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This is pet peeve of mine - a MAJOR pet peeve. It drives me absolutely nuts that there are people out there who insist on purchasing only 1/2 to 2/3rds of a movie. In the days of VHS it was virtually impossible to find a wide screen movie - all they had was chopped screen crap. DVD came about and nearly every movie was wide screen. Now, over the last year or so, chopped screen (called "full screen" by idiots) movies have proliferated. And, now, many times the chopped screen idiot versions are the only ones available for rental or purchase because the wide screen ones get bought out first. Too many times I've been given a gift of a DVD by someone and they didn't know the difference and got me the chopped screen version. Sometimes you really have to search the box or the disk itself to see whether it is wide screen or chopped screen.

And there there are the people who just don't understand the difference. "I hate the black bars - why do they put them there?" Grrrrrr.... You'd think now that widescreen TVs and computer monitors are popping up all over the chopped screen crap would actually be disappearing not proliferating.

Yet I have exactly the opposite pet peeve.

TCM was the first cable station to insist on "widescreen", which I call "ribbon TV".

It's utterly ludicrous to have 2/3 of your screen area be black bars. If you want to buy it that way, fine, but the majority of us still have standard TV aspect ration screens.

That's why letterbox VHS was highly unpopular.

That's why they make "fullscreen" DVDs. As a Laserdisk owner, I strongly believe the unpopularity of that media was due to the fact that many movies were only available in "ribbon TV". Ribbon TV killed the Laserdisk. I can tell you for sure that I never bought ONE widescreen Laserdisk, and I have something like 60 - 70. They could have sold me double that amount for a properly formatted picture.

Even though I have a 54" TV, giving up 2/3 of the screen is silly. Very little is typically happening on the extreme edges. Most of it is the "panorama", "sweeping drama" type effect, and it's negligible to me.

I'm not running an effete art theater, I'm watching TV.