Wednesday, May 16, 2012

PEPLUM-SCOPE


Supertotalscope. Euroscope. Supercinescope. MexiScope! Those are some of the numerous film screen aspect ratios seen on movie posters and during opening credits to compete with the more expensive CinemaScope format, which slowly disappeared from movie screens when it wasn't a selling point anymore.





 (this is from ADAM & EVE (1956))





3 comments:

  1. S.R.OrsulakMay 17, 2012 at 4:30 PM

    You forgot one KRONOSCOPE. How about DYLASCOPE (HERCULES & HERCULES UNCHAINED & a few others). There might be a few more out there.

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  2. PeakpashaMay 17, 2012 at 7:13 PM

    20th Century Fox only owned the rights of the CinemaScope name but not the process itself, so basically anyone could make CinemaScope lenses, as long as they didn't call it that. And of course, there were the cases, where they just gave a silly name to the process, like how the american poster of Hercules Against the Moon Men claimed that it's in COSMICOLOR and LUNARSCOPE.

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  3. PEPLUM cinemaMay 17, 2012 at 9:02 PM

    Peakpasha, the CinemaScope process was more expensive not just because of licensing fees, which is why other cheaper versions were created. This is just one example from Wikipedia re CinemaScope:

    "The Panavision technique was also considered more attractive to the industry because it was more affordable than CinemaScope and was not owned or licensed-out by a rival studio."

    The early version of CinemaScope was grainy and had a lot of distortions. Fox filmed some movies in 55mm only to be transfered to 35mm Cinemascope prints in order to rectify the distortions. This is an expensive process which most other studios around the world couldn't afford hence going with other new and cheaper formats. I already mentioned these distortions at this blog:

    http://peplums.blogspot.ca/2012/01/cinemascope-distortion.html

    Also the print themselves were sometimes different: Techniscope was a 2 perf 2 sides print while Cinemascope was a 4 perf 2 sides. Etc.

    Most were paying Fox to use CinemaScope name but the prints themselves and the process to make those prints also added to the cost which most PEPLUM films couldn't afford.

    Dyaliscope is one of them. It's a cheaper French film format to rival CinemaScope.

    Here's a list of all the Scopes out there:

    http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/glossary.htm

    and this:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_formats

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