Qui Gon Jim

All of us at some point in our lives made the transition from Pan and Scan to OAR. I remember watching "A League of Their Own" on HBO or Showtime, and felt like something was off with the picture but I was not really sure what.

Then I saw an article abot the WS versions of the Star Wars trilogy and I have been a convert ever since.

What movie converted you?

acostigan

It wasn't a movie. It was my HD-ready TV I bought a few years ago.

-AC

Groucho

Citizen Kane

The fact that the greatest film of all time is still only available in "Foolscreen" is a great tragedy. If Orson Welles were alive today he'd be rolling in his grave.

canaryfarmer

Hard Boiled on VHS. It was the first WS VHS I had ever seen (and probably the last--there weren't exactly a lot around).

talemyn

The Star Wars movies . . . a friend started pointing out to me all of the things that you couldn't see when you watched the FF version (e.g., the disappearing hologram of the officer after his ship gets hit with an asteroid in ESB, when Luke mentions seeing the Tusken Raider through his binoculars as he walks around the side of the Bantha, etc.)

canaryfarmer

And I hope that Groucho is kidding. That is all.

talemyn

That is generally the case.

dollfins1

i began to suspect something was wrong when i would see " this film has been modified to fit your screen" or whatever it says before a foolscreen movie begins. during the great blockbuster trade-in i got rid of all fullscreen dvds that were available in widescreen. when i see someone picking a fullscreen version i try to make them convert to the widescreen cult lol

DonnachaOne

I usppose it was when I was nine or ten, and I saw widescreen VHS in the shops, and asked why. In later years, I further understood the work, time and artistry that went into composition, photography and directing... and how much of a travesty it is to have that torn asunder.

Pretentious? A little.

It also works for silly films like Independence Day. Get the VHS and it's "hey! The White House... ROTUNDA got blown up..."

taa455

I was watching A Few Good Men on cable and saw the camera awkwardly pan across when someone out-of-frame started talking, then move back to the other guy. I remember thinking (this was before I even knew about "pan and scan"), "That looked horrible. Surely that was not how they made it." Later I learned about fullscreen and pan and scan and it all suddenly made sense.

ceeece

Same here. And it was rare to find a widescreen VHS copy of anything. I think "Star Wars: Special Edition" was my first Widescreen VHS purchase. I wish I had known back in the day when I bought the Original "Last time to own" versions. When DVD started selling and had "Widescreen" and "Full Screen" I knew it had to be widescreen all the way from then on out.

mrhan

It was those old Kung Fu flicks back in the 70's. Whenever I saw one on TV it made me think something was wrong. The characters would be fighting and you can see only half the characters on either side of the screen. It was like they zoomed in on the pic to fill the screen and didn't even pan and scan the picture. What was more odd was when the credits rolled and the pic would become really thin and all the letters would looked mashed together. Later on I saw a bootleg widescreen VHS copy of Star Wars in the eighties that made me realize that they did do something to cut films broadcasted on TV. Being a kid at the time I didn't know of the term P&S but somehow knew that films where cut to fit the TV screen.

Josh H

No one movie. Just having the difference explained to me.

Snowmaker

I think it first dawned on me with things missing from the Star Wars movies, but my first purchased VHS where I was really able to compare was this movie.

talemyn

Not what got me to buy-in, but a movie in which the alteration is painfully obvious . . . try checking out the soccer game at the end of Victory. Between the hacked-off subtitles and the fact that you can't see half of the goals being scored, it's practically unwatchable.

movielib

You've used this one too many times.

movielib

Siskel & Ebert's show way back when sold me. I distinctly remember the example they showed of The Graduate. It wouldn't have done much good before that as home video was just beginning to letterbox some films on laserdisc (Criterion).

Groucho

Yeah, but we've done this thread a million times. Might as well use a stock reply.

Actual answer: I rented Manhattan on VHS years ago and noticed the letterboxing. Did some research and found out a lot. People grouse about Woody Allen here a lot, but few know that he was one of the early proponents of OAR on home video.

buckee1

All of the Star Trek movies did it for me. I was used to watching them on tape and on HBO in P&S until Paramount introduced the WS collector's set in the mid 90's. There were new sounds and imagery that I had never or heard seen before. Subsequently, I was hooked from the opening credits!

movielib

I'm not sure but I think Manhattan may have been the first movie letterboxed. And it was the only way it was released.

Randy Miller III

Good Lord! I've gotta bookmark this thread!

Shap

Amazingly enough, A League of Their Own. I saw the P&S version too, and the panning is so horrendously conspicuous it literally made the movie unwatchable. I had always known that fullscreen would cut the edges off the movie, but never realized how much of an impact on the viewing experience it really made until I saw ALOTO.

flashburn

I think I've been OAR since birth, I guess I was just raised right.

nightmaster

Same here. I've been buying OAR movies all along but that doesn't mean I liked watching them on a pan and scan set. 185:1 was fine but wider than that......it just made me crave a widescreen set to enjoy them on

BigDan

I can't remember when I "saw the light", it always made sense to me that there was something happening to make a movie that was not square in the theater fit the TV screen that was (essentially) square. I just didn't care all that much until I started seeing letterboxed offerings on DirecTV pay-per-view (or some non-pay-per-view channels like whichever one was showing the Planet of the Apes movies in widescreen back in 1998) and later seeing widescreen DVD releases and got used to seeing an OAR image on my television screen.