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Tom and Jerry Chuck Jones aspect ratio

#1
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6/28/09 at 10:37pm
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I Netflix the Chuck Jones Tom And Jerry and they are 16:9.

The opening credits of most of the shorts are slightly pillerboxed and the main body of the cartoon on full 16:9

Were the cartoons supposed to be 1.33, 1.65 or 1.85? The cartoons always seemed composed well in TV fullscreen.
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#2
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8/20/09 at 3:48pm
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 They were theatrical and they were 1960's, so 1.85 should be correct.
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#3
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8/21/09 at 10:16am
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Adkins View Post

 They were theatrical and they were 1960's, so 1.85 should be correct.

I never knew they were theatrical. Make sense, though. Do you know if they were attached to specific movies or just distributed individually to theaters?

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#4
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8/21/09 at 6:50pm
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fritz Nilsen View Post



I never knew they were theatrical. Make sense, though. Do you know if they were attached to specific movies or just distributed individually to theaters?


 
All major studios had short subject departments that rented cartoons and things like comedy shorts to theatres on a regular basis to run before feature films ( that's where all of those 3 Stooges shorts were originally shown long before they ran on television) . They were very seldom targeted to specific features, although Disney did it more regularly than the other studios, often pairing ( and advertising ) a specific live-action or animated short subject with their shorter animated features to come up with at least 90-100 minutes of running time.

 In the (very) old days theatres would often rent an entire program of just cartoons or Stooges comedies to run as kiddie matinees on the weekends, and cartoons were always popular as intemission filler at drive-ins.

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#5
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8/23/09 at 3:42pm
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MGM instructed its animators in 1953 to begin composing for 1.75-1 (MGM's house ratio at the time).  This later became 1.85-1 of course when policies changed a few years later.

-J. Theakston

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#6
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8/28/09 at 2:58pm
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Maybe slightly off topic, but how about the other studios? Did Warner instruct their animation department to animate for widescreen too? And Disney?

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#7
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8/28/09 at 5:18pm
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There's a loaded answer... Disney was a fan of wide-screen, and his flat materials were WS pretty early.  Most features were 1.75-1 or 1.85-1.

Warner Bros. on the hand, were supposed to have gone wide-screen in 1954, but whether they animated that way or not is apparently up for debate.  On '50s titles, the opening titles are almost always blocked for 1.85, but the main animation gets cropped.  Later shorts, like NORMAN NORMAL, are completely blocked for 1.85.

This same anomaly appears in some Lantz cartoons, too.  I have not figured out the reason yet.

-J. Theakston

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