Tired debate, but is a 4:3 presentation of DBZ necessary when we all have 16:9 tv's?

[Metalwario64]

I had no problem watching 16:9 stuff with letterboxes on my 4:3 TVs, and I have no problem with pillar boxes on my HD TV. It's black bars, who cares. I don't notice them at all.

Yeah. If your TV's black (like 99% of them are), then it's no more distracting than the edges of the TV itself, or the manufacturer's name printed on the center bottom. The only thing of that nature that's annoying is when the picture is windowboxed (a black border around the top, bottom, and both sides), which happens when you watch a non anamorphic DVD on a 16:9 TV and have to zoom in to get the aspect ratio right.

And most films aren't 16:9 anyway, so even on an HD TV you have letterboxes for the vast majority of movies you watch. It's a non-issue.

I came here to say this as well. To my understanding, 16:9 was supposed to be a medium between 4:3 and the wider cinematic aspect ratio, so either way most of the time you'll have bars.

[Gaffer Tape]

I can't help but try to imagine what would have happened in this thread had it been posted around ten years ago. Obvious as it may be, times have really changed.

Well, since ten years ago was when the orange bricks first came out, I can imagine the conversation was exactly the same.

[KBABZ]

I can semi-relate since I find subtitles to always distract me from the picture itself, but the difference is that subtitles can be turned off, and when they're on they don't screw with the overall computational integrity of the product.

Well, since ten years ago was when the orange bricks first came out, I can imagine the conversation was exactly the same.

Weren't the VHSs in 4:3?

[Duo]

I can't help but try to imagine what would have happened in this thread had it been posted around ten years ago. Obvious as it may be, times have really changed.

Well, since ten years ago was when the orange bricks first came out, I can imagine the conversation was exactly the same.

That's exactly the reference I was aiming for, but I do not recall any notable amount of positive reception in this neck of the fandom.

[Gaffer Tape]

Weren't the VHSs in 4:3?

Yes, they were. But what does that have to do with the orange brick DVD season sets?

That's exactly the reference I was aiming for, but I do not recall any notable amount of positive reception in this neck of the fandom.

Gotcha! But I don't know. It just seemed to me that there were really only the first few people in this thread advocating for it while most of the rest of the thread is as passionately against it as the talk was ten years ago.

[KBABZ]

Weren't the VHSs in 4:3?

Yes, they were. But what does that have to do with the orange brick DVD season sets?

Not much I guess, outside me not hearing of anyone saying "Boy howdy, with the jump to DVD they can make it widescreen!". It was fine the way it was and nobody complained about it, right?

[Metalwario64]

Weren't the VHSs in 4:3?

Yes, they were. But what does that have to do with the orange brick DVD season sets?

Not much I guess, outside me not hearing of anyone saying "Boy howdy, with the jump to DVD they can make it widescreen!". It was fine the way it was and nobody complained about it, right?

Well, all of the singles were released on DVD as well, and those were 4:3.

[JulieYBM]

As I'm fond of saying, Dragon Ball isn't wrong, your television is. It's your brand new television that displays those black bars, not the thirty year old cartoon.

[HakkaiBills93]

The only case where dragon ball could be 16/9 would be adding missing parts from the cels (and i don't think that cels are widescreen that's why all is allways cropped no matter which version you take.) or manually copy each frame to add new footage to match widescreen but it's an useless process
Dragon Box are 4/3 yes but i want to add missing informations.
Dragon Box even in 4/3 aren't the intended aspect ratio
Why?
Cause they slightly cropped the Japanese tv footage which have the original 4/3 aspect ratio like it was mean to be seen (if you can grab some animax episodes you'll see that they have some kind of things at each side and that things are on the levels sets but not on dbox) they did it to hide imperfections.
the same things have been done with saint seiya dvd but that you can see on the chinese dvd which have remastered footage but no zoom
The same way for curious reason some episodes parts even in 4/3 have slight black bars on the side (missing things can be seen on the funi dragon box dvd (which have been slightly crop on top or bottom i don't remember exactly) so dragon box miss lot of footage from the original film print

if you also watch opening and ending and watch next episodes preview you'll see that each episodes even when there is the same things on the screen have differrent cropping and differrent zoom (on dbz ending dbox you'll never see yajirobe or sometimes just a little for example)

[Cipher]

I can't stand to watch even 16:9 footage on my 16:9 TV, because these stupid walls are always on the sides of it.

Until videos can fill my whole living room like a Star Trek-style holo-deck, movies and TV are just going to be a no-go.

[sintzu]

They consistently want to paint the show as something newer than it is.

I think they did it to justify the constant re-releases and the fact that DB didn't have new products back then so the only way to do it (according to them) was to make it out to be a "new" show when it really wasn't.

I think they would've left everything alone had something new been ongoing cause there'd be no need to market something old as new when a new product was available.

[Luso Saiyan]

There is realistically no point in releasing a 4:3 version when NOTHING is 4:3 anymore, simple logic

No, it's not simple logic. It's illogical, actually. Nothing is 4:3 anymore, except what was and always has been 4:3. Dragon Ball being an example and it should be provided as such.

and obviously FUNImation agrees and is not losing any sleep or money over this.

They are 'losing' my money, for example, and everyone who happens to vote with their wallet.

he problem with this way of thinking is that there are TONS of movies shot in Anamorphic widescreen, where the ratio is not 16:9, it's 1.37:1.

I believe you mean 2.35:1. And of course, there are examples of movies with even wider aspect ratios (Ben-Hur, for example).

[sintzu]

I personally don't understand why Funimation continues to do little things like that with the dragonball series. do they do this with any other anime?

No, just DB. You'd think a franchise as big as DB would have a normal, untouched release but so far it doesn't.

Not the DB series, just DBZ. Everything else is left alone.

There's a slight zoom with the original DB. They also "cleaned" the footage a bit so it can look blurry (according to who've seen both) compared to the DB boxes.

To bring up a minor example of why it's bad, here's two comparisons of the cropping that occurs in the Blue Bricks of Dragon Ball...

Why did they even do that with DB ? do they just like to mess with the picture for the fun of it even when it changes nothing ? DB was already 4:3 so why bother with it if that's how you're going to release it ?

[Cipher]

Less snarkily put than in my earlier post, I don't understand how anyone can have this issue. There aren't "black bars" there. There's no picture there. Stop looking to the side of the footage and watch the show.

You can do it; I believe in you.

[KBABZ]

To bring up a minor example of why it's bad, here's two comparisons of the cropping that occurs in the Blue Bricks of Dragon Ball...

Why did they even do that with DB ? do they just like to mess with the picture for the fun of it even when it changes nothing ? DB was already 4:3 so why bother with it if that's how you're going to release it ?

I've pondered this, and I think I know why (or at least, I think these are logical explanations). The first is consistency; the early episodes of DB much wider-framed compared to later ones, so cropping the early episodes that way helps keep everything the same throughout (I found this when editing the credits several times; there's clearly more stuff visible in intro during the Pilaf episodes than in, say, the Baba episodes). The other is cropping away the rounded corners of the film; anyone who's watched a Dragon Box episode of Dragon Ball will have noticed that there are often bits of rounded corners at the bottom of the screen, so Funimation would have wanted to remove those for TV broadcast. This is particularly relevant with the Pirate Treasure episodes because the cell alignment is so bad that the top of the next frame is visible at the bottom of the current one!

[sintzu]

In that case I guess it's understandable but they still could've done a better job such as cutting less out.

[Super Saiyan Swagger]

I don't even know why Funimation decided to crop the Orange Bricks DVDs. Such a bizarre idea.

I'm okay with cropping if it's done properly. Kai TFC actually does a pretty good job at cropping the Buu arc and I'm not at all distracted by lost footage. Nothing really seemed off.

I'm actually really surprised that there are people here that are annoyed by the black bars of a 4:3 video on a 16:9 display. That stuff has never annoyed me.

[KBABZ]

I don't even know why Funimation decided to crop the Orange Bricks DVDs. Such a bizarre idea.

It was part of FUNimation's whole thing to make DBZ look like a more modern, improved product. It's similar to why they slapped "REMASTERED IN HIGH DEFINITION" on the front of the box; while there is a benefit to doing that for an SD product (it'll look cleaner overall), the effect was actually to make people think they were buying an HD product when that wasn't what was on the disc (DVD is capable of storing HD files, but it would only be able to fit like an episode and a half at most). Toei took a similar tack with Kai with all the music replacements and new Intros and stuff; treating it like a brand new show rather than an edit of the existing one from the early 90s. For most young people today, releasing a new product in 4:3 is basically a death sentence in the same way releasing something in black and white is.

As I mentioned before, it makes sense with a TV broadcast because that's much more mass-market and it has to fit with everything else on the channel, unless it's a flashback channel like CN's Boomerang, or Jones! here in NZ (to save costs Toei did TFC in Widescreen only). It makes less sense when you're buying it for yourself on physical media, because at that point (especially in this day and age with Netflix) you're a dedicated fan who wants to "own" the series to watch at any time rather than just hire it out when Netflix has it in stock this month. Because you're so dedicated, logically you'd want the best, fullest presentation of the show in question, and that particularly applies to older shows where standards have changed over time.

With the Orange Bricks, I think FUNi was trying to go for the cheap, almost disposable type of DVD to cast the widest net and save the most money on production with things like episode count; after all there are just short of 300 episodes and it's tough to convince someone to buy even half of that. A hardcore fan product is much more expensive to produce for a show with so many damn episodes, and is likely why, combined with Toei's stuffiness, that the Z Dragon Boxes were a one-time deal (Dragon Ball, GT and the Movies were probably considered not popular and marketable enough to warrant the effort, sadly). And the unfortunate timing of Kai and the Level Sets meant that we were screwed out of a better presentation release and instead got Orange Bricks HD basically.

I'm actually really surprised that there are people here that are annoyed by the black bars of a 4:3 video on a 16:9 display. That stuff has never annoyed me.

It seems to only be the OP who takes issue with it around here.

[Soppa Saia People]

Honestly the cropping isn't even my biggest problem with the Orange Bricks. The colors are, they look awful.

[Bardo117]

The only justifiable case for me is on a TV broadcast like what OG Kai did; 16:9 crop for TV, fullscreen for the fans who will buy a physical copy for their archives.

The problem with this way of thinking is that there are TONS of movies shot in Anamorphic widescreen, where the ratio is not 16:9, it's 1.37:1. This means that when you watch said movies, which include such seminal films as Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, watching said movies on your TV has letterboxing that looks like this:


The zooming in means that you lose a not-insignificant part of the frame; in the second one, you can't even clearly tell if Goku is holding his Dragon Ball. In the Dragon Box version on the right, Goku feels much more "there" in the scene with Bulma, because he isn't a head peeking from the bottom of the frame like in the Blue Brick version on the left. And, in an earlier shot of Goku popping his head out of the river, in the Blue Bricks his mouth is almost cropped out of frame!

It's minor, but unmentioned stuff in frame like this is all part of storytelling in film; you might not have said aloud "Oh, Goku is holding his Dragon Ball" but your brain subconsciously does, and it adds clarity to what's happening on-screen, which is especially important with the faster-paced fighting in Z. Not to mention that cropped feeling again, it really does affect how you feel when watching the show.

I must be really bias cause I don't mind the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, but I DO mind the black bars on the side... Guess it's a double standard or just an optical illusion I'm feeling cause I don't mind, I would attribute it to the fact that we view the world in a wider aspect(Stretched out horizontally?) so having something impede my wide view is annoying.


Nobody here has to explain that the aspect ratios for movies aren't even shot in 16:9, I'm WELL aware of that... Aspect ratios are suppose to help you experience different scopes that the movie is trying to get across, such as the plane scenes in Dunkirk(1:43:1), as compared to the up close scenes where the characters are acting(Camera is too large to film tight scenes)


But how in the world is showing me more picture, while compromising the amount of screen it fills up helping me in my viewing experience? Obviously FUNImation shares my sentiment here, and they were obviously very very right as they are STILL producing the exact same season sets they began with almost ten years ago. I believe what they did with the franchise in terms of releasing was somewhat correct. One version that would be immensely popular with the masses(Orange Bricks) and the DragonBoxes(Limited Release for the TRUE fans) I can almost bet any amount of money on the fact that ANY casual fan who bought the orange bricks never even had the slightest clue that footage was missing from the top and bottom. The colors, the brightness, everything in those orange bricks is technically wrong, but it appeals to everybody in the masses the same way televisions on display at stores are purposely displayed with the brightest colors possible(even if they're wildly distorted) and that is because human attention span is very limited, and it is assumed that displaying colors more vibrant and appealing to the masses is one million times more successful than showing the dull bland colors of the programming.




The image above is a great example. Sure, the one on the left shows a more realistic look. It looks more akin to what you're seeing in real life. But once you start playing with the contrast ratios, you begin to see that it looks a lot prettier, more appealing to the eye. Same way we add filters to our instagram/social media pictures. Makes them look far from what you're actually seeing in real life, or at least a more extravagent version.



Well, excuse me guys that I posted something completely irrelevant to aspect ratios and went on ranting about contrast ratios(Defending FUNIs decision to restore the series in the way that they did)