Here S Why It Took So Long For Disney To Restore The Simpsons In 4 3

Here’s Why It Took So Long For Disney+ To Restore ‘The Simpsons’ In 4:3

By Hoai-Tran Bui/May 28, 2020 4:30 pm EST

Variety as the answer in a new report diving into the complicated process that the Disney+ team went through to “reconfigure its content-delivery engine and build a brand-new feature” to accommodate different underlying video attributes. Joe Rice, VP of media product at Disney Streaming Services, told Variety that this was a much more involved process than you would think, as the team had to make sure this reconfiguration wouldn’t break any of the existing features on Disney+, like Continue Watching, Watchlists, and the auto-play feature.

Thanks to that new feature, starting today, Disney+ subscribers can toggle between playing The Simpsons episodes in the original 4:3 aspect ratio or the remastered 16:9 widescreen format. This will be available across mobile, web, and connected-TV devices.

Disney+ originally launched all episodes of The Simpsons in the remastered 16:9 format “in order to guarantee visual quality and consistency across all 30 seasons.” But the company maybe should have anticipated that there would be backlash — when FX Networks’ Simpsons World app launched in 2014 with cropped segments to fit in the 16:9 aspect ratio, there was so much backlash that FX quickly restored the segments to 4:3. There is a great breakdown of the history of TV cropping that The Simpsons has faced by Slate below.