Your favorite OAR vs. P&S demos. (1 Viewer)

[Jefff]

Your favorite OAR vs. P&S demos.
Greetings !
After years of telling my wife(and others)to "Watch the film-not the monitor it's being displayed on" I wish to compile a list.
What DVD's do you own that have both the WS & FS version on the flip side?
Do you ever use these as demos, to educate others why the OAR
should be preserved?

I don't mean screenshot comparisons from the net.but ones that you actually use at home-right in front of people, where they see
a scene in it's OAR (paused for a bit-so they remember people/landscapes etc.) then you flip it, and go to the same exact chapter & time frame in FS, and they go WOW! "where did the other 4 people in that scene go to!?"

One of my fav's is "The Lost Boys" especially the first 3 or 4 chapters.
Plz. list some of yours, and feel free to point out specific chapter selections/timeframes/what's missing from the scene etc.

I know similar threads have already been done on this-but search
really didn't bring up what I'm looking for.

CHEERS! jefff

 

[Mark_vdH]

Most dual sided discs that have a 4:3 side and an OAR side, seem to be open matte. The only disc in my collection that is really 'butchered' on the 4:3 side (AFAIK), is Gattaca. The 2 minutes I checked on the 4:3 side, looked really awful....

 

[Scott Shanks]

I have used the beginning of The Thomas Crown Affair when Pierce Brosnan is in the Impressionist wing eating breakfast. He says that he just loves his "Haystacks". In the pan & scan version, the "Haystacks" painting is not visible.
I have also used Lady and the Tramp (as compared to their VHS tape) to illustrate to a neighbor how much of the picture they were missing.

 

[Chris M]

My favorite is the Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home DVD, where Leonard Nemoy describes the difference for me, so I don't have to. He has great examples ready too!
Chris.

 

[Joel Fontenot]

The Black Hole. Pick any scene.
Nevermind that the P&S side doesn't even have the overture.
Joel

 

[ChrisMatson]

There is a scene near the end of My Best Friend's Wedding where Julia Roberts and the guy (Rupert Everett or Dermot Mulroney?) are on benches in what I think is a train station. In OAR, they are on opposite sides of the screen, with this great distance between them. Flip the disc to P&S and you can see that the camera pans back and forth between the characters, completely destroying the intended shot.

 

[Jesse Skeen]

On the newer "Basic Instinct" disc, there's a segment called "Cleaning Up Basic Instinct" that shows a few scenes with profanity re-dubbed for the TV version- first it shows the unedited scene in widescreen, then the cut version of the same scene in pan and scan.

 

[Lew Crippen]

I’ve never used any for comparisons, and would not have a clue as to how many DVDs I own that are in both P&S and OAR.

But, I’m pretty sure (if my VHS memory is accurate) that Ghostbusters P&S mostly showed three ghost busters in the final sequences where the four of them are in a line. No prize for guessing who was left out.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Sorry, double post

 

[jacob w k]

I would think that any movie with an aspect ratio of 2:35:1 would be a good demonstration since a big percentage of the movie would be lost.

 

[Rain]

Ok, maybe this one sounds cheesy, but it is a dramatic difference and I've used it with great results...
The "I Remember It Well" number from Gigi.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The demonstration on the Die Hard disc.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

Well, i'd like to say Ghostbusters, but there is no P&S version on the disc to compare it to. That said, looking over my collection, I would say Eraser, and Poltergeist are two good one's. Speed is another excellent demo, provided you still have the P&S vhs to switch back and forth from.

 

[Patrick McCart]

Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001, It's A Mad^4 World, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Moulin Rouge, Doctor Zhivago, The Elephant Man, Vertigo, Rebel Without A Cause, and all 5 Star Wars films are unwatchable in P&S.

They all need ever bit of the intended frame to look right. Moulin Rouge and Ben-Hur especially look AWFUL in P&S.

Also, I can't stand watching Psycho unmatted. Too much headroom...it's irritating.

 

[BarryS]

I would say Ghostbusters. It has been one of my favorite movies of all time, but never until the June 1999 DVD release had I seen the movie in OAR. I saw the movie countless times in my youth on VHS. I had it recorded from an ABC broadcast for many years. I can still, to this day, point out nearly every line in the film that was censored for television in the TV version (i.e. "This man has no dick" became "This man is some kind of rodent, I don't know which"). In viewing the film many times from different sources, I saw a few different transfers of the film. I can plainly recall the elevator scene in the Hotel Sedgewick. In some versions, Harold Ramis can be seen moving away from Dan Aykroyd after he switches on his proton pack. In others, only Bill Murray and Aykroyd are visible. This phenomenon was a mystery to me until I learned about widescreen. Another scene occurs earlier in the film when the three guys are in the library basement. A bookshelf falls over by itself and Peter asks Ray, "This happened to you before?". Ray shakes his head. Peter says "Oh, first time?", and Ray nods. In one version I saw, the camera stays on Bill Murray the whole time and cuts off Dan's response which makes it a bit confusing. In another version, the camera panned back and forth between Bill and Dan. I guess this is why Ghostbusters, to me, will forever be the definitive widescreen demonstration film. In that respect, it's sort of sad that there's no pan and scan version on the disc (but only for that reason). Ghostbusters 2, also 2.35:1 Panavision, does have a pan and scan version, however.

 

[Carl Johnson]

The only time I've done an a-b p&s vs widescreen comparison was back around the time I got my first DVD player. I had Scarface on VHS and DVD (on a side note this title is known to have one of the worst pictures around)and I synched them so I could compare the pictures at the push of a button. The bad DVD image was so much better than the VHS that I had taken so much pleasure in watching just weeks before convinced me to disconnect the VCR from my HT permanently.

 

[HankM]

Any scene from Mad Max or The Road Warrior. George Miller knows how to use the Panavision camera. Another one is Pale Rider. Clint Eastwood directed movies are piss poor pan & scanned.

 

[Brian W.]

The Jet Song in "West Side Story." Especially the shot where they're all looking straight into the camera on the line, "The Sharks'll steer clear, 'cause every Puerto Rican's a lousy chicken!" The guys on the edges of the screen are making these cool arm movements that sort of frame the shot, but those guys are not even onscreen in the P&S version.

Seeing that shot P&S just made me want to back to the far wall of the room. It was like watching the movie through binoculars.

I have also used Lady and the Tramp (as compared to their VHS tape) to illustrate to a neighbor how much of the picture they were missing.

However, if you're talking about the last VHS release of "Lady and the Tramp," the print they used was COMPOSED for a smaller screen. Disney actually shot two versions -- Cinemascope and Spherical (whatever that means), because so many theaters in 1955 were not capable of showing a Cinemascope movie. I'd always understood that the spherical version was 1.33, but according to IMDB, it was 1.75. Hmm. Anyway, I never understood why they didn't put both versions on the DVD.

EDIT: Further reading leads me to believe that the latest full frame VHS was an open matte presentation of the spherical version.

 

[KlausWinkler]

@Barry
Ghostbusters is especially good with the Commentary by Ramis ("That's where I always get cut off in the P&S releases").
I'm almost sorry there is no P&S on the disc for a direct comparison...

 

[Bryan Tuck]

I've told this story in a couple of other threads, but one of my favorite examples is The Mask of Zorro. I showed a friend of mine the sword fight between Zorro, Montero, and Capt. Love (Ch. 20, I believe) in widescreen and then in P&S. On the P&S, she said, "You can't even see the other guy!" Pretty much that whole movie is a good example, because it looks so cramped in P&S.

Most of those that have been mentioned are good examples, but some others I like are Tron, 2010, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, which looks really bad in P&S.