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Watched anime on a 13 inch CRT in college and the panning shots made me dizzy, and I miss that
Back around 2004 I watched every show on a hand me down 13 inch tube TV in my dorm in Kalamazoo, and the camera pans in stuff like Cowboy Bebop would genuinely mess with my eyes because the screen couldn't keep up. Fast forward to now and I catch people saying older shows were directed with slower pacing on purpose, like it was some big artistic choice, and I think that gets it backwards. A lot of those slow pans and long holds existed because the tech forced them, and directors worked inside that box instead of picking it. I still remember pausing on a scene in Escaflowne three times trying to read a sign in the background and giving up because the resolution just wasn't there. Now I watch the same show on a 55 inch screen and catch background gags I never knew existed for years. It changes how I judge older series, because what looks like stillness to people today was often just the limits talking. Anyone else rewatch a show and find whole background details that the old setup hid from you?
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the_gavin26d ago
That line about background gags you never knew existed hits home for me. I used to roll my eyes at people who called old shows slow, figured they just had short attention spans, but then I rewatched Trigun on a decent monitor and caught all this little stuff in the corners of frames that I had zero chance of seeing on my old setup. It honestly made me walk back a lot of what I used to say about pacing being some pure creative choice, because yeah, a ton of it was just working around what the hardware could do. Still love those shows, but I catch myself looking at them different now.
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