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I recently discussed H.R. Pufnstuf, one of my favorite kids shows. That show premiered alongside another less remembered psychedelic "Wizard of Oz" homage, "Here Comes the Grump." This cartoon was a basically an ongoing chase through a series of odd fantasy lands. The title character was actually the villain of the show. He was very much like a pink Yosemite Sam. I think he might be TV’s only pink villain. It was produced by DePatie-Freleng, who were probably paying homage to their moneymaker, "The Pink Panther."

Anyway, this Saturday-morning cartoon series made a strong impact on me as as child because of a particular episode where two warring clans are shooting love and hate arrows at each other. Characters who got shot by the arrows suddenly became very loving or very hateful. As a youngster this concept freaked me out a little, so much so that I remember vividly the time and place I was at the moment I saw this on TV.

So years later I thought back on Here Comes the Grump and found that four videotapes were released in 1985/1985 by Embassy Home Entertainment. I collected the tapes off eBay. On one was my remembered episode, titled "Sugar and Spite." To my surprise, my memory of the cartoon was an exaggerated version of the actual program. My recollection was of a long battle in which victims are overwhelmed by vicious anger, and of another long sequence where the boy hero, Terry, and the Princess Dawn find themselves deeply in love. The latter part does not exist, and the former sequence is mild cartoon humor that lasts about ten seconds. These exacerbated recollections are likely an example of how something mundane to adults can be strangely overwhelming to young children.

But that was all just an aside to the real point of this post.

The VHS tapes I had were about 90 minutes each, and the way they were packaged gave me no hint as to how many episodes I was still missing. Being a fanatic DVD collector, I hoped against hope that this forgotten cartoon might show up on DVD.

That occured on January 31 of 2006. Actually, I can thank Steve Martin for bringing "Here Comes the Grump" to DVD. Because Steve Martin did The Pink Panther remake, Mirisch-DePatie-Freleng Productions released The Pink Panther cartoons to DVD, and this no doubt was the reason they also put together a deal to release Here Comes the Grump the same day. Kind of like how Turner put off releasing King Kong on DVD for years until a remake was produced.

So I popped in my long-anticipated DVD and started to enjoy some nostalgic Grump. The detail is sharp and bright on the DVD, so much so that you can really discern the difference between the painted cel characters and the background. But something still seemed a wrong with the picture. I couldn’t put my finger on it right away, but I had a suspicion. Later an internet forum post confirmed it for me: they altered the aspect ratio!!!

The proof of the alteration is right on the disc, because they didn’t reformat everything. On each disc is the beginning title sequence, episodes, and coming attractions for the next two episodes. They only reformatted the episodes. Here’s an example:

This is an frame from the coming attraction:

This is the same frame from the episode. The train’s wheel is now oval in shape and the top and bottom of the entire image has been trimmed.

Look what happens when I put my TV into widescreen mode! At least the dimensions of the characters looks normal again.

Superimpose the widescreen image over the original image and we can plainly see that, although they found slightly more picture information on the sides, this cartoon has been cropped for 16 x 9 televisions!

So did they intend this to be a widescreen DVD? Actually, no, not according to the back of the DVD case:

Original aspect ratio? Here’s the original aspect ratio:

But according to the box, this is how we are supposed to watch it:

Stretching it to the 16 x 9 dimension returns the characters to the way they were drawn.

Here again you can see the difference between the two versions:

So why was this DVD spoiled in this way? It could have been an mastering error, but jumping aspect ratios is quite a stretch. My theory is that the producers decided to save money on this property by mastering it for the 16 x 9 HDTV broadcast market, while using the same master for the 4 x 3 DVD release. That is why they would have remastered only the episodes and not the coming attractions.

It’s unfortunate that they chose to conceal this alteration on the DVD case. The only natural way to view the episodes on this DVD are in widescreen mode. However, I can make any 4 x 3 video into widescreen with my HDTV’s zoom feature! I didn’t need it done for me.

What really scares me is the prospect that other producers of old 4 x 3 aspect ratio material will make the same choice, permanently cropping images for all time. The general theme of today’s entertainment industry seems to be the promise of more choices while delivering fewer.