There are weiners out there who complain and whine when they letterboxed (widescreen) movies. They say stupid crap like:

"I can't see the whole picture!"

"They're cutting off the top and the bottom!"

"Why do they have to make it in letterbox in the first place? It was fine the way it was before!"

Ugh! Excuse me, morons, they are showing you more, not less!

When some genius letterboxes their movies, they're actually showing you MORE of what you can't normally see. When a movie is presented in the letterbox/widescreen format, they are showing you the whole damn picture. Not the portion of the image. "Formatted to fit your screen" is the worst thing since Hitler.

This is what they call "pan and scan". Pan and scan is a type of format where they take the original image and cut back and forth between two characters who would normally be in the same shot.

This isn't any fancy movie lingo, it's a simple concept tried to made simply for the knuckleheads out there. Unformatted looks like this (for some reason, this doesn't work on Netscape. Go get a real internet Program like Internet Explorer and try it again. :(

When you run your cursor over the image, you will see the whole image. This is the easiest explanation I can give for letterboxed movies. That's formatted, the second is letterbox/widescreen.

GOT IT?!!!

Good... you may continue. Here's one more for good measure...

...And another one...

Your welcome, come back again for another lesson.