well, i do have the pied piper on Japanese LD, it's older than dirt, and that's the date on the sleeve.
but i have no idea what the "FIRST" release on any home format for widescreen would have been.

I won't buy or even watch P&S movies. I've got too many other good films in the correct format on LD or other media to spend the time. Like some others who have already posted, I'm ok with open matte.

I live in Hong Kong, and LD was widely supported here but unfortunately most Hollywood films were released in P&S. It's a real shame, because the format was supported here until the early 00s and some great films were released albeit butchered with P&S.

The other day I picked up the HK release of The Thin Red Line which features gold discs....and is P&S. You'd think after giving the release gold discs they'd at least release it widescreen...but no!

Yes, Hong Kong really blew it with many films as well as the US. Some Hong Kong jacket covers were so cool they almost made you want to buy them anyway. You just have to resist knowing that the film is basically ruined.

"With pan and scan, as much as 50 percent of the original picture is lost. It's simple math, folks, something has got to go. And sometimes what is lost is very important. Now how about this scene from The Graduate. Where have you gone Mrs. Robinson? You've been panned and scanned right out of the scene." -- Jack Lemmon

I avoid films with changed aspect ratio like they're gonnorhea. Whoever thought it was a good idea to remove 40% of a film and zoom in on it needs to die a horrible death (if he hasn't already). I hate it when I try to find an obscure film and the seller doesn't know the difference between the aspect ratios, or when the box doesn't advertise the original aspect ratio.

Thankfully we've gotten smarter as a society and now just about everything that comes out is in its original aspect ratio, but for collectors like myself, it makes it difficult trying to decipher the oldies

"With pan and scan, as much as 50 percent of the original picture is lost. It's simple math, folks, something has got to go. And sometimes what is lost is very important. Now how about this scene from The Graduate. Where have you gone Mrs. Robinson? You've been panned and scanned right out of the scene." -- Jack Lemmon

I avoid films with changed aspect ratio like they're gonnorhea. Whoever thought it was a good idea to remove 40% of a film and zoom in on it needs to die a horrible death (if he hasn't already). I hate it when I try to find an obscure film and the seller doesn't know the difference between the aspect ratios, or when the box doesn't advertise the original aspect ratio.

Thankfully we've gotten smarter as a society and now just about everything that comes out is in its original aspect ratio, but for collectors like myself, it makes it difficult trying to decipher the oldies

How does one go about ascertaining what the original aspect ratio of a film is supposed to be? Is there any central source? I know imdb sometimes has the original ratio, but it doesn't always say if it was a matted Academy Ratio. I have found it very hard when wading through different films, especially horror films to find out A. what the original aspect ratio was supposed to be, and B. what the details of the release are. I'm not old enough to have been able to see many of these films in theater.

So I figured I'd post this question in this topic, but what do you guys do when you buy a large lot of discs and get really bad Pan and Scan copies of discs that have much better remasters available on Laserdisc?

For example I just got a collection from a guy that contains a lot of early to mid 80s releases such as Starman and They Live, both 2.35:1 films that have been P&S and have better later releases on disc.

I'm thinking of putting them aside, not on my main collection shelf, and possibly framing them down the line because I don't plan on watching them. I have a lot of discs though and frames aren't cheap. Haha. But at the same time they're not worth trying to sell because I doubt anyone wants these editions, let alone enough to pay what shipping from Canada costs (It cost me $12 to ship one disc surface mail last month)

Some of those older P&S LDs feature the original poster art so they are perfect for framing if you don't have the poster.

I've given a few of them away as presents in frames, and the recipients were more than happy to get them.

When I was buying Laserdiscs during the 90s i only selected the widescreen version since the films were shot in any aspect ratio other than 4:3 apart from the majority of silent films apart from a boxing match from 1898 which was shot on 63mm film & if i recall correctly Napoleon was shot in 4.00:1. Any film made prior to the advent of Cinerama was shot with the ratio of 1.375:1 so films like Gone With The Wind are generally cropped to 1.33:1 unless for the DVD releases of those films were anamorphic or for the laserdisc window box releases though I'm only aware of the Charlie Chaplin films like Modern Times being Window box discs & being an owner of a widescreen TV for about 15 years Pan & Scan discs such as The Addams Family on the UK Columbia/Tristar label aren't a satisfactory way to watch a film. Also I've noticed the images on the Pan & Scan versions being much softer than their widescreen counterparts due to the telecine zooming in onto the original images. So for old films from 30 years ago such as Airplane I bought them on DVD since they weren't ever released in widescreen as far as i can remember. The only non widescreen film in my collection is Commando from Encore Entertainment but that's an open matte disc so i just zoom into the picture on the TV with only a small amount of extra visual information on the screen since that film may have been composed for 1.85:1 & not 1.78:1.

There seems to be many more pan&scan laserdiscs than letterboxed or widescreen discs. Just a guess. As I said at the beginning of the thread I'm glad that laserdisc was at the forefront of the widescreen (home video) movement. With that in mind I've had to pass up many a good film that would have been awesome in it's correct aspect ratio due to the prevalence of pan&scan. My collection would be much larger had pan&scan not been such a detractor.

I agree with you that p&s also made the film much softer looking. In addition, the zooming added to blur or smear which may have even be more evident on earlier model players. To me, whether through incorporated zooming (p&s) or manual zooming, laserdisc doesn't look it's potential best. If I'm repeating myself it's just that I haven't looked at this thread in a long while.

Well, looks like someone finally wised up and is releasing ROTLD on blu-ray (in the UK at least) with the original soundtrack . . .

The Return Of The Original Soundtrack Of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD Coming To UK Blu-ray From Second Sight!

. . . guess I better hurry up and get that all region blu-ray player!

Why would anyone want to actually watch something P&S? You're only looking at 50% of the picture each time.

But even Open Matte, though not cropped, is not OAR if not widescreen.

Before Cinerama and CinemaScope, the vast majority of 4x3 films were shown slightly cropped/matted from anywhere from 1.4:1 to 1.75:1. The square screen just didn't look "right" to most theatergoers and owners, so they showed them a bit wide. Just as it was exceedingly rare to find a CinemaScope theatre with a true 2.55:1 screen (most were 2 to 1), it was rare to find a true 1.37:1 screen. Studios knew this and framed accordingly - kind of like the safe action/safe title area in NTSC television days. So, many, many pre-scope films look great zoomed to 16x9, especially if your television will allow you to move the image to expose more of the top of the frame, preventing cut off foreheads. That doesn't mean they should have been matted for home video release... But look at Gone With The Wind in 16x9. It looks like it was framed for it. Selznick himself gave the OK for 1.66:1 framing for the 1950's Perspecta Stereo release.

And then there's the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers... It was NEVER meant to be cropped for 2:1 SuperScope... It was shot/framed for 4x3 all the way. Yet we've never been given the original framing. Only the SuperScope and P/S versions of it.

An amazing number of old TV shows, like The Twilight Zone look fantastic in 16x9 because of the heavy centering of the image due to the rounded and seriously overscanned TV sets of the day.

BTW, the only animorphic release of GWTW was the 1998 IB Technicolor prints, which was done to maintain the original aspect ratio since most theaters didn't have 4x3 aperture plates to show it properly otherwise. Unfortunately, it ended up giving the image the same resolution as 16mm, and since the IB printing system was a new version, the image was super soft, with terrible color fringing from the 10 year old IN used as the source. I should know, I projected that film many, many times as Chief Projectionist at the Century Rio 24 theater in Albuquerque, NM. It looked dreadful. All the DVD's and the BD are full 4x3. Now if we could just have the fully directional Chase stereo mix that duplicated the Perspecta dialog panning - only the LaserDisc of Making Of A Legend has clips of it. The version on DVD and BD has the phase so messed up no dialog directionality can be heard at all.

Ty C.

Just use the zoom function on on your set and you'll achieve the same framing as theatrical with open matte transfers.

Not so. Cause open matte is cropped from the sides when it comes to special effects. So you still lose some intended image, even if you "gain" non-intended image.

Only on a film with SPFX like the Back to The Future Series. An open matte film like Carrie zooms perfectly, with nothing missing. I wasn't talking about films with FX rendered in wide ratios, just standard open matte films, of which there are many.

Ok then that is true.

It´s maybe a little bit Offtopic, but maybe you can tell us if it´s hard to get LaserDiscs there (like in local stores) and what you pay for them? I´d really like to own a golden THin Red Line Disc, just for having it , even it s pan and scan.