Stone Age RomeosThis film poses an interesting (or frustrating!) question: To widescreen, or not to widescreen? Yes, that one again! Most of the new footage is framed for widescreen matting. However, the new map of Jerkola is not. To combat this for the dvd, Sony folks "fudged" a little and came up with an interesting solution to avoid losing any of the gags. Have a gander (or a goose, or even a lot of little goslings!) below:
1
Sony DVD, widescreen
 | Australian VHS, full frame
 |
2
Sony DVD, widescreen
 | Australian VHS, full frame
 |
3
Sony DVD, widescreen
 | Australian VHS, full frame
 |
Just for fun, and to make the whole thing more frustrating, here's a VHS screencap from a more recent airing of this short taken from Stooge-A-Palooza, which is far less zoomed in than the Australian one. Here, we can clearly see "Map of Jerkola" and can almost see the elusive "Skeleton Bay":
Notice how the new dvd image is optically squashed to fill the widescreen frame? And some of the text is still cut off due to the framing of the transfer. Weird, ain't it? That would mean that the map of Jerkola is very probably the only bit of new footage from the widescreen era not composed for widescreen. Unless, of course, the intention was for the map to look like this when projected:
(Mock-up widescreen cropping!)
Or, a less-likely scenario would be that the map had been filmed for a previous film and never used. But, I don't think that's the case. Either way, Skeleton Bay is still cut off at the bottom!
I'll state my opinion here and say that, despite one projectionist's memory of exhibiting films such as these in the wide format, these pictures were made with the assumption that while they
could be projected widescreen, they likely
wouldn't be. Now, of course that's not fact, it's my opinion based on the evidence provided here and in the past screenshots threads.
Really, I don't have an argument, per se, towards a full-frame video presentation, however, based on the visual evidence provided here and in past screencaps, I'd argue against a widescreen video presentation. As a personal choice for the Stooges films I'd pick a full-frame transfer though or, ideally, a disc with both to pick from.
