SilverWook said:
Pan and Scan refused to die in the U.S. thanks to consumer confusion/ignorance/indifference, and the studios' lack of any real effort to educate people about those black bars. There were some widescreen VHS tapes in the 90's as well, but if you were really into seeing movies the best way possible, you bought an LD player.
It was probably sales of widscreen tv's taking off that finally nailed the coffin shut.
IMO, HDTV/Blu-ray was the final death blow for 4:3 P&S consumer media. Before HD, pan and scan yielded the maximum vertical resolution for a 2.35:1 film. Even on an anamorphic PAL DVD, a letterboxed 2.35:1 image only had 435 lines of resolution, less than the 480 lines of SD NTSC. It's a miracle that we've been able to extract any kind of passable anamorphic or HD image from the ~272 lines of actual picture resolution in the GOUT.
It wasn't until 1080i that the picture area of a 2.35:1 letterboxed image exceeded the 576 lines of SD PAL. With 1080 HD, a 2.35:1 image uses about 817 lines of resolution. Widescreen TVs beat P&S down, and HD and Blu-ray dealt the mortal blow.
Not only did a letterboxed 2.35:1 image on a 4:3 TV look annoying to many, but you did lose almost half of the vertical resolution. I loathe pan and scan, but a P&S LD in either format still has more lines of vertical resolution than the GOUT.
Of course, the telecine quality, color timing, etc. of the old fullscreen transfers of the OT is inferior to the widescreen transfers. Sure, they're too bright, too desaturated, the contrast is too low, faces look flat with diminished highlights in the flesh tones, and garbage mattes are *PAINFULLY* visible, but every time I watch a P&S version, I seethe inside, wishing that we had the OUT in their original aspect ratios with that much vertical detail. There is no widescreen transfer of the OUT that preserves as much of the detail of the starfields as the P&S versions.
P&S sucks, but I still think the old fullscreen releases need to be preserved. I don't think there are any preservations of the UK fullscreen LDs, are there? And I don't think any of the fullscreen preservations done a few years ago have been IVTC'ed, they're just raw interlaced rips.