I picked up The Car the other day, enjoyable movie, and realized it was the first widescreen VHS I'd ever purchased or owned. I never made it a point to buy them back in the day or paid that much attention, same with most people I knew. Were they not very popular or did people not care because were were still using 4:3 televisions? Does anybody specifically collect these?


P.S. As is the case with all my photos, please excuse the bad photo.

There were a few, but not many. I can recall in the late 90's right before DVD became a thing there were a very few, and they were usually special editions. I can recall owning the Highlander 10th anniversary tape and a set of all three Die Hard movies in the oversized p0rn0 cases, that was about it.

I had a VHS copy of Logan's Run in widescreen.

I have a copy of The Lion King (1994), wich is widescreen. Orignal prerecorded VHS

The late lamented Roger Ebert compiled several letters about letterboxed VHS in his book 'Questions for the Movie Answer Man' which I recently picked up and was a really enjoyable read. The chapter seems to be available in full on Google books, I'd recommend the book which you can probably buy online used for a couple of dollars, it's a dryly humoured and informative look at issues affecting film fans in what now seems like a distant, bygone age!
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y_3PAWCwSnoC&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=roger+ebert+%22when+schindler%27s+list+came+out+on+video%22&source=bl&ots=oNtRuFjxTe&sig=2jGmDKvCpMZwSBIIlHwSFKM3YO0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AU7vVLWMOMX-UJiugLgP&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=roger%20ebert%20%22when%20schindler%27s%20list%20came%20out%20on%20video%22&f=false
One of his correspondents raises the letterbox 'bait-and-switch' practice, which I recall from TV airings of the Bond movies as a kid in the 1980s, and noticed long before I otherwise knew anything about aspect ratios or letterboxing. Less nefarious than the the writer jokingly suggests, it's simply to preserve the text from the credits!

Widescreen VHS may have been more widespread in the UK than in North America, as many titles didn't get PAL LD releases (where they did they were often licenced out to an independent LD specialist publisher like Encore) and even some of the 'discerning' end of the market had to tolerate VHS at least some of the time. PAL countries also had the small advantage of 100 extra lines of resolution over the NTSC standard, giving us maybe 320 lines of vertical resolution for a letterboxed scope image against NTSC's approx 270 lines, or a 20% potential increase in image quality, don't know whether that had any real impact on adoption though.

I remember reading an article in a store magazine, I think related to Star Wars and other Fox titles getting a widescreen push, around 1992 explaining that you didn't need special equipment to play them, and you were getting more of the original image rather than less! I got a few widescreen releases in the later days of VHS before I stopped buying tapes altogether on the expectation of DVD supplanting them. I had William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet that a group of my school friends gathered around to watch on someone's tiny 12" screen, also Titanic and the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet, and the '97 Star Wars 'Special Editions' which came in silver sleeves vs the Pan/Scan version's gold livery. As I recall the studio titles were only ever an optional version that some of the bigger retailers would carry; in the new releases chart section they'd have shelves full of Pan/Scan copies and only a couple of copies of the widescreen version of selected titles. Some 'art' movies may have been widescreen only, and some subtitled titles would have the image shifted to the top of the screen and the subtitles in a large matted area below the image. I believe in parts of mainland europe widescreen releases (and TV broadcasts) were the default.

I also ran across a letter in a back copy of the Radio Times (TV Guide equivalent) of a correspondent complaining about a recent (1987?) broadcast of 2001: A Space Odyssey in widescreen, his odd thesis being that it shouldn't be broadcast at all as it's impossible to replicate the cinema experience on a home TV, and letterboxing made the image even smaller and further removed from its theatrical grandeur! How far we've come.

I actually have several widescreen VHS tapes in my collection. This includes : Alien, Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dune, Godzilla (1998), Highlander, Highlander 2: Renegade Edition, Independence Day, and Twister.
I think from when I last checked online for widescreen VHS tapes, there were at least, something like 90 releases from various studios.

First way I owned Jurassic Park at home was on widescreen VHS.

Also picked up a widescreen VHS (sourced from a REALLY messed up print) of The Master Killer/36th Chamber of Shaolin and the live action Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon in the early 00s.

I know Anchor Bay released a bunch of widescreen VHS titles in the late 90s.

The first I can remember as a kid was Always, the Richard Dreyfuss and John Goodman film. I believe there was a little bit by Spielberg at the beginning explaining letterbox.

My only widescreen VHS tapes are Blade Runner - Directors Cut and Starship Troopers. Both have surprisingly good transfers for VHS.

I found this 1993 post from the rec.video.releases newsgroup in a Google search, where a user called The Dominator lists some 140 UK PAL letterbox VHS releases, seemingly complete at that time as far as he knows. I had no idea that any more than a handful were released so early, as I didn't have any until several years later. The titles on the list seem to be fairly evenly split between recent blockbusters, Cinemascope or 70mm classics, and foreign/arthouse films.

He also posts in 1997 that Branagh's Hamlet was the first non-foreign [language] film he's aware of that was on UK VHS in Widescreen only.

edit: The Dominator aka Dom Robinson is still active on the net, running dvdfever.co.uk, the website doesn't carry all of the old content anymore, but I located a later version of the VHS list including Academy ratio titles and aspect ratio and other details for many releases through the Wayback machine at
http://web.archive.org/web/20090201115613/http://dvdfever.co.uk/widelist.shtml. Running counts on the list, there are around 420 titles in scope ratios, 400 in flat widescreen or VistaVision of 1.7-1.85, and another 90-odd in slightly matted ratios from 1.5-1.66 that would barely have traversed the overscan on CRTs.

There's also a Widescreen PAL LD list at http://web.archive.org/web/20090201115654/http://dvdfever.co.uk/ldlist.shtml with some details about the releases which might be of interest to posters here.

Thanks for the links tadao, pretty interesting stuff. I wasn't aware either, obviously. Though I think I remember a widescreen Jurassic Park vhs, that must have been around 94-95, right?

There were some, but very rare as they were either in big special boxes or very hard to order. I got one as a child accidentally when buying On Her Majesty's Secret Service used. It introduced me to letterboxing in a very dramatic fashion, revealed that many of my cherished tapes were a lie essentially, and clarified many things that were confusing over time because of the pan n' scanning.

The only downside is that the resolution is terribly small-especially on a scope film. If your TV is any bigger than 25" it's downright unbearable.

I have OHMSS, Thunderball, Star Wars Special Edition, and Faces Star Wars Trilogy box in letterbox VHS.

Ace, interesting, yes I thought so, glad you agree! It's a British list only, maybe there were others who kept similar track of North American releases? I'm not sure what the status of that longer VHS list is, it may be only feature film releases in OAR or near it, and still in print at the time of the final update in 2002. Jurassic Park is on there under Paramount (rather than Universal as one might expect, lots of titles were and/or are still handled by different distributors in Britain). One omission I noticed is Oliver Parker's film of Othello which I now recall I had as well as those other Shakespeare titles. There are a number of titles on the longer list that don't give a ratio, and allowing for other omissions, I guess the UK PAL widescreen VHS list probably tops 1000! I had no idea!

The other thing I notice with those old posts are how many films are still listed as cropped in the widescreen versions, often between 2.00 and 2.25 for scope titles, or even from scope to 1.77 which was and is a bugbear for later TV broadcasts.

Other UK PAL landmarks listed on the DVDFever Wayback pages are our first letterbox releases as Jesus Christ Superstar in 1986, and Lawrence of Arabia in 1990.

sdraper, funny you mention screen size, for me the problem was that the TV at home was so small (14") that a letterboxed image was fairly tiny. I got a 20" screen in early 1998 I think, which was more acceptable for widescreen images. Sounds like there was a fairly narrow sweet spot between the images being indiscernibly small, or too big and falling apart!

Translated from an uncited comment on French Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recadrage_%28vid%C3%A9o%29)


It's surprising to see French releases of a few scope films like American Graffiti (1973) [082 876-1], Blade Runner (1982) [70008LD] and Indiana Jones et le temple maudit (1984) [082 878-1] in the database as pan/scan there, I guess they must have been old masters.

I was impressed by how thoroughly the mainstream PAL DVD market was OAR from the outset, excepting some legacy transfers of films that did not receive new scans, after such a long time dragging its heels on VHS and broadcast. While there's something to be said for open matte transfers of flat films as an alternative on a flipper disc (and I sometimes seek them out on LD too), the extent to which the North American market offered alternative pan/scan versions of scope films surprised me. Those same viewers who didn't want a widescreen DVD as it didn't fill their 4:3 CRT are probably now watching them squashed on their 16:9 HDTV or complaining that they didn't buy a widescreen set to watch Wizard of Oz or Star Wars with black bars...

What were the earliest Widescreen releases on VHS? It looks like Woody Allen's Manhattan was released Letterboxed in the early 80s, and of course the Lawrence of Arabia restoration in 1989. After those two, the earliest date I can find was 1992: Star Wars Trilogy, Fatal Attraction, Star Trek IV, The Graduate, etc.

I actually avoided widescreen releases on VHS. The only one that I ever remember even watching was my fathers The Last of the Mohicans VHS. It was not until DVD's, with their better picture quality, became more affordable that I became a widescreen snob. However, I do have several VHS whose first few minutes are in widescreen before changing to full screen. Does anyone know if this was a common practice, or if it had a purpose?

-Robert

Halloween first from circuit city on Sunday after I saw it on TV never realized it was R or cared. Also my first R purchase. case says Anniversary Edition, tape does not. came with a product brochure of the poster and a T-shirt,

Star Wars Episode I Special Edition from Best Buy.

others have been found used
Star Trek (6?)
Vertigo
some others don't remember and don't have any more.

Something else I notice, the case for The Car is very similar to a D-Theater case, and made by Universal who I believe supported D-Theater? I wondered if they reused some of their D-Theater tape cases for regular VHS releases?

Often the opening titles were left in widescreen because they used the full width for the credits. If they were cut down to pan and scan then large portions of the text would be chopped off each side. You often see this at the end of pan and scan films too for the closing credits.

I would think those cases would pre-date D-Theater since its closeness to the clamshells which was used for both beta and VHS releases.

Well that does make since. Also, does anyone remember the first time that they realized that widescreen was better? That is if you think that widescreen is better. I remember watching A New Hope in fullscreen, and thinking to myself I do not see any Sand People when Luke says, "I see Sand People". However, when you watch the movie in widescreen you can clearly see the Sand People. This was the moment that I realized that I was actually missing part of the movie when viewed in fullscreen.

-Robert