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The 2000s were an awkward time for a lot of TV shows, as Americans gradually switched over to wider HD screens. “I don’t know what the stats are now; I just made the shift about a month ago,” said Avanzino back in 2011. Staying in the 4:3 ratio meant potentially alienating the growing number of viewers with a newer TV, whereas jumping to HD meant you had to make sure no important characters were on the sides of the screen. Throughout those couple years of transition, both of these options had clear ups and downs.
It’s also led to a lot of issues over the remastering of old TV shows to fit modern TV screens. This caused particular controversy back when Disney+ first started streaming “The Simpsons,” where some viewers couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the visual gags in older episodes no longer worked. Most famously, there was the joke in season 4’s “Duffless” where the Duff beer factory shows us their three types of beer being made: Duff, Duff Lite, and Duff Dry. Back in 1993, viewers could see that all three beers were coming from the same tube at the top of the screen. But for people watching in the remastered version (the default option on Disney+), the tube is cut from the top of the screen to fit the 16:9 ratio, and the joke is lost.
“Futurama,” meanwhile, is streaming on Hulu, a platform that gives viewers the old episodes in the same SD format it came in, which means that none of the visual gags are undermined. A few decades have passed, but luckily you can still watch some of the best episodes of “Futurama” exactly how they originally aired.
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