A cropped upscale of an ancient 4:3 broadcast tape isn’t going to look so hot in HD either. I’ve been sampling the local nostalgia tv subchannels and it’s a mixed bag of 4:3, horribly cropped to 16:9, and even stranger slightly stretched out at the sides making a 1:66(?) image lightly windowboxed at the sides, which seems to defeat the purpose of appeasing viewers who hate black bars in the first place. Not sure if any of this are “new” syndication masters or being somehow done on the fly.
Shows shot on SD broadcast tape look really bad blown up even in SD, which most of these digital subchannels are. Night Court looked like a bootleg tape to me.
I wonder if Disney would foot the bill for proper Simpsons remaster of the older SD episodes? Would all the film still be stored somewhere?