The beloved series Seinfeld premiered last week on Netflix with a new version rescaled to 4K. And sadly, like The Simpsons on Disney +, also painfully mutilated.

It seems that there are people who do not know that television life existed before wide screens, and they get very angry when the series have black bands on the sides.

So classic series that were shot when there were only almost square tube televisions, with a 4: 3 ratio, are being mutilated by streaming platforms.

They remove the bottom or top of the image in 4: 3 to get a 16: 9 wide picture, thus filling the entire screen so that people do not see black bands.

This botch produces several problems. As it is just a piece of screen, you have the feeling that you are watching the series with zoom. In other cases, the talking characters are not seen.

Or, as this tweet shows, objects such as the sewer that is part of the joke the character is telling are removed from the scene, and if you don’t see the sewer, the joke loses its meaning:

This also occurs in the Seinfeld version that broadcasts Amazon Prime Video, or in other classic series like The Simpsons on Disney +.

The streaming platforms show that all they want is to keep subscribers at all costs. Everything else is secondary.

If a handful complain because they see “strange black stripes on the sides“, they have no problem in mutilate the original format and broadcast the cropped series, with a zoom effect and where you miss conversations and jokes.

The irony of the matter is that they mutilate classic series to remove the black bands, but they add black bands in their premieres.

Series like The Mandalorian, The witcher, Star Trek: Discovery or Stranger Things have black bands.

Why are black bands on top and bottom accepted, but not on the sides? A complete absurdity.

If you want to see Seinfeld in its original format, the only option is … the DVD version, which is already a few years old …

Original article by Juan Antonio Pascual published on Computerhoy.com