Modified To Fit Your Screen

So maybe there’s an extent to which film buffs are born, not made; after all, as a child, I was watching Siskel and Ebert. Still, at very least, film buffs are educated. But, yes, I was watching one Sunday evening in 1990 when they informed us about the concept of letterboxing. I think I’d known about it at least in theory before then; I don’t know if my Uncle Bill was a film buff but at very least he had a wide selection of movies on VHS, and some of them were in widescreen editions. The weirdest one I ever saw was a version of Ben-Hur where everything was in fullscreen except the chariot race, which swooped out and showed you how much more picture there was.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that even the great epics used to be in what we now call fullscreen. The aspect ratio of Gone With the Wind is 1.37:1. There were a few widescreen productions going back as far as 1897, but by and large, movies were in 1.33:1 or 1.37:1. Then came the rise of television and the need to be different. The need to get the attention of an audience. Not all movies were Panavision or VistaVision or Cinerama or what have you, but the standard aspect ratio tended to be 1.85:1. Which was all well and good until the rise of home video.

For years of my childhood, it was just fullscreen. Which in my house was largely fine, as my mom did most of the movie-buying, and she bought the movies she liked. A lot of John Wayne movies are fullscreen. But when we bought newer movies, or rented them, we got very familiar with the warning that the movies we were watching were formatted to fit our screen. It was information that was just there, like the FBI warning or coming soon notices about movies that had come out five years earlier. We seldom went to the movies, and in those days the window between theatrical release and home video release was so wide that who could remember what the full image looked like?

When Roger and Gene talked to us about pan-and-scan, the average TV size was about twenty-five inches. I’m not sure ours was even that big. People got upset about those black bars taking up so much of the picture—as late as 2000, I talked to someone who didn’t like widescreen because “it cuts off like half the frame.” Apparently, though, the drive started shifting with that special. People were actually asking for widescreen in increasing numbers. I knew about the concept of letterboxing, I think, before then, but that would have likely been the night I learned the term “pan and scan.”

I owned a few movies in widescreen on VHS. Dune, for example. But by the time I started buying movies in any degree of seriousness, I also bought my first DVD player, and that was when the aspect ratio issue for home theatres became Serious Business. There are discs around here that want me to flip them to one side or another depending on which version I want to watch. Some are very prominently labeled as widescreen. I do have one or two fullscreen, inherited from Gods know who or never mine in the first place.

As DVD replaced VHS, so too did TVs get big. Within ten years of that special, the year I bought my first TV that I owned myself, the average size was forty inches. I don’t know if mine was that big; it was the biggest I could afford, is all I can say for sure. The black bars took up the same percentage of the screen, but the picture I was seeing was much bigger. And then, of course, they started making widescreen TVs and filming TV shows in widescreen and suddenly the challenge became figuring out how to play Gone With the Wind without its being stretched weird because it wasn’t widescreen.

My children are more familiar with the difference between portrait and landscape than between Academy and widescreen. (My phone tried to get me to take our holiday pictures in portrait and I was furious.) They are I think aware that different aspect ratios exist, but only barely. And they’re educated on film by the standards of children their age. I’m not sure if they would’ve noticed bars on the top and bottom of the screen, but maybe they would’ve. Or maybe they would’ve grown up to be as insufferable on the subject as I am. Goodness knows they’re close enough to that as it is.