Damn, that's terrible. Reminds me of The Simpsons being cropped into 16:9 for Disney and obscuring the joke that all the Duff brews come from one pipe.

Great article.

Can someone explain what was wrong with that _Friends_ screenshot? I can't tell.

Great article, I really thought it was a recropping like friends (and many others). So weird that they just forgot about CGI.

It's weird that they'd have the crew in the frame anyway. Was it really not possible to have them out of frame? I guess being able to "do it in post" makes people lazy?

A side story on the techniques for restoration:

I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.

They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.

They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.

I'm not sure if the above scene is in the below quick documentary but there are a lot of other cool "behind the scenes of restoration" moments: https://www.pbs.org/video/civil-war-restoring-civil-war/

Unrelated: does anyone else experience huge lag with HBO streaming app? It’s easily the slowest I regularly use on Samsung smart tv.

The did something similar to Buffy The Vampire Slayer when "upgrading" it to HD. It lost all/most of the color grading and was cropped to 16:9.

Some night scenes now take place during daytime and you can see booms and camera operators in many shots.

It never even got a blu ray release. The only way to watch it at home without egregious errors is still DVD as far as I know.

Fun fact: The X-Files production team foresaw the coming of 16:9 home entertainment, so they made some effort (increasing with later seasons) to try and "protect" a 16:9 frame, which allowed for an unusually good Blu-ray restoration. [https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7499/look-inside-the-files...]

I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.

Stories like this regularly make the rounds when movies or shows that the original creators put a lot of love and thought into are "remastered" on the cheap. The last one I saw was the story about the garish colors in digital versions of old Pixar movies - amongst others, they intentionally exaggerated green hues in the digital original to compensate for the transfer process to analog film stock which was less sensitive to green. When Disney transferred the movies to digital formats and streaming, they took the digital original 1:1, so the colors now look off (https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...)