The episodes are 16:9 (HDTV ratio) orignally, not 2:35:1 (film ratio).

I noticed that CN stretches everything on their HD channel (which makes me mad to no end), so when I saw that Clone Wars was "Available in High Definition" I DVRed an episode to see if it was right. Instead of the 16:9 image that is letterboxed on the SD channel, the HD image was cropped so that most of the letterbox bars were gone, but the image was still stretched and therefore still looked like crap. I don't get it. If you get a 16:9 show created in HD, then advertise that it's available in HD, why would you still take the SD signal, crop it badly, then stretch it? I still DVR the SD version because I'd rather watch the OAR with black bars all the way around than watch ANYTHING stretched at all.

I wrote Cartoon Network about it. Let's see what they say.