1996 Columbia TriStar DVD promo

Featuring the legendary "trailer voice guy" Don Lafontaine, this was included at the beginning of Sony/Columbia-Tristar's first DVD releases. This one is taken from a 4x3 movie transfer to appear properly here; widescreen 16x9 movies had this with a blue border on the sides. Their first few DVD releases were only 16x9 widescreen (as they should be), with a couple titles (Fly Away Home and Matilda) only in 4x3 pan & scan because those are just kids' movies and obviously nobody cares about those. Starting with Last Action Hero they made most titles 2-sided discs with widescreen on one side and pan & scan on the other, which was a good solution as it pleased everybody. Columbia TriStar was one of the best DVD labels for a few years, until 2003 when their quality began to slip. Several catalog titles were issued only in pan & scan format (making them just about useless on a widescreen TV), and if that wasn't enough they began reissuing many of their 2-sided titles as 1-sided discs with ONLY the pan and scan version! (These included Last Action Hero and The Cable Guy shown here.) For this reason, my new widescreen TV will NOT be a Sony.

Note that Ghostbusters and Close Encounters are shown here and were planned for release in 1997, but Ghostbusters was delayed until 1999 and Close Encounters several years after that.