No fury like a fanbase scorned!

Can we just...look, I know everyone's already dog-piled on this, but I'd like to add my dog to this pile and-huh? Hang on , I'm going somewhere with this and it's about the Simpsons and this dumb Disney streaming thing and why don't they fix this glaring issue that-but I'm getting ahead of myself.

So one of these, but with fan ire instead of, you know, dogs.

I'm not going to lie, it's a fair amount.

In the interest of full transparency, I'm not paying for Disney's streaming service, I'm using someone else's login. That's not to say I wouldn't pay for it. Sure, they're a gross corporation that's spent the last decade buying everything and rolling it into one giant monopolistic Katamari ball of-sigh-content, but I'm not made of stone and they have Darkwing Duck. I mention this because I'm about to complain about something, and I want to be upfront about how much salt you should take me with.

So The Simpsons is on this thing. Like, all of it. I'll spare you the tired old screed about how the show sucks after season ten or whatever, but I do want to talk about aspect ratio.

Last time it was patent filings. This time: aspect ratios.
The fun never stops on Onward Stranger Fiction!

I mean, look at this? Can you even-huh?
What do you mean you can't tell the-trust
me. It's terrible and worthy of your scorn.

The series switched to 16:9 about ten years ago to keep up with flat panel screens, but everything before that was 4:3 like old CRT television. To compensate, the versions on Disney are cropped and I think even stretched to fill the entirety of today's rectangular, wall-sized flat panel televisions and it looks terrible. Like objectively terrible and even cuts out some sight gags. So what I want to know is, who wants this? I mean, who? When you run something formatted for 4:3 on a 16:9 screen you get black bars on the side it's not great, but it's better than the alternative.

Yet history tells us that there is some segment of the population out there who find these bars so offensive that they demand the imperfect and I dare say, idiotic solution of a zoomed in and stretched image. Something similar happened back in the 80's and 90's when to accommodate televisions they cropped the left and right side of the movie and then panned side to side if this cut off an actor or part of the action.

Here. This is a movie-shaped movie.

And here's some pan and scan nonsense for chumps.

Now, that's the soulless, focus-group
tested corporate mascot we all remember
from like three good games thirty years ago!

It wasn't great, but those were barbarous times and we didn't know any better. But now we do and Disney should know that hell hath no fury like a fanbase scorned. Have they not learned the lesson of Sonic the Hedgehog? Remember back when the trailer for the movie was released and we all recoiled in horror at the half-human chimera that punched our nostalgia right in the creepy human teeth? Well, the production company cowered at our might and delayed the film's release so the CG department could replace the titular corporate mascot with something less unsettling.

It's easy to feel powerless nowadays. The climate is spinning out of control, everyone's being crushed by debt and the Republican party openly steals and rigs elections, but when it comes to the entertainment industry trading on our nostalgia, at least we have a voice. A shrill, demanding voice that we seem to only use to give our opinions about TV shows, but still, you know, a voice.

"Hey, we were just workshopping a new slogan: vote
Republican. Or don't. Doesn't matter, because you're stuck
with us no matter what. So uh, what do you think?"

-Mitch McConnell,

being a little on the nose