Behind the Rankings: About those MASH reruns

Hulu rocketed to the top of the power rankings this weekend partly due to its unveiling of all 1,983 episodes of MASH. Commenter Top Cat James pointed out that the show is not exactly scarce in reruns. Ah, I replied, but now the series will be uncut and un-time-compressed!

Well, word is out: The adventures of the 4077th aren't truncated for commercials, but they aren't exactly in their as-broadcast form, either. On one hand, they look great--sharp picture and vivid colors that look better than they did on your 19-inch Magnavox in the family den back in the day.

On the other hand, these new HD transfers follow a recent trend of widescreening older shows by cutting the tops and bottoms and showing more on the left and right, thereby avoiding the 4x3 aspect ratio that would leave--GASP--blank space on the sides of the screen. I thought we had won this war (I won't demean our nation's veterans by making a Korea joke) when DVDs eventually made pan-and-scan passe. Yet there is still a fear of "Why is my whole screen not filled?" and it's leading to these kinds of transfers. For more examples, see the recent crop (no pun intended--or, OK, maybe it is) of old Warner Brothers TV shows like CHIPS on Amazon Prime Video. Fake widescreen seems to be the norm.

(Is this why it's taking so long to get promised Fox library series like The Bob Newhart Show? Is someone prepping new HD transfers of the likes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show?)

I understand why many fans of the show are angry. I understand the argument that these shows weren't meant to be seen this way and that this is butchery. I have never been a big MASH watcher, though. I avoided it in reruns over the years--the ubiquity may have driven me away in a sense--and I never got around to digging into the series in its short stint on Netflix. It bothers me that this presentation distorts the original picture, but I think I can enjoy the series, anyway. Hawkeye's sanctimony might be a bigger hurdle for me.

Maybe if HD transfers are done with care and thought, it's worth altering the original broadcast picture if we get far superior picture quality AND uncut episodes. There is reason to suspect that kind of attention to detail is not evident in these Hulu versions. According to this fansite, The Interview, one of the series' more notable installments, is in color instead of the original black and white.

For me--let's put aside the obvious botch on The Interview--the most important thing in general is complete runtimes. As a viewer, I will put up with this if I want to give the series another shot. I have to wonder, though: Why can't we get HD transfers that offer superior quality AND preserve the original 4x3 broadcast ratio?