I’m still mad at Chris Carter and Lance Henriksen for letting “Millennium” get cancelled. And at Megan Gallagher for quitting and taking the humanity out of Millennium. And ourusboros. But whenever the snake’s eating its own tail we come full circle back to where it really began, The X Files.
I haven’t seen X-Files Re-opened, the one off reboot for millennials because I’m trying to watch the entire original series — at least until season seven — with my youngest son. And he’s digging it.
The first season I own on DVD is season three and, today, when we reached season three, I proudly popped it in. “O my God,” my son exclaimed. “That looks awful.” And indeed it did.
I tried it in my other DVD player. Same result. It looked like some millennial fired from Trump’s show videotaped original broadcasts on a 19″ television and transferred the videotapes to DVD. I mean, pretty good graphics for circa 1994 if you’re standing outside in the rain watching a stranger’s television through his living room window.
We went back to Netflix where I expected to confirm the worse – the transfer on Netflix streaming wasn’t much better and, in order to get it on widescreen, Netflix panned and scanned.
But not today. Apparently Chris Carter decided in season one to film all of the episodes (except the pilot?) in widescreen although the series was originally broadcast in 4:3. In December 2015 when the entire series was re-released on Blu-ray each show (except the pilot?) was transferred sublimely and lovingly to high definition and an extra 30% or so of footage was added to each frame. OMG there is a Santa Claus in 2016 and it’s Chris Carter.
I’m still mad about Millennium but I’m very happy about my high definition widescreen X-Files. I can think of a worst way to watch X-Files but I can’t think of a more undignified way than a full frame 4:3 low definition transfer.