much bigger frame, basically using every pixel available on the film emulsion. The idea is: when you do the TV version, you don't have to pan & scan as much: the headroom (at the top of the frame) stays the same, and you just open up the bottom. Two problems with this idea: 1) if there's any visual effects, too often the VFX company doesn't fill the entire Super 35mm frame, so the shot still has to be pan/scanned for home video; 2) if there's anything low in the shot that you don't want anybody to see (like pre-cracked glass on a prop phone booth), it's now going to be seen. As a testament to Cameron's skill and imagination, many, many films later started shooting in Super 35mm in the 1990s and 2000s, specifically so they had some room to move the frame around. All the Harry Potter films were shot that way, and I believe the Lord of the Rings films were as well. There are film die hards who want to shoot anamorphically, which has a specific "look" to it (like the broad horizontal "J.J. Abrams" lens flares), and so they don't shoot Super 35mm.
