lordjedi said:
I agree with this 100%. I still have trouble convincing people that the "black bars" are suppose to be there. And now the same thing is happening with grain. If it's suppose to be there, then I have no problem with it. Hell, I use to be one of those uneducated consumers that didn't know about widescreen. Once I did find out though, that's all I wanted. Once I learned the difference between "widescreen" and anamorphic widescreen, the black bars didn't bother me at all (when I first same them on my widescreen TV, I was pissed).

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'm not as concerned about widescreen itself as I am about original aspect ratios. It's taken nearly two decades of home video (and decades before that of television broadcasts) of chopping up movie frames to holy hell before people finally started to get educated. The only problem is, that now that widescreen TVs are becoming the norm, the opposite problem is happening with the uninformed consumer: television shows and movies are being cropped to fit this new wide television screen without pillarboxing. They did it on those crappy DBZ season box sets, and they've done it on a few Disney movies. It almost seems like we got across the wrong message. Widescreen's suddenly the new "thing," so everybody wants it wide, regardless of how it's supposed to be. Well, that, and the same people who complained about horizontal black bars and never learned any better are now complaining about vertical black bars and still probably won't know any better. It's cringeworthy when people stretch out a 4:3 image to fit a 16:9 screen. I saw my roommate go above and beyond that. He was watching a dual-sided DVD. One side was 4:3, and the other was widescreen. He was watching the pan and scan version stretched out to widescreen. I think a few synapses in my brain blew out when I realized the total lack of logic in that.