Wrestlemania 24 DVD aspect ratio weirdness

Here's a strange one:

I bought the Wrestlemania 24 DVD. It's in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my 17-inch widescreen computer monitor, it plays in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my portable widescreen DVD player, it plays in 16x9 widescreen.

But when I put it in either one of the DVD players I have hooked up to our 4x3 resolution televisions, it does NOT play in 16x9 widescreen. Instead, it plays in perfectly cropped 4x3 standard TV aspect ratio.

Now, I have a lot of widescreen movies in my DVD collection. All of them play in 16x9 widescreen format with the black bars on my regular 4x3 TVs.

But not Wrestlemania 24. And I've fiddled with the TV/DVD settings on the DVD players to get it to play in 16x9, and it won't.

It's almost like the DVD auto-senses what the aspect ratio of the screen is and adjusts the DVD accordingly.

Is anyone else having this problem?

So I bought a DVR today ...

After having had the opportunity to work with a DVR in my professional life, I decided that it was time to ditch the VCR and buy a DVR at home. So one of our TVs now has a Digital Video Recorder attached to it - with a 250 gig hard drive and Super-Multi DVD player/recorder. The timeshift and chase play features were the big selling points for me, and I'm sure I'm going to get many hours of use out of it.

Pride Fighting Championships returns to DVD

This is the best news I've read all day.

Admittedly, it is only 8:25 a.m.

Seriously, though, my brother Dean has been getting me old Pride FC sets for Christmas for a few years now, and they're great. I'm looking forward to the "new" stuff coming out.