Sunday, July 14, 2013

Screen Shape Then ...

Screen shape now ...



You go on YouTube, you see that all those old Disney and Fleischer cartoons, those Popeye and Mickey shorts, were kind of ... squarish.

Not anymore. The Simpsons have long-since gone to a high-def t.v. screen ratio, and animated features don't have the viewing dimensions of well-loved favorites like Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and other cartoons of the thirties and forties.

Lady and the Tramp was the first wide-screen feature (shot in both CinemaScope and traditional formats), followed by the 70mm Sleeping Beauty. And now, of course, everything is in wide-screen digital splendor.

But it's still fun to take an eighteen-minute history lesson to find out why movies over the past century have looked the way they've looked.

2 comments:

A. said...

Awesome video. Reminds me of an introductory film class I took in college... when you break down the simplest aspects of film production history only to find it's incredibly complicated and filled with layers of technical innovation that we tend to overlook.

I remember the first time I explained the "pan and scan" of TV networks to my roommate (before the days of widespread widescreen TVs) and he didn't believe me. So we turned on the TV and the first movie network we came across we had an example. His mind = blown.

Steve Hulett said...

Pan and scan of old Cinemascope movies on t.v. was awful, especially back in the '60s. Characters would be cut out; once in a while all you could see was a nose of one of the people on screen.

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