Watching a pan-n-scan movie is like reading the Cliff Notes condensation of a book.
Four words for people who think pan and scan is a good thing:
Ben. Hur. Chariot. Race.
Am I the only one who doesn’t give a damn if my DVDs are “widescreen” or not?
Yes.
People who complain about black bars always confuse me. Aren’t most TVs surrounded by 4 black bars already? When you’re reading a webpage that’s not open fullscreen are your eyes magically drawn to your icons on the left? Can you concentrate on the content without that blue task bar at the bottom of the screen diverting your attention? I mean it’s not like it has little clowns dancing around. It’s just an unused portion of your screen where nothing whatsoever is happening.
Unless you have subtitles, which you can then read without them obscuring the action.
Oh. And allow me to quote Treasure Planet, a widescreen DVD from Disney, on the subject. They do not offer a Fullscreen version. I suppose this is why.
I like their direction and I hope they stick with it.
News Flash!!
Blockbuster Video has finally seen the light. Today, Blockbuster announced that they are reversing their earlier policy of buying pan-and-scan over widescreen when the two choices were available. A quote from this article:
Excellent point. Even when this movie is shown on TNT and butchered to pieces in pan-and-scan, it always switches to widescreen for the chariot race.
Why? Because it’s in-fucking-possible to show it any other way. Same with The Matrix, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or countless other films.
Yeah. That was a miserable failure if your definition of “miserable failure” is “the best selling computer of 1998 which single-handedly resurrected Apple as a player in the computer industry.”
Priceguy, you don’t even think DVDs should exist. I’m really not sure how much your input is worth here.
It’s not exactly an earth-shaking film, but the one time I really noticed bad pan-n-scan, I mean that was severely distracting, was watching that Micheal Keaton movie Multiplicity. There are pan-n-scans all over the place in that movie when you watch it on TV, that are just terribly distracting, they’re happening all the frickin’ time. Since I never saw much of anything in widescreen before I got a DVD player (couldn’t afford to go to many movies when I lived with my parents) I would figure I’m pretty used to pan-n-scan. And I probably am pretty used to it, I usually just don’t notice. So if I noticed it right away, it must be among the most colossally crappy pan-n-scan laden cuts of all time. (No, I’m not begging for a widescreen version of Multiplicity, I’m just pointing it out as an example.)
We usually think of widescreen as something you’d only get for action blockbusters, where you wanted to see every cool explosion or gun-wielding android on the screen, but I can see how eliminating pan-n-scans would be best for alot of films of any genre.
He doesn’t sound very sure of himself? Does he? 
heh. I’ve noticed that before; when I cut and paste from certain places, even though it looks fine in the text box, the quotes and apostrophes get turned into question marks. Guess I should preview more often, even when I’m sture of the coding…
Actually, generally not. The information in the center of the frame is considered subordinate, in most schools of shot composition, to the information on the “thirds.” Watch closely the next time you see a real, non-butchered movie in widescreen. Characters will almost never be in the middle of the scene, almost always on the left or right third. If you have two characters talking to each other, most competent directors will position one of the left third, the other on the right third. When they chop the image up, you get ‘talking nose syndrome,’ which requires dreadful amounts of panning and scanning. It’s not a workable option.
**
And, ironically, Six Feet Under is in 16x9 widescreen. 
Says who? Someone who doesn’t own one? If the lack of a floppy drive on pretty much every Mac introduced since 1998, particularly the iMac, is such a big deal, you’d think that the iMac wouldn’t have gone on to be one of the best selling personal computers in history.
Strange, none of my Macs have floppy drives, either, and I don’t seem to miss them…
And when, pray tell, did I say it was a miserable failure? No, I didn’t, did I? I just said it was stupid to not have a floppy drive. It was.
Exqueeeeze me? In case you missed it, I’m arguing in favor of widescreen. This thread isn’t about DVD, it’s about widescreen vs pan-and-scan.
If success is the sole arbiter of what’s good and what’s not, then VHS was better than BETA, Windows is better than MacOS, Internet Explorer is better than any other browser out there, and so on.
It’s not like most computer buyers are informed customers. The iMac was small, compact, pretty and, according to the advertising, easy to get started with. That’s enough.
I worked tech support back then and do you have any idea how many times we wished our customers had a floppy drive? An umptillion times, that’s how many. A customer with a freshly bought iMac had no way to transfer data off the computer without using e-mail or networking.
I can not stand widescreen. But I think that’s only because I have a small tv screen. On a small screen widescreen just makes the screen even smaller. On a big screen tv I probably wouldn’t mind widescreen.
I have been on a long, lonely crusade for years to convince all of my friends that widescreen is better. This started years ago with a 35" tube TV and laserdiscs. At the time it was the only way to get most movies in widescreen - I have, for example, Episodes IV-VI of Star Wars Special Editions in widescreen with Dolby Digital sound. Try finding THAT on DVD!! And yes, I spent the money on a laserdisc player that could decode AC-3 (Dolby Digital) - early adopter geek here!
With advent of DVD, widescreen and Dolby Digital are now available to everyone. My experience has been that my friends (with some gentle prodding) have to come to realize that widescreen is better. The number of “Can’t you get rid of those stupid bars?” has dropped off dramatically in the last two years. Of course, I’ve upgraded to DVD and a bigger TV as well, and to really watch a movie the lights are off anyway so the black bars aren’t noticeable at all!
I don’t have any specific pan-and-scan horror stories, but I do know that I never watch any of these movies in P-n-S:
Ben-Hur
Unforgiven
The Matrix
Braveheart
That is all.
Some movie scene look breathtaking in wide screen format, but loose they’re true beauty when made for TV. The movie was made to be viewed that way.
Filmmakers put a lot of work into each shot. They manipulate the scene in order to set an atmosphere, and keep up the audience’s interests with crafty scenery. It’s like the background is a whole different personality. Some people don’t notice it or ignore it. Their minds are completely focused on the initial story. This is NOT a bad thing!
With me, it all depends on the movie. If it were a comedy, I would want the TV format. Unless it’s a movie like “The Mask,” TV format ruined my favorite joke in that movie. When ‘The Mask’ (Jim Carrey) gets shot, and he puts on a dramatic, but fake, death scene. After he keels over, and pretends to perish, he’s handed an Oscar like statue. He thanks everyone for the award and starts to leave. He then stops, and points to the opposite side of which he’s walking, as if people off stage are signaling to him that he’s exiting the wrong way. It’s just funny because I’ve seen that happen so much. I guess you would have to see it for it to be funny. But you can’t on regular TV, because it was shaved off.
It’s all a matter of taste, which is why you often get an option these days.
I find this logic amusing. For years, I watched widescreen VHS (ugh, gag, vomit) on a 12" TV. Never bothered me a bit.
Widescreen all the way, and I’m not just saying that because I have a 51" widescreen at home. If I’m watching it on a computer, widescreen is a must (granted I’m sitting close), but even when I had a 20" TV, widescreen laserdiscs (laugh all you want) and VHS tapes were also a must.
I don’t know if it’s been posted already, but look at these comparisons. It’s usually quite funny seeing the difference between 16:9 being convered to 4:3. http://www.widescreen.org/examples.shtml
Granted, many examples are out of context, since it’s just a still. Nonetheless, there are cases where an important object never reaches the center of the image, and thus would disappear completely on a fullscreen version.
I’m surprised at the number of full screen advocates here, given that many movies include little easter eggs that require the viewer’s full attention.