Fox is making Buffy widescreen and Joss Whedon isn’t happy
Into every a generation a slayer is born, and in the next generation, that slayer must be squeezed into a format that fills that generation’s televisions. That’s the situation that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is currently facing at 20th Century Fox, which has been converting the series from its original 4:3 aspect ratio into a widescreen, 16:9 ratio for syndicated broadcast on Pivot, the network for millennials who can’t get with squares. And as is so often the case with Buffy or messing around with aspect ratios, it’s all turned into a nigh-apocalyptic mess. And so, Joss Whedon has stepped forward to fight the forces of letterboxed darkness, and wield his strength against the big, rectangular bad.
Whedon has long made his displeasure known with the idea of converting Buffy to anything but 4:3, including a note in the original DVD releases that made his feelings plain:
Adding space to the sides simply for the sake of trying to look more cinematic would betray the very exact mise-en-scene I was trying to create. I am a purist, and this is the purest way to watch Buffy. I have resisted the effort to letterbox Buffy from the start and always will, because that is not the show we shot.
But hardly for the first time, it seems Fox and Whedon disagree. The newly remastered episodes of Buffy (which may be prepping for a Bluray release to go with their syndication run) don’t just add more space to the sides. As cataloged by this lengthy Facebook thread, they also add more space to the tops and bottoms of scenes, while cropping others seemingly arbitrarily.