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Why get the Japanese disc? It's not in widescreen either. And what will you do if you get the Japanese disc now, and a month from now Criterion announces that it's going to release the film in widescreen, or have both ratios? How about just relaxing and waiting to see if Criterion changes their...

Well, that was Vittorio Storaro's insistence that everything he shot be framed in 2.00 "Universum" ratio. It wasn't Criterion's fault, other than that they didn't tell Storaro to go fly a kite.

Well, actually, Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” Since the folks here who've been complaining have posed a solution, it doesn't qualify as whining.

So...here's a suggestion: Anybody who wants Summertime in widescreen -- whether 1.85 or 1.66 -- can simply create a mask in their preferred ratio to attach to their screen to matte off the portions of the image they don't want to see... (Duck!.....)

And yet, many of those same people would ignore you if you pointed out that the open-matte image included things that weren't supposed to be seen, like boom-mikes, or in the infamous case of A Fish Called Wanda, that one could see that John Cleese was wearing shorts when he's supposed to be naked.

At least in the case of some of their LDs with questionable ratios, they said that the director requested that they release it that way. Certainly in some cases (the mix of 1.33 and 1.66 ratios on Dr. Strangelove, for example) that seemed to be a reasonable defense. That does not seem to be the...

Not really. There have been many (mostly non-US) films made in Academy Ratio after that point.

So it's pretty much the same as The Thing?

Even that is a questionable idea. Way back when, at The Other Site, I made the following point in a discussion about a different movie...

The (non-Criterion) German blu-ray was in Academy Ratio as well.

I had thought to add that while Criterion did this a number of times -- I'm sure there are more than the ones I mentioned above -- the AR was corrected on (as far as I know) every title they got wrong, for later formats/releases. Either by Criterion themselves or another label. Summertime...

I agree. I wasn't defending their decision, just pointing out that they released more titles in the wrong AR than people think.

Well, they did compromise on a few titles back in the LD era. In addition to Summertime, others I can recall were oddly released in 1.33:1 were A Hard Day's Night and Help!, Tunes of Glory and The Horse's Mouth, Vengeance Is Mine, Darling, and Carrie (yes, the DePalma film, not the William Wyler:)).

And the LD before that.