Widescreen's the future so eventually it will happen. No petition is needed. The old standard 4:3 ratio is unnatural and cuts off the viewer's peripheral vision. We see in a wider scope and televisions are being made larger and wider to accommodate this. I don’t want my classic television sliced into widescreen, but I’m glad my movies aren’t amputated at the sides anymore and that new television is being shot with a wider scope in mind. It should have always been this way.
That's something I agree to... but here's what I hate. Many times things that are shown in widescreen, Sesame Street being a prime example, are only shown in full frame by certain stations, thus cropping out words and letters, effectively destroying the educational concept of Sesame Street. They do the same thing with Between the Lions in my area (at least in the PBS Digital sub-station), cropping off the on-screen text... again, effectively destroying educational concepts. I'm sure there are a lot of people who want to keep things cropped off with old style TV's... but that should be built into the cable or satellite the same way it's built into DCBs. But when something is broadcast in WS, stations shouldn't have the right to crop them.
It's as I said, why the heck do they still make movies in full frame? Every time I see some movies on sale somewhere, they ONLY have full, and even with a small TV, I don't wanna watch a crummy crop and chop scan that shows what I DON'T want to see (in the example of Muppet movies, that could stand to be the puppeteers), while scraping off what I want to see. Again, I was severely traumatized by a BAD VHS copy of Ghostbusters.