Inspired by Ducky’s thread, I just wanna yell for a little bit about the version of CDRR and og!Ducktales up on Disney+. They just completely borked the aspect ratio! I was so excited to watch some CDRR when I was bunnysitting at my brothers place and could leech of his Disney + but their upload was so bad I couldn’t watch it. They cut off the top and bottom of the screen to make it fit the screen of a modern TV.
And here’s the thing, I KNOW they don’t need to do this, cus I checked out an ep of the muppet show and it had the original aspect ratio, with black bars on each side and it looked just fine. But I guess with cartoons they figure that people don’t care and that modern kids will just wander off and play roblox if every inch of the screen isn’t filled with cartoon characters or something.
This keeps being a problem for me finding nostalgic cartoons, if they aren’t cropping it, they just stretch it out to fill the screen and it looks ugly as heck. Honestly, that’s almost less bad because with some wizardry you can just squash it back to the original aspect ratio (a good tip if you’re trying to eyeball it is find a scene with a circular object in it and adjust until it’s a circle again. If there’s a full moon, a coin or a wheel of cheese, you’re in luck.) whereas when they crop it, part of the animation is just lost.
I frankly find it insulting to the animators, artists and character designers who worked hard on the shows only to have it butchered like this.