The new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, replete with two of the world's largest TV.
To be sure, Frank has got to be upset; this knocks a bit of the luster of his legendary TV, especially considering his TV couldn’t have been high def since it was around before Al’s 1993 song about it. But that brings up an interesting point: what shape was Frank’s 2000″ TV? The song doesn’t say what shape it was but it does refer to it as a “TV” and not a “movie theater.” This tells me Frank’s early-90s monster probably had an aspect ratio of 4:3, you know, the older, squarer shape before 16:9 became all the rage. And therein lies some hope because a diagonal measure isn’t directly proportional to area. So time to calculate area.
Jerry’s 2105″ TV is 160 feet wide by 72 feet tall. Multiplication, and Wikipedia, tell us his screen’s area 11,520 square feet. Now to brush off the trigonometry book; if the ratio of the width of Frank’s TV to its height is 4:3, then its two sides plus diagonal form a right triangle whose hypotenuse is 5, forming a classic 3:4:5 triangle. 5 is to 4 as 2000 is to 1600, and 5 is to 3 as 2000 is to 1200, so Frank’s TV was 1600 inches wide and 1200 inches tall, or 133.33 feet by 100 feet. And that makes the area of Frank’s TV 13,333 square feet, and still the winner.
