People still don't know the difference between wide screen and full screen after all these years ?
That's so very sad....
Okay once more I'll put it into small words for the unenlightened.....
C I N I M A S C O P E [________]
Big huge rectangular movie screen
T V [__]
Square Screen
Okay, how do you fit massive rectangle into a square area ?
Well, you could cut off the sides of the 'scope film and pan & scan like a drunk director with a massive hangover....
Or you could just put black bars where there is no footage what so ever so the rectangle is in the middle of the square.....
THAT 2ND ONE IS WHAT WIDE-SCREEN MEANS ON DVD'S
Don't like the black bars, tough, even on 16x9 HDTV's you'll still get the black bars, yes they'll be SMALLER, but they'll still be THERE because even 16x9 isn't as big as 'scope is.
I know this becuse I just got a nice 16x9 HDTV & ST:TMP still had black bars at the top and bottom, gasp, go fig....
It didn't bother me because I know it was shot in 'scope and not in a 'standard' movie format.
Now if you've paying any attention, you've may have noticed even TV shows on a 'standard' TV have black bars, that's because they started shooting them in 16x9 and broadcasting them the same way as well.
Trying to escape any Wide Screen format is impossible nowadays, the entire world has moved to it, even ADS on TV do it, we've left 'standard' in the dust pretty much before the 'switch' the FCC required ALL the networks to do recently.
Disney's new feature length 'traditional' animated film that's on it's way to theaters will be in 'scope as well, heck the last several ones they did by hand were in that format too.
Computer Animated films can be 'manipulated' to fit a 'standard' TV screen, but that's not the point now. That practice will no longer be done as 16x9 is the new 'standard' as far as TV goes.
Wide-screen isn't something new, Hollywood's been making wide-screen movies for a very LONG time. Why ? To compete against what they saw as a threat to their bottom line, Television, and seeing as TV has been around from the late 1940's early 1950's we're talking 1/2 a century here.
This was long before the 2nd profit market from VHS & so forth came along to help Hollywood resell their films to the general public, so you can kinda see why they did what they did at the time.
They wanted films to be BIG events, so they made the films BIGGER then what you could see on TV any old day. This prompted the creation of several film formats, each owned by each studio back in the day, however CinemaScope (tm) became the industry standard in short time even with all the other formats that there were at the time.
ANYWAY, flash forward to VHS.
Now here came the problem, Hollywood decided that folks who didn't know any better wouldn't watch a film with black bars at the top and bottom, so they cut off the right and left sides of every film they put out on VHS back in the early days of VHS life. Film buffs weren't very happy about this practice.
Later on, Hollywood bowed down to the folks who complained about this practice, because DIRECTORS added their voices to that of the film buffs, as they wanted their work to be seen, all of it, not just the middle of it or whatever have you.
Now this is where the confusion started between folks that know better vs folks that didn't know better started. Folks that didn't know better started saying things like....
"Hey, this movie doesn't fill up my TV screen, it's black on the top and bottom where there should be footage located."
This is the main reason why there is a site on the 'net like
www.widescreen.org in the first place to explain this stuff to the unenlightened, they also cover the multitudes of other formats that Hollywood played with back in the day.
Go ahead and check that site out, it's quite an eye opener.
I'm sure that site will be around to hold folks hands when they watch something like "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" on their wonderful 16x9 HDTV's and there's still these black bars there even tho' the TV is a wide screen TV....
Just remember, this whole thing started because TV was competing directly with movies back in the day.
- W -
* Who Also Film Historian Sometimes When It Come To This Stuff *
^ Ohhhhh gotcha!
