I never understood why it didn't become the norm for films to be put in widescreen for VHS. Some movies had special letterbox versions, but 99% of all tapes of course had this awful phrase:

"This film has been modified from it's original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen."

They obviously made big-screen TVs in the 90's, so I've always found it weird that hardly any tapes were made to accommodate them.

Don't get me wrong though, I actually love VHS tapes. I still have a small TV with a built-in VCR and I love finding old tapes that have never been used. The picture quality really isn't that bad. I just wish they had made letterbox versions.

Who knows? Maybe they tested them when VHS was first coming onto the market but people didn't like the bars on the screen, so they made pan & scan the norm.

The poor quality. But once they went to DVD, some still stayed standard. I remember seeing the Funny Farm DVD in a store for $29.99. Ha.

I watched Mrs. Doubtfire on VHS a couple months ago and the first 5 minutes was in widescreen. It actually looked really good. At first I thought it was a special letterbox version, but then it eventually switched to full screen.

>>4

I watched Mrs. Doubtfire on VHS a couple months ago and the first 5 minutes was in widescreen.

That is probably to accomodate the opening credits

There were a lot of Widescreen VHS tapes produced. The Star Wars Trilogy for a start.

During the heyday of VHS, all TV screens were in Academy ratio, and the average TV screen size (setting aside what was accessible to a handful of very rich people) was much smaller today.

What happens when you letterbox a 2.35:1 film onto a small 4:3 screen? The majority of the screen is black, and the entire image is contained in a narrow ribbon, which, given the level of resolution of both TV screens of the day and VHS tape, has more or less no discernible detail. If you were looking at a close-up in a Sergio Leone film, you might be able to make out facial expressions, but not otherwise. And the black bars are unbelievably distracting.

Purists of the day waged a violent war with common sense, insisting that films had to be seen in the letterbox ratio, even though most people couldn't really see anything in that ratio; they made lame appeals to "the format the artist intended", even though any viewing on a TV screen via VHS tape was about as far away from 35mm projection on a cinema screen as any other.

But they were fighting a losing battle. However clever the sophistry which told the masses that films had to be seen in letterbox format, their own eyes told them something else.

Yes, this was definitely a problem. I think I used to own The Bridge on the River Kwai in widescreen and could barely make out anything on my 4:3 14 inch TV set. I can only imagine what watching Ben-Hur would've been like.

Ehh.. Back in the 80s, pretty much everyone I knew had one of those big cabinet TVs in their living room like this: http://www.wegotserved.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/console-tv.jpg. By the early 90s, medium sized TVs were cheaper and more common too, and most people had several of them. I had plenty of widescreen VHS tapes and they looked fine. Obviously DVD was a huge step up in quality, but the VHS tapes were far from having "more or less no discernible detail."

And the black bars are unbelievably distracting.

Not to me...

There's nothing lame about wanting to see a film the way it was shot, without the sides chopped off. You don't take pair of scissors to a painting just so it'll fit in the most convenient frame. I can't believe it took people decades to come up with the simple solution of making TVs wider.

It took decades to come up with a new way of projecting an image onto a TV screen, that didn't have cathode ray tubes making the set as deep as it was wide. (And also remember a wider screen requires more bandwidth, which is more at a premium when broadcast signals are analogue.)

And this point:

There's nothing lame about wanting to see a film the way it was shot, without the sides chopped off.

...exhibits a particular kind of blindness, which is what I was criticising. The widescreen film was shot on 35mm with the intention of being projected on an enormous reflective screen. When it's shown on a tiny glassy one you're not seeing the film in anything like the intended medium, or with anything like the intended effect. Whether or not the sides are chopped off is a trivial matter by comparison.

One way or another, when the images is transferred from film to VHS tape to your old crappy screen, you'll lose most of the detail. You can either spread this loss over the entire image (letterboxing) so that everything makes you strain your eyes so as to imaging you're seeing something; or you can concentrate this loss on the edges of the image so as to make the central bit easier to see to something approaching an acceptible standard.

On a 4:3 screen, if you switch from a pan-and scan fullscreen selection of a 2.35:1 movie, to a letterbox version that lets you see (so people fondly and falsely believed) the "entire" image, how much detail have you lost on that central bit that previously filled the entire screen?

You've lost over 70% of the detail, over and above the loss you already sustained moving from cinema to a TV screen in the first place. That's why nobody wanted to watch letterbox, unless they felt, for misguided reasons, that it was their duty to do so.

Maybe I don't remember VHS well enough, but I didn't think the picture quality was that bad. In any case, what annoys me is that even after DVDs came around, people still insisted on keeping the fullscreen format, whining about "black bars" while losing up to half of the frame in some cases.

I think widescreen/letterboxed VHS was finally beginning to gain more acceptance, but it was almost around the time that DVD was coming on the scene - I remember that Warner Home Video re-released some of their popular musicals and comedies from the 50s and 60s letterboxed.

I recall that the first letterboxed VHS I watched was THE COLOR PURPLE, released only in that format at Spielberg's insistance. It took me about five minutes to get accustomed to, and was never a problem for me, in fact became my preferred format. I was glad that almost from the first, DVD offered films letterboxed.

I'd imagine the main problem was the small size of tv screens back then. Typical tv's were 4:3 in shape and less than 20 inches corner-to-corner at around the time vhs first came out. If you presented a movie like Star Wars to a person that way and then ALSO blacked out half the frame, you'd be left with a very small picture to look at.

I think that the VHS format had more vertical line than horizontal one and simply almost all TV were 4:3 and relatively small (32 or smaller inch was standard in people living room).

And like other pointed, almost all television was in 4:3 so that it was people were use to see on their tv, making the black bar more distracting when you are not used to see them.

I have the special edition Star Wars trilogy on VHS which is in widescreen. These are rare though. It's in the special box that came out in the mid-to-late 90s. One cover has Darth Vader, the next has a Stormtrooper, and I forget what the other has.

EDIT: I found it, it's Yoda. This is the version I have on VHS: https://sinestrocorps.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/htgkaonng1knyrt1.jpg

>>17
I have those too. There was a bonus tape called From Star Wars to Jedi

There was a bonus tape called From Star Wars to Jedi

That's the one with Lucas on the cover surrounded by ILM miniatures, isn't it? I think I still have that around here.

I believe I used to have it along with The Star Wars special edition VHS's, but my mom threw out all of the VHS we had, after a small flood hit our basement.

I heard letterboxing was against U.S. law for a while, actually.

>>21

I heard letterboxing was against U.S. law for a while, actually.

if i remember correctly, congress sneaked that one through as a rider on the law to ban "garbage pail kids" stickers.

Worst movie I've seen in the theater in a long time.

I have the Star Wars trilogy letterbox version and they look fine. Only version I can watch after Lucas mutilated the films for dvd.

The original versions of the films on those DVDs aren't anamorphic/enhanced for widescreen, so if you watch them on a 16x9 HDTV there is a black box around the whole picture, unless you use the "zoom" feature. Anyway, those DVDs were a huge insult to the fans because of this. Lucas was basically saying, "okay, I'll give you the originals again, but only in this shitty quality edition on a bonus disc.

The original versions of the films on those DVDs aren't anamorphic/enhanced for widescreen, so if you watch them on a 16x9 HDTV there is a black box around the whole picture, unless you use the "zoom" feature.

Well VHS tape was never enhanced for widescreen TVs either and it's not possible to upscale a VHS tape like a BD player can with a DVD.

The DVDs is far from great but you can pick them up for candy money these days. Try them, you might be 0.5% happier.

Blade Runner: Director's Cut I remember being the first VHS I saw in widescreen.

Owned quite a few "Widescreen" VHS tapes in the early 90's, But my roommate and I had a Sony 50" XBR Rear Projection with a line doubler so we watched a great picture. Most our movies though were on laserdisc and bought in widescreen and not pan and scan. I believe at the time most of the widescreen VHS tapes where special ordered from Suncoast.

It used to be a big deal, to me at least, when finally seeing a movie in widescreen after being used to the pan-n-scan version. In Die Hard, when Powell is the lobby of Nakatomi Plaza, you see someone behind a wall holding a gun if he goes any further. This is missing from the cropped version.

I remember when Michael Mann's film The Insider was released on VHS it was ONLY available in widescreen, and at Blockbuster Video they had to put a disclaimer on the shelves for that movie so that people wouldn't get it home and come back to the store angry that there were black bars on the screen.

>>30
The fact that stores had to issue that disclaimer shows you just how deeply unpopular letterboxing was. And I think the unwashed masses were right on this one.

>>31
You do know that people's eyes used to be a different shape, right?

I was good at finding VHS with widescreen.

There were lots of widescreen tapes by the mid nineties. Most new releases got a widescreen version and things like the Empire collection from WB/MGM/UA regularly released widescreen editions of classics.

What letterboxing lost in video resolution it partly made up in scanning a larger part of the film and not blowing up any defects etc which would have been apparent in the panned and scanned picture.

I did have a letterboxed VHS of Star Wars when they finally put one out in the late 1980s, and I liked it quite a bit. I didn’t have many widescreen VHS tapes, though, because I’d switched to LaserDisc by the early 1990s.

There were big screen TVs, perhaps, but the vast majority of TVs owned in the '90s had something close to a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Most people didn't like seeing bars at the top and bottom of their screen in those days, and few people understood that you were getting 'more' of the film, not less.

That said, many arthouse films had letterbox VHS tapes. Certain companies (like New Yorker Video) specialized in keeping films in their correct aspect ratio.