Netflix alert: Episodes 101-113 are now full HD!

Not that anyone here cares, but sometime soon I'm going to watch Squeeze (which I've seen many many times and sometimes has even been my all time favorite episode) and report back. Squeeze is one of the most cinematic episodes of the whole series, setting the tone for the rest of it, and if I'm impressed by the way they handled that one, maybe I will revise my views on this. But mostly, my issue is the aspect ratio. Yes, I am dreading that they might have gone in and tried to remove all the film grain or brightened up images that were meant to be dark and otherworldly, but if Carter had even the slightest involvement, I guess I kind of doubt he would've allowed them to do that, and most real fans also wouldn't react positively to that kind of change, so the likelihood is that it's not that bad, or people wouldn't be excited about it here. But the changes to the aspect ratio are a different matter- Carter made his views on that known, he prefers keeping the early seasons in 4:3, and Fox has obviously overruled him. Yes, hopefully it is just a Netflix related decision, and I understand (and even share) the enthusiasm that these will now be on Netflix, rather than the truly disgraceful quality of the previous versions that were on Netflix (which were so much worse than the DVD versions or the versions that once aired on TV- particularly in deleting key text on the screen- like in Home, someone on here actually had no idea the town was called Home, because they were missing the text- they actually thought it was called Mayberry!). However, given that Netflix is, more than any physical format like Bluray, regarded as the standard media format today, it sets a very bad precedent that they chose, over the artists' objections, to release the 16:9 altered versions rather than the 4:3 originals. After seeing 16:9 versions on Netflix, everyone will start to see those as the "real" versions and even if a Bluray did include 4:3 versions, there would be an outcry against that, after seeing 16:9 on Netflix. Indeed, it is rather likely they never even restored the 4:3 originals at all- it would've been very expensive and time consuming to restore it in two different aspect ratios at once. That is the crime here- that they chose to restore it in the wrong aspect ratio, leaving the originals to rot on outmoded, soon to be unplayable formats. Even if I'm impressed by how the new Squeeze looks, it won't affect my judgment on this at all, because I would still oppose them deleting parts of the original X-Files and adding things that weren't intended to be there, ensuring this version constructed by Fox with minimal involvement of the artists, is the only version people will ever see.

/r/Xfilesfiles Thread Parent