I learned this from the older X-files DVDs, which have some unusually good special features.
They made a ton of effort on it, recognising it's a different version altogether:
> The new version of The Wire, then, will differ both creatively and technically. In certain cases, such as a scene in season two where longshoreman gather around a body, Simon said he believed the added space would add a vulnerability to the scene that wasn’t possible in 4:3. But he describes other scenes where the added space distracts the eye, and the remaster zooms in on the characters to retain that intimacy.
https://www.techhive.com/article/599415/hbo-remastered-the-w...
I have Homicide on DVD, it also has some good extras.
> This video is not rated. Join vimeo to watch
No thanks. Here's a YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufs0Rwx8sOk
I've also sat in transfer sessions where the Pan&Scan decisions were being made to transfer wide screen down to 4:3 vs just doing a center crop extract. It makes you appreciate just how much effort is needed when done as best it could be rather than just the fast/lazy way.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
(For the pedantic, yes there is a name for this technique, and yes the ratios aren't exactly 4:3.)
When digital cameras like the ones from Red came out, you can tell it the aspect ratio so it only saves the active pixels of the full sensor and ignore all of the out of aspect pixels. That's a brave operator doing that, and I've only seen it in the wild once.
So it was not "cropped in the theater"—the theater got a standard anamorphic print. To go from the Super 35 negative to the anamorphic print, they both cropped and optically squeezed the image (in the case of the non-vfx shots), and scanned, cropped, squeezed digitally and printed back to film (in the case of the vfx shots). This was a few years before they did full "digital intermediates."
The second half of your sentence is misguided.
In 4:3 it looks good and like the original airing show, in 16:9 any non-digital/composite shot looks freaking fantastic. But once you get to any digital or composite shot it takes a nose dive in quality.
https://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.htm...
I have these versions, and it's world better than everything beforehand. It's also a good opportunity for a re-watch!
Sheridan was maybe a bit cheesy at times but definitely gave off that vibe of a leader one could follow into battle.
If you want to pirate it, with yt-dlp and the URL, you can download items from the Tubi web site. (Don't ask me how I know.)
Unfortunately, Warner Brothers lost those files. Rumor has it when they sent copies to Sierra (really Vivendi at the time, just before the Activision acquisition) for a Babylon 5 videogame the WB Archives team accidentally sent their only copy and that when the videogame project was shutdown they destroyed the copies per the IP license agreement.
There's a high probability that even if WB had had the digital masters of the effects, they probably still would have stuck to the 4:3 restoration over the 16:9 restoration to avoid recompositing costs, but it's still such a weird swing of bad luck that the production team thought ahead about HD technology well enough as well as anyone could at that time and yet the 4K copy we have in this timeline is in the wrong aspect ratio.
That said, I think letterboxing is a better choice than trying to recompose a shot for a different aspect ratio if it wasn't accounted for initially (eg: The X-Files). And even then, the shot selection and composition would have been different had the aspect ratio been initially different (like TXF's 16:9 versions leaving the edges of the frame largely unused).