Restored first video of Smashing Pumpkins performing live in 1988 on cable public access TV

This is proving to be a pretty cool thing to watch, but it’s disappointing that part of the “restoration” was evidently cropping the video to 16:9. The comfort of having it fit modern screens is a little silly when you see all the carelessly cut-off heads it causes throughout the video (not to mention the weird chiron crop in the newly-shot intro!).

It’s a terrible trend, and kind of useless when you consider how few people ever watch web videos in full-screen landscape mode.

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