this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Babylon5
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It was the dawn of the third age of mankind. Ten years after the Earth Minbari war. The Babylon project was dream giving form. It's goal to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call. Home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanders. Humans and aliens wrap in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.
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Obligatory Simpsons cropping that ruined jokes:
Hopefully nothing this bad will end up happening. Regardless, I really don't know why anyone would still choose to crop a release after issues like this have been known to unintentionally occur.
Because those in charge don't care - they just want to shut up the "black bar" whiners who are too clueless (and equally careless) to understand why they're there & what they're losing when it gets "fixed."
Is that still a thing? I genuinely don't know whether it is, or if that is just an executive thinking back to the days when people would complain when modern content that has a 16:9 aspect ratio would produce black bars on their aging 4:3 televisions. I would hope that people in modern day with 16:9 televisions understand why old television shows might look different on a modern display, and that they would be willing to put up with the black bars that they know are helping them to not lose any content. But maybe the ignorant whiners do still exist. I don't know.
When 4:3 content is (properly) displayed on a 16:9 screen, there will be wide black bars to the sides which people also whine about. They paid for a big screen for a reason, dammit!
People stretch 4:3 content to 16:9 — e.g. in uploads on YouTube, and afaik on their tvs too. Which is immensely stupid but is done anyway. So complaining about the bars is relatively innocent.