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me too

It's almost as directors direct for the format that will be used! [I'm glad they didn't crop to make it though!]

Same reason they should make the original Star Trek available without the digital effects.

Seinfeld looks SO CLEAR when it's not cropped in too: www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/c...

I wonder if their watch-time data shows losses between 4:3 and 16:9 and they believe that faking scenery or brutal pan & scan choices add up to a little more profit margin? Streaming is flattening everything out to subscription-based noise anyway, now. The most cynical reality is the most likely.

And lots of cool shows are playing with letterboxing today! Ponies on Peacock is 100% 4:3, there have been several recently. A few shows are even bouncing between aspect ratios in different scenes just to fit vibes, POVs, or plot devices like different time periods. The public is good with it!

yes but it was horribly expensive (every single visual effects shot was re-done in HD) and it will probably never happen again at that magnitude

That's a whole other thing though because Mad Men was always widescreen.

Just pillerbox it! I just want it to be clearer since it was on film. I don’t need it to be widescreen.

Unless it's Babylon 5, they need to keep the original aspect ratio. Like in Seinfeld's "The Pothole", the pothole itself is not visible in 16:9 but it is in 4:3. Plus all those instances in Friends where you can see the stand-ins.

I didn’t spend 30+ years angry at Pan & Scan movies to watch this happen

Babylon 5 got released on DVD in a widescreen format that wound up disappointing a lot of people because they didn't redo the effects for widescreen - they just cropped the 4:3 version, sometimes badly. So I'm glad when they did remaster the show they stuck with the broadcast aspect ratio.

There's a nice variation with some British shows that were done in the mid 90s that were deliberately shot 16:9 ready and broadcast 14:9 at the time but now have correct 16:9 HD versions.

I still wish we got the Wire in 4:3

Really wish they pillarboxed Buffy the Vampire Slayer. INFAMOUS for what you can see in the wider frame.

It's funny to me that after the letterbox/pan-n-scan battles about movies in the 1990s, we're now doing the exact reverse with TV shows from that era.

Looking forward to Criterion branded black duct tape.

The technical term for that is "outpainting", if you ever feel like looking it up. It's "inpainting" when it's filling in details inside an existing image.

It almost renders the scene unintelligible, visually.