My wife and I are big fans of the series Columbo, starring Peter Falk. The show had two separate runs. The first and much better original series aired on NBC in the 1970s while the latter still-sort-of-good revival aired on ABC about a decade later. Like every other program made for television before the age of widescreen (16:9) TVs, both series were made for fullscreen(4:3). Now that we do live in the age of widescreen television, the people and companies responsible for distributing these older shows have a choice. They can either release them in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, with black bars on the left and right (known as a pillar box), or they can crop a bit off the top and bottom to make their aspect ratio match that of 16:9 modern TVs.
The folks distributing Columbo did both.
The Blu-rays of the original 1970s series are presented in 4:3 with a pillar box while those of the revival are cropped for 16:9. So which is better?
Like I said, my wife and I are big fans of the series, and so we want to see all of it as originally intended. So should you, and not just with Columbo, but with any older program made for fullscreen television. That may sound dangerously close to some niche opinion of a film nerd, akin to insisting on a subtly different cut that was only released in Japan, but I assure you watching popular American television as it was made is neither niche nor nerdy.
Alternative cuts and the like are largely extracurricular. They are added material for those who want more than what was originally released for a general audience. Cropping removes from the original work, often in ways the ruins whole scenes. Take this scene from Columbo Goes To College, an episode from the later revival. Our titular detective gestures toward a potential clue, which is completely cropped out in the 16:9 Blu-ray. (You can compare the cropped shot to that of the original by clicking the toggle below.)
The scene then progresses to further emphasize the importance of this one item, which tragically remains cropped out on the Blu-ray.
Those of us who lived in the era of fullscreen televisions were accustomed to watching movies cropped from their intended theatrical aspect ratios, but that was different because there really was no good alternative. By my recollection, most TVs in the 80s and 90s had somewhere around a 20-inch diagonal. You could watch the un-cropped theatrical version of movies, but doing so reduced your already small TV by almost a third to a measly 14-inch TV. Watching theatrical releases at home really was for nerds, who either accepted the tiny viewing experience or who could afford absurdly expensive (and often absurdly heavy) large TVs. Additionally, studios truly invested in making their cropped releases for home video as good as possible. The very existence and prominent use of pan and scan, the derided technique that used virtual panning to show critical parts of a given scene that would otherwise be cropped, is proof of just how much effort went into making cropped films watchable on fullscreen TVs.
The conditions that made pan and scan cropped movies the least worst option last century don’t exist today. The same investment isn’t being made by companies cropping fullscreen content to match widescreen televisions. The folks behind that cropped Columbo scene could have done a tilt and scan, the vertical counterpart to pan and scan, but they didn’t because the cost and effort likely wouldn’t be worth it given their budget. That seems reasonable to me, but begs the question: so long as you’re avoiding the cost involved with making a crop less bad, why not avoid the cost and the bad entirely by not cropping at all? Investing anything to crop old media in the era of ubiquitous giant flatscreen TVs makes no sense. Given a 55-inch diagonal, the viewable portion of an un-cropped fullscreen show is still roughly 42-inches. Never mind fullscreen classic television, have you heard anyone complain when modern shows with wider aspect ratios are streamed with a letter box, where the black bars are on the top and bottom? I haven’t. Even many commercials have black bars of some form or another these days and no one cares because their TVs are big enough that they still see everything without issue.
Outside of a few exceptions, no one should be cropping anything today. Not for streaming and certainly not for Blu-ray releases that only nerds buy. According to some very light research, it sounds like the company responsible for the Blu-rays of my cropped Columbo, Kino Lorber, couldn’t really do anything because the cropping happened when the original film was rescanned by Universal. I worry this was (and perhaps still is) a common practice to make old television shows look more modern, where the only high resolution versions have already been cropped at the source and so cropped is free while making un-cropped versions requires investment. I hope that’s not the case and if it is, studios will pony up the de minimus amount of dough to redo the scans in their original aspect ratio. In the meantime, my wife and I will keep watching the DVD versions of these episodes of Columbo. They may be lower resolution, but at least they show the whole thing.