(This is a post I made on my cohost a lil while ago, I lightly edited it for clarity)
You've seen this post about Hidamari Sketch right? It's kind of famous, at least it is to me. If you can't click through to see the link text here it is.
Remember how Hidamari Sketch aired during the DTV transition, and SHAFT knew exactly what to do with the new real estate for the widescreen version?
This was a fact that bounces around in my brain like a DVD screensaver. Hidamari Sketch aired in Japan between January and March 2007 during the DTV transition and they prepared two versions for broadcast, one that was HD 16:9 and one that was SD 4:3. I've heard of things going wrong during this transition like the shot of Mugi getting cropped out in the 4:3 broadcast version of K-On but this time period isn't super well researched in the admittedly small digging I did.
So it makes sense that a studio during this time would make these changes right? Your show is going to appear in two very different formats, you're going to want to make sure it looks fine in both. Anyway I was reading the replies of this post one morning and I read one that gave me pause.
This started me researching the analog to digital transition in Japan which I won't get into here but long story short, yes it did air during the analog to digital transition. There was an analog digital simulcast of both signals in Japan that started in about 2003 and ended in 2012 when all analog transmissions were shut down. So there was a period where broadcasters were putting out both HD 16:9 and SD 4:3 to serve people/areas who had not made the jump to the digital signal.
But it got me thinking, some people in the replies were talking about not being able to find proof that it aired in 4:3. Chances are they just didn't know where to look. Anyway I just looked on nyaa and lo and behold.
So I had the original broadcast versions of season 1 and 2 in 4:3. (i was unsure what the second torrent would be, it didn't have any information in the description and "TV broadcast" could have been the 16:9 broadcast bc there was a simulcast but it was the 4:3 version).
Anyway I was curious if there were any other changes, I kind of doubted that there were since it's already a lot of effort to produce two different versions of scenes but maybe there was something that the person that put together the original comparison missed.
If you, like me, believed the truth of that original post I'm about to tell you Santa Claus is not real. I compared these with the BD and found 2 of the frames from the original post. (the other I presume is from the first episode of season one also). And, they're,,, cropped from the 16:9 version.
In hindsight this makes perfect sense, I know sometimes they will redraw or reanimate certain scenes for the blurays because production is sometimes very fucked and they don't have the time to make things to their usual standards but if you're working for TV schedules why would you give yourself more work to do?
I'm sorry im sure this is interesting only to me but "Shaft redrew the wide character shots for HD during the DTV transition" is something that had the same veracity in my brain as, water is wet and i thought about it about as often. Two things make this very funny.
The image is cropped from what I assume is the original which makes it more obvious that it was a joke.*
the person that made that edit (presumably on 2ch or a/ on 4ch) didn't like, make the entire image 4:3 they popped the background out so it wouldn't appear squished. Which is such an insane effort post that you still see people go, oh yeah no it has to be real no one would go to the effort to do that. (read this post, people go to insane lengths for zero reward all the time)
I cooked up a very quick comparison in photopea to show what I mean. At this point it's trivial to remake the background, it's just a repeating pattern anyway.
*I would love to tell which is older but google recently changed how reverse image search works and it doesn't show you pages with the list of dates of when that page was last crawled so it's a little hard to figure out and I don't want to spend a bunch of time figuring out an alternative. So whoever cropped out the obvious joke part is one of histories greatest pranksters in the relatively small pond of people that give a shit about slice of life anime. tl/dr two people, the person that made the original image and the person that cropped off the obvious joke part have combined their efforts to fully prank me 10 years later and I don't think anyone else I've told about this has felt owned or surprised to the same extent as me so I feel like histories greatest fool here
