When MASH was released on Hulu, I went down this rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on. It goes really deep with some shows being filmed, like MASH, to some being videotaped, like WKRP in Cincinnati. This was primarily done for cost since the medium has different costs, plus licensing agreements are cheaper with videotape over film. This is also why classic shows can get a good HD print, since film can be recaptured at really high resolutions as opposed to videotape.
What I found, is that filmed shows were also shot in (mostly) widescreen, but were planned for a 4:3 presentation. Here’s a shot from MASH:
As can be seen between pictures, there is a small amount cut from the top and bottom, but there is also more picture shown on the sides. They also went back and redid all of the overlay shots and titles, so in the episode with the clock overlay, they moved it so that it would not be cut off using this technique:
At first, this really annoyed me, but after a while, I didn’t really notice it. As long as it is done with quality of the image in mind, it will make these episodes available to future generations on modern screens.
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