What year is this? Oh, yeah. Two thousand ten. That’s way past Space: 1999. And yet you can still make the mistake of buying or torrenting a so called Full Frame or Full Screen version of a film that was originally shot in a wider aspect ratio.
You can’t even buy a new 4×3 television to watch it on.
Let’s talk about that name for a moment. Full Frame or Full Screen. Like you’re getting all of something: FULL. It ought to be called Cropped Screen or Cropped Frame. You’re losing sometimes nearly half your screen real-estate through Pan and Scan. So if we think of a motion picture as being half video and half audio, the distributor is cheating you out of a quarter of the film you just bought.
If you downloaded it via torrent you might think that you only wasted your time (or more accurately that someone else wasted your time), but damn it: time is money. Either way you’re wasting little bits of your life, and you’re not giving the film makers their due.
To be fair there are plenty of films and shows that were originally shot such that they can legitimately claim the title Full Frame.
Any film shot prior to the invention and wide-spread use of anamorphic lenses and other wide screen techniques for instance—let’s say the early 1950’s—will not be a wide screen aspect ratio. Any television show shot before the general acceptance of the inevitability of wide screen television—slowly over the last several years—will not be in a wide screen aspect ratio (Mork and Mindy, The Avengers). These shows and films were shot in and should be presented in a Full Frame or 4×3 (or thereabouts) aspect ratio(s).
For anything shot in a wide screen aspect ratio, it’s time to bury (though not mourn) Pan and Scan.
(Pan and Scan being the technique whereby wide screen films are butchered converted into Cropped Frame versions.)
There are some great examples of how badly Pan and Scan can mangle a film. One of my favorites turns the Fab Four into the Fab Three and cuts Old Fred in half:
Good-bye Pan and Scan; you will not be missed.
It’s the lash for any of ye caught with Full Frame booty.
(A quick search would suggest that one cannot buy Blu Ray Full Frame movies. C’est vrai? Enfin!)