What is Letterboxing?

In case you hadn't noticed, movie screens have a different shape than television screens. This means that when a movie is shown on a television screen, it doesn't fit. Up until recently, this meant that either the left and right ends of the picture were cropped off, or the picture was "panned and scanned" (the camera would seem to go back and forth between the left and right sides, usually done for scenes in which the two characters speaking were at the far left and right of a scene), or that the picture was warped so that everyone looked tall and thin (this was usually done for credit sequences so the full names could fit on the screen, or you would think you were watching "ne with the Wi"). Now some companies are releasing "letterboxed" versions of films on videocassettes and videodisks. These have a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen, allowing the full width of the picture to be included, but resulting in a smaller picture--that is, a character ten inches tall in a non-letterboxed version might be eight inches tall in a letterboxed one.