Believe it or not, I’m doing a demonstration of DVD players for a new-hire class, and I’d like to show a movie scene or two of widescreen vs. pan-and-scan, and I’d like a particularly bad example of P&S to show.
Any thoughts?
I don’t know if you can find a P&S version of Blazzing Saddles on DVD, but you can on VHS. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. It literally pans during the scenes and stops abruptly at the camera’s destination. Very jarring.
It kills me when “A League of their Own” is shown on cable in pan and scan. Also, I would guess any big budget movie with lots of effects would be bad. Like, “Lord of the Rings” or “Titanic”.
Ghostbusters had amazing bad P&S. This had to have been VHS as I’ve never watched a P&S DVD if I could avoid it.
Here’s a site with great comparison shots between widescreen and P&S.
Link
I second “A League of Their Own” - though I haven’t seen it on DVD (I’d guess it’s probably the same job that’s on cable). I think it has something to do with the large cast that’s usually on the screen at the same time.
Honorable Mention: “Multiplicity”, the Michael Keaton suckfest. The p’n’s is particularly bad because there’s 5 Keatons on the screen, and the scanning director tries to get all of them in on the same shot. Watching it made me dizzy.
Honorable honorable mention: “A Few Good Men”.
I seem to recall **Patton ** being pretty well hacked up for pan’n’scan.
One of the Editions of “Die Hard” has a nice featurette showing the virtues of letterbox format. It shows a scene of Alan Rickman and the hacker talking about the vault in both pan and scan and letterbox.
Here, here. Anonymous Coward. I’m not really even a movie buff or a purist. Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies and I watch it whenever I catch it on Comedy Central or another channel. I’ve never noticed bad P&S before, but the Ghostbusters P&S is just so horrible it completely distracts from the movie.
I’ve seen FotR in full and wide-screen, and the action/effect scenes were not the biggest losers. More stationary, artistically composed scenes were the biggest losers. While many times p+s framed the shots as good or better ( :eek: ) than the original, the number of times the p+s shot was just jarring to the well-composed frame of the wide-screen version was unacceptable.
The all-time worst is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In the widescreen version, during the Dawn of Man sequence there is no camera movement. None. And I’m sure this was deliberate on Kubrick’s part. This is a world with no technology, no tools, no even surfaces of any kind. Any smooth motion of the camera, like a pan or a tracking shot, would betray that. After the monolith comes and brings the first moment of true inspiration, even the camera technique and the viewers perspective opens up to new possibilities. The pan-and-scan version destroys that mood.
Try When Harry Met Sally . There are a lot of scenes of them talking across a table to eachother. In letterbox it is one long uncut scene of thier conversation.
Pan and Scan continuously jumps between the two of them depending on who’s talking.
Another just awful pan & scan DVD was The Last Action Hero . Despite being an awful movie the pan & scan version is so bad it’s almost unwatchable. Must be why you can find it for $5 most places.
Try Boogie Nights, where, early in the film, Mark Wahlburg’s character is being coy with Burt Reynolds’ character. They have a long exchange where they’re both on-screen, at extreme ends of the frame. It’s a nice static shot that puts emphasis on the initial distance, and it really works as an illustration of a sort of seduction.
In the P&S version, it becomes a seasick-making tennis-match. Pathetic.
“Pan-and-scan”? What is this of which you speak?
Oh yes, seconded (or thirded). I think it’s so noticeable because they actually pan in mid-shot, where most movies pick a cropping and stick with it.
I mentioned this in another thread, but Starship Troopers has a couple of bad examples. The worst being during the game of “football” near the beginning of the movie. The pan is so bad it actually blurs.
I’ve never seen the pan version, but there’s one scene in Silverado where Kevin Costner’s character is going to shoot two bad guys. He’s in the centre of the screen, outside batwing saloon doors, and the two baddies are at the extreme edges of the screen. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how they’d fit it all in frame.
On VHS, the worst I ever saw was Jacques Tati’s Playtime. Granted, it was shot in 70mm widescreen and doesn’t translate well even letterboxed, but it was just impossibly bad.
For instance, there was one joke where you see two families watching TV, only it’s staged as though they were watching each other. The pan and scan only showed one of the two families, so the entire joke was pointless.
When I was a wee lad, Siskel and Ebert had a show devoted to the differences between pan&scan and widescreen. They showed some example from a Fred Astaire movie, where he’s jumping on to a table, dancing, then down onto the floor and dancing. In the P&S version, however, he’s on the floor, the suddenly appears on the table, then he suddenly appears on the floor. You’d think he was a magician or something…
Ooh! Ooh!
I have a P&S VHS copy of Zardoz– there’s one scene where two actors are facing each other from opposite ends of the screen, with lots of negative space in between.
It ends up being a dialogue between two noses, with the viewer contemplating a white wall. Awesome.
That’s Silk Stockings.
The bad Pan-and-Scans that annoy me most are not the ones where they cut back and forth between two characters conversing, but where one person is talking to another who’s only half there. For example, in Anne of a 1000 Days, Anne Boleyn (Genvieve Bujold) and Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) are talking during a court dance; when the P&S shot is on Anne, Henry’s face is cleanly bisected off to one edge of the screen, and vice versa.