Since I know a few people out there (myself included) are Ben 10 fans I thought I would go over an issue with the Ben 10 Season 4 DVD set.

The “Secret of the Omnitrix” movie (all 4 versions of it: Red, Blue, Gold, and Red w/ trivia popups) are on the second disk of the Season 4 set.

The movie originally aired in widescreen as far as I know (not sure about all 3 versions, but I’m pretty sure Red did).  It also aired on widescreen on VOD (version Red), had a barebone version Red DVD at Wal-Mart which was letterboxed, and the Australian DVD was letterboxed.

The pop up trivia version (which used version Red) originally aired in cropped 4×3.

Here are a few screenshots for comparison.

This is a screenshot of the movie (version Red) as it aired on Cartoon Network, as you can see it is clearly a widescreen image.

This screenshot is from the DVD encode of version Red, it is 4×3 and there is image data missing from the left and right.  All 4 versions of the film on the DVD are cropped.

Hopefully Warner will do right by the fans and fix this, but there is no guarentee they will, and in fact seems unlikely.  It is unfortunate that we have seemingly hit the point that an animated movie would be animated widescreen, aired as such on TV, and then the DVD is cropped.

edit- I scaled up the screencap from the TV airring, and overlayed the DVD cap on it. The blue dots represent the point where footage gets cut off due to the cropping.

Tags: Ben 10, Cartoon, Cropped, DVD, Secret of the Omnitrix