Digital Home Thoughts: Slate - "How Widescreen Won"

"Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country's dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as "full screen"). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen."

Even when I didn't have a HDTV, I would only buy Widescreen versions of DVDs and LaserDiscs. There is just something about watching a movie they way it is supposed to be seen. Reel Classics has an excellent article from over 6 years ago about how much you actually miss on movies that are not letterbox. It wouldn't be Memorial Day without "war movies" and I ended up watching Where Eagles Dare on Turner Classic Movies. Surprisingly, it wasn't in letterbox format and many scenes lost their punch over the DVD version that I had just purchased a couple months ago. A couple scenes were cut off and you actually miss some of the great panoramas of Richard Burton on top of the cable car. As the Slate article shows, the pendulum has swung back into the letterbox camp and many of these great old movies shot using CinemaScope can now been seen how the director planned it to be.