I started off this morning researching the analog to digital transition bc of this post and went down a little rabbit hole about how each country handled the transition from an analog signal to a digital one. Eventually I thought to check on nyaa to see if anyone had uploaded the original broadcast recordings, not thinking that I would find anything. They would have had to have been recorded and stored on someones harddrive since like, 2007, unlikely. But, two uploaders individually put out releases of Hidamari Sketch and Hidamari Sketch x365 (the second season) on nyaa. If you have a CRT and like watching anime and don't mind that these are unsubtitled I encourage you to give them a watch, they're a fun little artifact and I'm glad someone preserved and uploaded these.
If you don't know there was an analog digital simulcast of both signals in Japan that started in about 2003 and ended in 2012 when all analog transmissions were shut down. So there was a period where broadcasters were putting out both HD 16:9 and SD 4:3 to serve people/areas who had not made the jump to the digital signal.
But the image above made me so curious. Were there any other differences between the two versions?
I compared these with the BD and found 2 of the frames from the original post. (the other I presume is from the first episode of season one also). And, they're,,, cropped from the 16:9 version.
In hindsight this makes perfect sense, I know sometimes they will redraw or reanimate certain scenes for the blurays because production is sometimes very fucked and they don't have the time to make things to their usual standards but if you're working for TV schedules why would you give yourself more work to do?
I'm sorry im sure this is interesting only to me but "Shaft redrew the wide character shots for HD during the DTV transition" is something that had the same veracity in my brain as, water is wet and i thought about it about as often. Two things make this very funny.
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The image is cropped from what I assume is the original which makes it more obvious that it was a joke.*
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the person that made that edit (presumably on 2ch or a/ on 4ch) didn't like, make the entire image 4:3 they popped the background out so it wouldn't appear squished. Which is such an insane effort post that you still see people go, oh yeah no it has to be real no one would go to the effort to do that.
*I would love to tell which is older but google recently changed how reverse image search works and it doesn't show you pages which the list of dates of when that page was last crawled so it's a little hard to figure out and I don't want to spend a bunch of time figuring out an alternative. So whoever cropped out the obvious joke part is one of histories greatest pranksters in the relatively small pond of people that give a shit about slice of life anime.
