Pan and Scan: A Look Back at the Worst Idea in Movie History

This isn't a nostalgic reminiscing of pan and scan, but a chance to dance on its grave.

The ratio wars predate Millennials filming with their smartphone vertically. Indeed, the ongoing aspect ratio battle is never ending. Anyone who has ever watched a movie, a clip on YouTube, or any image on their phone has seen the black bars on the sides or top. But chances are you never thought much about it. Done right, you simply don't notice a clip made in one aspect ratio forced into a completely different one. As long as the proportions aren't distorted or the image manipulated or awkwardly zoomed in, we’ve come to accept this as a part of life. It only took fifty years of bungling to figure it out.

This isn't a nostalgic reminiscing of pan and scan, but a chance to dance on its grave. To this day, it remains the worst atrocity committed against movie fans. The amount of destruction this lone idea has caused is (literally) hard to fully see.

This whole issue boils down to a spiteful campaign by the movie industry to quash competition. In the long run, the 16:9 ratio was probably the better choice, but it still ruined movies for decades when we tried to watch them on our own TV screens, always in a 4:3 ratio. For people watching their favorite movies in their home, they only saw half of Ben Hur or Bridge on the River Kwai. (Yup, that was intentional.)

The ratio discrepancy is not accidental. You can't fit a long rectangle into a square. There's a reason why movie buffs have come acquainted with the black bars on the sides or perimeter of movies. Silent films and most early classic "golden-era" films were typically a 4-by-3 image, though some movies (e.g. Citizen Kane) experimented with an imperceptibly elongated ratio known as "Academy ratio," just to screw with projectionists’ heads.

With network television channels like NBC and CBS eating into the profit margins of movie studios, the honchos at Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, and many others came up with a scheme to outclass TV in the only way it could: sheer spectacle. The images were not only in vibrant color, free of static, but also in widescreen format, as compared to the miserable boxy, low resolution picture you got in your living room. The world was entering the era of Cinerama, VistaVision, and Cinemascope, sometimes twice as long as the image was tall.

But, as Scientific American chronicles, the history of ratios is long and meandering. Long before IMAX debuted in 1970 (reinventing the medium by running the film horizontally through a projector instead of vertically), each company advertised its own marketing gimmick (think Blu-Ray vs DVD), with its own unique ratio. None of these really mattered, it was all about waving a middle finger at TV execs. When you watch old 4:3 movies or nineties sitcoms on your modern TV or your phone today, you lose nothing. Those black bars on the side mean nothing. Nothing was ever there. However, the opposite was true when movie companies or TV channels tried to show widescreen on boxy TVs, which lead to decades of pan and scanning.

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If the above image from Lawrence of Arabia looks weird, the obscuring gray sections represent what pan and scan is editing out when people watched it on old-school 4:3 regular TVs. Sorry, Anthony Quinn.

Fantastic movies made for great TV viewing. However, chopping the widescreen movie ratio to accommodate TV screens came with it the problem of re-interpreting and radically altering the shot composition that cinematographers and directors will toil hours, if not days, to perfect. The compromise was the abomination known as pan and scan, which you can witness best in this side-by-side comparison of the butchered home release of Jaws on VHS.

The name originated from the fact that actors had to be selectively cut out of the shot, then the editor had to shift back and forth so that we could see who the cast were talking to. The pan and scan copy of Alien faring no better than Jaws, the person in charge of the VHS transfer having to decide which parts of the screen to ignore, as the left and right sides fight for dominance. But in this game of tug-of-war, we all lost.

James Cameron, Mr. 3-D himself, infamously remarked that he liked the pan and scan method of viewing, but he definitely was in the minority. "The pan-and-scan transfer does not suffer many of the horrible cropping losses normally associated with a widescreen film," he told the LA Times back in 1993. Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese were emphatically against the idea, embracing letterbox-style movies as the only artistically viable option, even if they did leave those huge black bars on forty percent of the screen. "I shot in widescreen because it gave me twice as much area to give the audience information," Pollack said. "I could tell much more story, faster. [sic]." He was so sick of TV people pan and scanning his movies he stopped using widescreen for twenty years as a defense against offensive TV edits.

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Director Michael Mann was not a fan either, commenting with scorn on the idea of re-editing movies, "If you pan and scan Lawrence of Arabia, you lose the desert." Or, in other words, forced to choose between Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif. If you're ever bored, do your grandparents a favor and buy them their favorite movie in widescreen 4-K in the correct ratio, and watch their faces when they see all the cowboys in Magnificent Seven or The Wild Bunch on the screen all at the same time. It's probably the first time in sixty years they've seen it the way it was actually intended.

For directors who painstakingly staged compositions on film, a third-party mangling their work was a slap in the face. If anyone was to be irritated it was the people who worked on them, but it's hard today to find any movie buff to stick up for the practice, pan and scan having the longevity and staying power of Crystal Pepsi.

If you didn't have the cash to own a widescreen TV and rent more expensive letterbox tapes or $40 LaserDiscs in 1993 ($80 today) — and chances are you didn't — you were stuck with some technician hacking hunks of the movie off to achieve a misguided corporate aesthetic. The plague of black bars on the top and bottom of the screen was the only option to the nauseating reign of pan and scan, with people forced to view blurry, zoomed in image because it filled out the TV. Wider TVs meant that no longer did anyone think it necessary to fiddle with the default picture.

Now reserved only for old TV shows, the TV world finally segued to widescreen in the late-90s and aughts, offering the 16:9 picture that we all universally know and love today. The HD format officially becoming the new standard for TV in 1996, though adoption took an eternity. IMAX still outclasses HDTV ratios in terms of scope, but the discrepancy is less noticeable. There has even been a growth in the 2:1 ratio thanks to Netflix, which might in time supplant the 16:9 ratio, or at least Netflix likes to think.

More likely, we'll just be stuck with another arbitrary ratio, but what else is new. That won't stop 4:3 from still popping up, as it has been with unusual regularity. The perverse twist is that those boxy-looking movies will inevitably look ridiculous on widescreen TVs where most people will end up watching them, widescreen displays designed specifically to accommodate pretentious filmmakers making movies in those weird longer ratios. Some things never change.

Nathan Williams is a freelance writer who has written hundreds of articles over the last decade, covering every conceivable subject from the socio-political impact of memes in the Ukraine Conflict, politics in the early Christian church, psychology, to the history of cat wranglers in film.He formerly wrote at Cracked.com and Dead Talk News, covering pop culture and breaking news before joining MovieWeb.