Man, I tell you whut man... I hate 'dem black bars on mah DVD!

Imagine this scenario: you have an 8x10" picture but only a 5x7" picture frame. Buying a new frame is not an option. How can you fit the picture into the frame?

You have two choices - you can cut the picture down to size or you can go to a photo lab and have the image shrunk to fit the frame. In lots of cases, cutting the picture would work, but let's imagine that the picture is of you in front of a landmark, like the pyramids at Giza or the Tower Of London. You wouldn't want to cut that would you? Now let's imagine that instead of some random picture you want to frame, you have an original copy of the Mona Lisa. You wouldn't cut that down to fit the frame would you?

If you wouldn't, then welcome to the world of widescreen! Widescreen images are movies shown on home televisions that have the dreaded "black bars" at the top and bottom of the screen. While it might seem that those bars are taking some of the picture away, I assure you that they are instead giving you more picture! How can this be?

Well, it's because that, in a nutshell, TV screens are roughly square while movie screens are rectangular. Take a floppy disk or a square drink coaster - that's your TV. Now take a dollar bill - that's a movie screen. The only way you can truly fit a dollar bill onto a floppy disk is to either shrink the bill down so that the whole thing fits on the floppy disk. You could also move the floppy disk back and forth to capture only the important action on the movie screen - this is exactly what "pan & scan" does.

You see, television screens worldwide have a standard 1:33:1 ratio. This means that screen on your TV is 1.33" wide for every 1" it is tall. Wanna check your own set? Go ahead, I'll wait. Was I right? Good! I knew I was! The 1.33:1 ratio is called the "aspect ratio" by cinefiles and broadcasters all over the globe. So anyway, back in the late 1940's when TV standards were being developed, it was decided to use the same 1.33:1 ratio that Hollywood had used for years. After all, it worked just fine for Tinseltown all these years and it also meant that if movies and TVs and the same aspect ratio, movies could be shown on TV without any alterations. Sounds good right? Well, as you might know TV took off in the 1950s and Hollywood was scared to death that TV would kill the movie industry. To combat this, Hollywood tried a gazillion gadgets in that decade - everything from 3-D to Smell-O-Vision to wildly different aspect ratios. These aspect ratios included VistaVision (1.66:1), Academy Flat (1.85:1) CinemaScope (2.35:1) and even the massive Ultra Panavision 70 (2.76:1). While most of those gadgets faded away, the new aspect ratios stayed on. In fact, Academy Flat (1.85:1) is now considered the "default" aspect ratio for movies today, although directors use a slew of different ones to suit their fancy. This means that most films cannot be shown on TV without either adding the bars at the top and bottom (which shrinks the image but retains the aspect ratio) or by something far worse... by panning & scanning.

Pan & scan (a.k.a. "full screen", yet also called "pan & scam" or "foolscreen") is a process by which the camera that does the transfer to home video actually moves back and forth during the transfer process to capture the "important" bits of a movie. I oppose this on artistic grounds - after all, the director filmed a movie in a certain aspect ratio and in a certain way - why should some flunky be able to change the director's vision later on - usually without his consent? Typically, pan & scan movies crop (what someone other than the director) deems "unimportant" to the shot, but one of the most annoying effects of pan & scan happens during conversations. Take the following examples. In each case, the original version shown in the theatres (and the widescreen version of the tape\DVD) shows people having conversations via stationary cameras. The pan & scan home video version requires that the camera move back and forth to show each character while he or she is speaking.  Look at this:

In this example from Demolition Man, Sandra Bullock is talking to the fella in the passenger seat. In the theatrical and widescreen releases, the camera is mounted on the front of the car and does not move. In the pan & scan version, the camera moves back and forth between the two.

Yet another example of the camera moving during conversations in a pan & scan movie. In this example, the camera is mounted on the front of the motorcycle and doesn't move during Harrison Ford and Sean Connery's conversation. Pan & scan requires that it does.

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Probably the funniest moment in pan & scan history! In this scene from Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is looking through his "binoculars" at some Banthas. In the soundtrack he says something like "I see two Banthas down there, but I don't see any Sand People.... wait a sec, I see one of them now." Do you see any sand people in the pan & scan version? 

In the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, Rupert Murdoch wannabe Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) wants to start a war; to accomplish this he has a British warship accidentally veer into Chinese waters, where the ship is sunk. In the scene above, the joke is the screen behind Carver - "The Empire WILL Strike Back" plays on both the Star Wars movie and the British Empire. But you'd never know that in the pan & scan version.

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Sometimes, pan & scan takes away from the "artistic vision" of the director. This is the hardest thing for most people to wrap their heads around. After all, it's easy to see how conversations, sand people and jokes about the British Empire change what the director had in mind. But "art" is something more abstract. What I see as "art", another might see as "just a picture". But the director went to all the time and effort to frame a shot in a certain way - why not watch it the way he or she intended?

Mozart directs The Magic Flute in Amadeus. Notice the composition of the shot in the widescreen version and how much more restricted, cramped and less majestic it looks in the pan & scan version.

The final scene from Star Wars. It's a perfect closing shot in the widescreen version, but you can't even see C-3PO in the pan & scan version!

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Yes, pan & scan is a tool of the devil. But some studios are actually doing something about it. Pixar Studios - known everywhere for their well-done CGI movies - actually has software that renders the scene differently for the pan & scan versions. Of course, this works for Pixar because this is all computer-generated stuff. You can't do this sort of thing with live action movies:

Notice that there is very little difference between these two scenes.  The pan & scan version isn't technically "panned & scanned" but is actually re-rendered to fit the 1.33:1 ratio of television.

OK, that's enough "foolscreen" bashing for one day. I hope I've enlightened you as to why those "black bars" make for a better movie experience than a crappy pan & scan version does. For more information, please see this page or this page or this page, from which most of the examples above came. These folks can get into far more technical detail than I ever could about why widescreen is better.

Oh, and I almost forgot one last thing... As I said above, TV adopted the standard 1.33:1 ratio that Hollywood used before the 1950's. This means that most movies made before that time have the same aspect ratio as your TV, so there's no panning & scanning of many Hollywood classics. So don't go to your local  video store asking for the "widescreen version of Citizen Kane".  It doesn't exist.  :)

I absoutely HATE the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, because when they want to extreme close-up a face, it always cuts off the top of their head. And directors can't resist doing this. Then when it come to video, they will "re-render" it for the 4x3, so you get a little more top and bottom but still less on the sides. Or you can get the 2.35:1 where they zero in so close I get a headache with the tops and bottoms of people's heads cut off. Titanic, Ronin, Apollo 13, just to name a few. I wish they'd make a 1.85:1 re-rendering, which gets the "extra" on top and bottom, but still keeps all the sides. Better yet, I wish they would just make EVERYTHING in 1.85:1, and offer ONLY THAT when it comes to video. Just wanted to say that to you!!

Jeff, you are correct in that the 2.35:1 ratio is indeed quite "narrow" for close-ups of faces and other objects.  But to be quite honest, I'm not going to argue with the artistic decisions of the director. 2.35:1 looks great in theatres and makes for a full-on movie experience.  One can argue that 2.35:1 movies on most 4:3 TVs are a bit of a waste, as a full half of the screen is blanked to maintain the ratio.  I will disagree of course, but I'm not naive enough to say that 2.35:1 looks better on a 4:3 TV than 1.85:1.  Of course 1.85:1 looks "better" as far as filling the screen goes.  As far as your "headaches"... maybe you should see a doctor?  I'm not being funny - seriously, you should see a doctor.  Me?  I'll be here keeping the OAR flag flying!