negative1 said:

For the opening crawl in each Star Wars film, on the pan and scan versions the viewer has to wait until a line of text of the opening crawl reaches the center of the screen to read through that whole line. On the widescreen versions, each line of the opening crawl text appears in its entirety beginning at the bottom of the screen.

Actually, though its obviously been a while since I watched the P&S versions, as I recall, the P&S version that came out on VHS in the late 80s/early 90s was just fine - you could read the crawl almost from the bottom of the screen. It was like they "zoomed" it out or resized it maybe?

It wasn't until the THX/Faces VHS set came out (1995?) that it became the way you describe, and I very clearly remember this because I found it incredibly frustrating at the time - even though this was supposed to be highest possible quality you could get on VHS, you could barely read the opening crawl!

(I still have my tapes but no VCR, otherwise I'd queue them up and confirm, but that's my recollection... )