I know _Excalibur_ was trippy, but did we hallucinate this article?
April 30, 2021 2:10 AM Subscribe
My husband and I encountered the John Boorman movie _Excalibur_ tonight while down an internet rabbit hole via other, lesser, King Arthur movies. We both distinctly remember reading an article explaining why all the home video releases are really obviously cropped weirdly and poor quality, due to some kind of concrete reason like lost/destroyed masters. Did we somehow imagine this?
The Wikipedia page about the film has no mention at all of any issues with the aspect ratio. _Vast_ amounts of electrons are being spilled online up to the present time with people empirically noticing that the aspect ratio on the DVDs is whacked, but no one seems to know why. Our Google-Fu is completely failing at finding any official, or unofficial-yet-plausible explanation that we could have seen. Does anyone else remember finding a Holy Grail of Excalibur bad video explanations?
(sorry....)
The Wikipedia page about the film has no mention at all of any issues with the aspect ratio. _Vast_ amounts of electrons are being spilled online up to the present time with people empirically noticing that the aspect ratio on the DVDs is whacked, but no one seems to know why. Our Google-Fu is completely failing at finding any official, or unofficial-yet-plausible explanation that we could have seen. Does anyone else remember finding a Holy Grail of Excalibur bad video explanations?
(sorry....)
Yeah, Excalibur was a notoriously severe victim of pan and scan, along with The Wild Bunch. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of.
posted by dobbs at 5:51 AM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by dobbs at 5:51 AM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
Can't have been lost masters; the Blu-Ray dub is decent.
posted by flabdablet at 6:01 AM on April 30, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 6:01 AM on April 30, 2021
I'll mention that I've seen two versions of Excalibur, one less explicitly graphic than the original theatrical release. So conversion from film to video seems a likely culprit.
posted by SPrintF at 10:03 AM on April 30, 2021
posted by SPrintF at 10:03 AM on April 30, 2021
I don't know specifically about Excalibur, but here's I think a fascinating examination from Turner Classic Movies and famous directors of how Pan and Scan to convert a movie to a TV aspect ratio kills the cinematography. Link
I don't know about the aspect ratio but this would be a good demonstration of the weird cropping people are talking about.
Kind of a guess, please delete if too off topic.
posted by cali59 at 5:05 PM on April 30, 2021
I don't know about the aspect ratio but this would be a good demonstration of the weird cropping people are talking about.
Kind of a guess, please delete if too off topic.
posted by cali59 at 5:05 PM on April 30, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
Heat was famously the first movie where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared a scene together, but in the home video release they still weren't ever in frame at the same time because Pan and Scan cropped out one or the other converting it from widescreen.
posted by phunniemee at 4:49 AM on April 30, 2021 [1 favorite]