The Big Show

What should be our first movie on the new TV? It's being delivered today and we want to break it in with something amazing and yet something we all like.

 

I'd like it to be Avatar, but that's a little scary for the little ones.

 

We could do Tangled, although we've seen that one a lot lately.

 

Since it's a plasma TV we want to take it easy for the first 100 hours and not play too many movies with static images (like the black bars of a Panavision movie). After that the phosphors will be set and it will be very resistant to burn-in, but for now the list of movies is narrowed down to films made in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio (16:9) that exactly matches the TV.

 

Filtering all the movies we have for the 1.78:1 ratio, here's the list of possibilities:

 

Tangled

Beauty and the Beast

Toy Story 3

Avatar

Up

The Pacific

North by Northwest

Shawshank Redemption

Princess and the Frog

Band of Brothers

Pride & Prejudice (1995)

Tinker Bell (All)

Corpse Bride

Madagascar 1 & 2

Bolt

Sherlock Holmes

Earth

Cloverfield

Dirty Dancing

 

Some of these are too violent and scary or adult-oriented for the kids. Knocking those off, we have:

 

Tangled

Beauty and the Beast

Toy Story 3

Up

Princess and the Frog

Tinker Bell (All)

Corpse Bride

Madagascar 1 & 2

Bolt

Earth

 

Hmm...what do do, what to do...

 

Zach would rebel against any of the Tinker Bell movies, and while Corpse Bride isn't that bad, Brooke might be a little scared. And I'll remove Beauty and the Beast, since although it looks really good, it's not very modern anymore in image or sound design and we want something big and powerful. So we're down to:

 

Tangled

Toy Story 3

Up

Princess and the Frog

Madagascar 1 & 2

Bolt

Earth

 

Looks like it will be either a big beautiful documentary or children's animation. I guess it follows that the bulk of 1.78:1 material would be TV-friendly stuff. The vast majority of theater-run movies are made in 1.85:1 "flat" or 2.39:1 "scope".

 

Hmm.

 

I'm leaning towards Toy Story 3. Or Avatar :)