Last night my wife (the beautiful and gracious Jenna) brought home a free RedBox DVD rental of "Journey to the Center of the Earth". As we skipped through the opening previews, their Blu-ray promotion piece fires up and . . . the aspect ratio was letterboxed 4:3. What in the name of all that's good and pure?? Now I realize they can't exactly show people a full HD picture on regular old DVD, but a non-anamorphic presentation? Really?? Are they even trying?

Is it just some sneaky attempt to make DVD look like crap?

Pics of Jenna?

Ha.

I remember Universal used to have HD-DVD commercials before their DVD's.. and it never made sense to me. You can talk about 6 times the resolution all you want, but if the T-Rex fight from King Kong looks exactly like it does on their DVD.. uh, yeah. Good one.

Well, to be fair, they had commercials for DVD on VHS tapes. Obviously they can't show the difference, but it is a good place to advertise.

I am guessing that the promotion was done for the widescreen and fullscreen versions of the title (assuming FS was available), and they just used the same for both. That doesn't excuse it being non-anamorphic though.

I guess I'm not sure this is really a problem. The point of the ad is to spread awareness, not demonstrate the technology (which would be impossible anyway, and displaying the ad in anamorphic widescreen might actually confuse some consumers).

I think it's a bizarre decision, in that they aren't even taking full advantage of the technology available to the DVD format. The soundtrack, on the other hand, was a 5.1 mix that was so loud and aggressive I had to turn down the volume. It felt like they were really going out of their way to convince people with the audio (which is, of course, only slightly ironic for WB . . .).

Using non-anamorphic 2.35:1 video to promote Blu-ray makes no sense to me. They might just as well have used a 192kbps mono audio track.

How do you figure anamorphic widescreen would've confused people?

Because many people are still pretty confused about the difference between Blu-ray and DVD, and I could imagine some people seeing the anamorphic image as an example of Blu-ray, and then thinking, "huh, this doesn't look any better than DVD."

I can see that -- especially given the low level of understanding most of the populace has concerning HD vs. SD.

I think Blu-ray ad's on DVD's honestly confuse people. They probably make some people less interested in the format as they can't see any difference in quality over their DVD's. Which is both sad and funny seeing as how you couldn't possibly see/hear the difference that way.

Wouldn't they think that with a non-anamorphic image though? Anamorphic or non-anamorphic wouldn't make a difference for those viewing on 4:3 sets. However, if it's non-anamorphic, those viewing on 16x9 sets would see it as worse than the anamorphic transfers they're accustomed to on DVD.

You're probably right. In some ways, there is no way to "win" with advertising Blu-ray on SD-DVDs. Some people are still going to be confused, or unconvinced. I guess, though, as long as it is getting increased visibility for the format, it must be helping to a degree.

And on the plus side, I've seen a number of Blu-ray commercials on TV over the past two weeks, in HD, that were pretty well done. They appear to have been made by the same agency that made the promo that is running at Target stores (at least they are using the same announcer).

There's a new ad that's been playing alot lately. I think it's the one that's part of the new "TruBlu" ad campaign. It shows clips from several different new films. I have seen that one playing alot, especially in between NFL games. Gee, I wonder who they're targeting?

There's also a new Walmart BD ad featuring a Sony BD player.

DishNetwork have plenty of ad runs for HD programing that are in standard-Def. I believe that the key point is to raise awareness. The small percentage of consumers that will be confused...will always be confused!

Pro-B

What VHS tapes had promos for DVD on them? I might have to get one of them.

I've got a real collector's item- a LASERDISC made for Good Guys stores with parts of the first DVD demo discs from various companies on it.

Is Universal ever going to re-do those DVDs to take out the HD-DVD promo on them? Seems they'd find it a bit embarrassing now.

"The Matrix" on VHS had an ad for DVD . . .