It’s possible to be too hard on Disney. Yes, sure, they’re seemingly trying to suck up every other media outlet in existence, and they rule the city of Anaheim with an iron fist, but it must be remembered, they are a corporation. Their motive is profit, they want to make their buck and hang anything that gets in the way of that, so it simply wouldn’t occur to them to do things any other way. But there’s no possible excuse for Disney+ landing the streaming rights to The Simpsons, godfather of modern Western animation, and then clumsily editing it into widescreen.
Some background may be necessary here. It’s been convincingly argued by better minds than mine that The Simpsons wasn’t just a great show, but also came along at the exact right moment in history. A small but significant aspect of this was that home video was really starting to spread at that point – it wasn’t long since VHS had comprehensively destroyed Betamax in the format war. In other words, it was easier than ever to rewatch shows, and The Simpsons was one that bore rewatching, not least because it had a very good hand for background gags, specifically sign gags, all too easy to miss on a first viewing.
(And, as ever, Simpsons Did It – in an early episode Homer and the kids go out to rent a movie from VHS Village [formerly Beta Barn].)
All the classic Simpsons episodes on Disney+ are in cropped widescreen format — this means you miss out on tons of great visual jokes, like how Duff, Duff Lite and Duff Dry all come from the same tube. pic.twitter.com/cTy9adulFl
— Tristan Cooper (@TristanACooper) November 12, 2019
This is no secret in media circles, it’s a well-known part of the legend of one of the most well-known television shows in the world. So it beggars belief why Disney+ would render the show out of its original glorious technicolour 4:3 ratio, and into new-fangled widescreen, which has chopped big bits off the top and bottom of it and played merry hell with the sign gags. Including but not limited to that of the immortal farm goods store ‘Sneed’s Feed and Seed, Formerly Chuck’s‘.
The Simpsons is no stranger to having the distributor’s edits kill the humour, but at least that used to be deliberate – formerly it was the censor’s knife doing the damage. Usually this was just the occasional profanity being trimmed out or awkwardly dubbed over. More dramatically, the UK’s Sky One – which already cut out fairly mild profanities like ‘crap’ – actually edited out the word ‘royal’ in an episode airing after the death of Princess Diana.
Matt Groening was ahead of the game back in 2006 when he complained about THE SIMPSONS being butchered for widescreen televisions: pic.twitter.com/98CtjNsv7Q
— Justin Decloux (@DeclouxJ) November 12, 2019
This wasn’t even referring to the royal family, it was as part of the phrase ‘you screwed up royal’. You could put that down to Sky One being overly cautious about potentially-painful reminders of a recent tragedy – which is odd, since their then-owner NewsCorp’s various tabloids would continue to exploit it for headlines for years to come.
As absurd as Sky One snipping the word ‘royal’ might be, you can at least see the thought process behind it – and that someone was, at the minimum, thinking about it. Disney+ giving The Simpsons the same treatment as they do all their properties from before the age of the flatscreen and shoving it on the airwaves had nobody thinking about it. But, given that when the streaming service launched the other day many simply couldn’t get it to work, perhaps this isn’t a surprise.
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