way back when they first issued Apocalypse Now in Widescreen on VHS in the early 90's. i was browsing thru a Suncoast video store and spotted it. i furled my brow and thought, "hmm, wide screen... looks like a gimmick." then i read the explanation on the back and my jaw dropped. in an attempt to find more, i quickly discovered the holy grail: LaserDiscs.

Face/Off. I saw it twice in a theater, and when it came out on VHS, I rented a copy. I was bothered by all of the panning and scanning of the picture, so I purchased a widescreen VHS copy. (At the time - 1998 - DVD was still too expensive for me.)

I do remember showing it to some friends and they all said "What's with the black bars?" After explaining it to them, most of them said "Who cares?" When DVD became more popular, most of them converted to widescreen.

Ghostbusters was a good example for widescreen... listening to the commentary track, Harold Raimis (sp?) said that he despised pan/scan because those cuts always cut him out of the side-by-side shots of all four of them.

Alien and Jaws. I loved them as a kid on TBS, TNT, Sci-Fi etc. and they were always fullscreen and edited. Saw the dvds and was blown away by what I was missing. Widescreen ever since.

Pre-VHS (late 70s) I read an article explaining P&S. After that, movies on television started looked wrong. But P&S was an unavoidable fact of life until someone decided that DVDs should be released widescreen. That's someone whose hand I'd like to shake.

Same here. That Graduate example is a really good one, too, since there are a few people here who say OAR is important for action movies, but makes no difference for comedies and dramas.

Die Hard on laserdisc.

Watching The Towering Inferno elevator scene at the beginning of the movie where Paul Newman and William Holden are talking at each side of the elevator. The scene was automatically moved between them as the conversation took place, not how I remembered the scene in the film. Caught a late night showing on AMC (late 80's or early 90's) and they were showing the letterboxed version. Really a huge difference. I started searching out the latenight versions because that is when AMC showed letterboxed versions.

I then started looking for widescreen VHS tapes and found Witness, the Star Wars trilogy SE and Star Trek First Contact. My wife thought I was crazy. Only bought widescreen after those initial titles. Not enough money for laser disc, but have really enjoyed dvd.

It was the P&S copy of Pulp Fiction I got for my 15th or 16 the birthday. I noticed when Jules shoots Flock of Seagulls, there was some really unnatural movement.

People say that? :whofart: Try watching George Washington or THX-1138 in FF . . . you might as well take just out a couple of the characters when you consider the beautiful cinematography that would be lost.

Watching The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly on TV (among other movies) in the 70's...it was obvious something was really messed up.

Converting to OAR
 

For me, it was a SE version of Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home on VHS. Along with the film (in widescreen), the tape had a "making-of" documentary included. In it, Nimoy (who directed, I believe) extolled the virtues of the widescreen format. They even showed a comparison of one scene - the interior of a pickup truck with Kirk, Spock, and the marine biologist chick. The difference between the widescreen version and full-frame was quite evident, as was the pan & scan they had to do. After that, I wouldn't buy a tape unless it was widescreen. DVD was an answer to my prayers! Now if only Paramount had included that documentary on the DVD release of ST:IV...

I've always bought DVDs in WS, but I was reminded of how crummy full screen can be when I was given a copy of Minority Report that had been "formatted to fit [my] screen." That just sucked - ruined the movie for me.

The Siskel & Ebert show was also my introduction to the "black bars". But The Graduate wasn't the one being used as an example. It was a Spencer Tracy movie instead. Desk Set, I think.

When I first got my DVD player back in 2000 I knew that widescreen was way to go, but really noticed the difference when i first watched Blazing Saddles in WS. I thought I was seeing scenes I hadn't seen before.

They used a number of examples. The Graduate was one.

The scene was the one where Benjamin was standing at the door of the hotel room in the background on the right and Mrs. Robinson was putting on her stockings in the foreground on the left. The composition of the scene was exquisite. The P&S version had to keep cutting back and forth between them which completely ruined the shot.

when they issued Lawrence of Arabia in widescreen on VHS. I had remembered from watching the movie many times on television and P&S VHS that in the opening credits, Lawrence keeps walking off frame and coming back which I always thought was very odd. In the widescreen version, he never leaves the frame and i'm actually able to tell what he's doing. Also Star Wars in Widescreen let me see a whole extra planet in the opening scene that I didn't realize was there before.

I showed my dad a comparison of Lawrence of Arabia between his P&S copy and my widescreen copy and he became a widescreen advocate ever since.

If he were alive today I would say he would be clawing at the top of the coffin instead of rolling

Criterion's "2001 A Space Odyssey" on LaserDisc. I bought it with my first LaserDisc player in 1989. I've been a OAR believer ever since.

I cut out black cardboard rectangles, and put them on the top and bottom of my 31" JVC during regular network programming.

I remember when I first got into dvd back in 2000, and I bought the Jurassic Park 2-pack in fullscreen. (I was still unclear about the difference of wide and full) I then bought Gladiator which was released ONLY in widescreen, and I found out more about OAR, and I never looked back since.

actually with that movie, you see more then the widescreen movie (but you see too much dead space at the bottom) which is a process called "super 35", which many 2:35;1 movies shot today use.

I think it was Star Trek III. During the scene when the Enterprise explodes, the VHS P&S version did not show the reaction of the Bird of Prey. A later letterboxed rerelease version did. It was like watching the movie for the first time. :)

I remember renting the video of Start Trek IV (way before DVDs were around), and watching the scene when Kirk assembles the crew in front of their stolen Klingon ship on Vulcan. I remembered seeing the full name painted on the ship - "H.M.S. Bounty" - when I saw the movie in the theater, and I couldn't figure out why it was cut off on my TV screen. From that point on, I noticed similar "cuts" in many scenes in many movies, but I thought I would just have to live with it. Then DVD came around, and it's been OAR all the way. :banana: