What do you mean "new credits"? Credits concerning the people involved in the HD conversion process? An entirely different main credits sequence? Or just a new (apparently shoddy recreation, with the wrong fonts) version they made of the original credits?

None of this (please note I'm referring to Netflix issues and not the return of Kumail's show) seems particularly worth celebrating. I thought they'd already re-inserted that on-screen text on Netflix months ago, and I believe Kumail did mention it then. I have since heard that there are a lot of alterations in these HD versions on Netflix, even aside from being cropped to fit 16:9. The music cues have been changed or removed in some cases, clearly not for artistic reasons but just due to cost. The cost of obtaining music rights (not talking about Mark Snow here but the occasional songs) can be truly outrageous and it increases over time, so I understand why that may be an issue, and if I worked for Fox I may have been required to make that same decision, nevertheless, artistically, it is an almost unforgivable compromise of the original episode, which, just like the cropping, is yet another argument that the DVDs are still the reference versions (and they do still look stunning if viewed on a smaller screen like a laptop- which is actually a bigger screen size than many people these days watch things on) and until they actually remaster the ORIGINAL version into HD, preserving the aspect ratio and the soundtrack and either keeping the same credits or recreating them properly (with a font that looks the same to the naked eye), then we cannot

Let me give an example. A French language version (either sung by Bobby Darin himself or a cover by someone other than Bobby Darin, someone much more unknown and cheaper, possibly) has now, in the HD version on Netflix that new viewers regard as the reference version, replaced the original song in the funeral sequence of Beyond the Sea. Now that's pretty disastrous because you really need to hear the (English) lyrics of that song briefly at her dad's funeral, or all the later stuff with Boggs (the meat of the episode) makes no sense and the entire episode's power is lessened (and, ya know, it's only like the most important episode in the history of the show, in terms of advancing the show into new areas and proving it could stay on the air and offer lasting art, drama, character development... and an all time classic performance by GA). unless Beyond the Sea is a song you're super-familiar with melodically and rhythmically (and most people today aren't- it's just an old hit they may never have knowingly heard before) if you only briefly heard a French version in the funeral, you might not even recognize it was the same song when you hear Boggs sing it, you might not get that Boggs is singing a song associated with her dad. It also makes little sense plot-wise that the version of the song that meant the most to her dad and mom and was played at the funeral would be the French version. And that also seems like something Scully or her mom would have remarked on. There is never any discussion of French roots or French speaking in her family, and as old as her dad seems, I don't know that he is old enough to have fought in WWII in Europe, which might explain an affinity for French things. I believe he is supposed to be slightly younger than that, and indeed, if Beyond the Sea is a song of his youth, that song came out over a decade after WWII. Of course being in the Navy he may still have spent time in France on some kind of mission (although that too is suspect- for a long period after WWII, there was little cooperation between the French military and the US military, although they were technically allies- this was due to the nationalist policies of right wing French leader Charles de Gaulle, who distrusted American power, as did many French on both left and right, partly out of guilt for their own failures to repel the Nazis in World War II and their guilt over their own colonial activities, which became easy to displace onto America, although it also deserved much criticism for picking up from the French colonial atrocities and making things much worse where the French had left off in some of their colonies, such as Vietnam). In any case, associations with France (or even French Canada) was never a part of Bill Scully's character as intended by the original show (unless we are referring to the former French colony of Vietnam, where he may have been stationed- but it's not like Vietnam vets usually developed a French nostalgia- French was rarely used in day to day situations there), and the thoughtless insertion of a (probably cheaper to obtain) version in French is one of many examples of how seemingly minor, aesthetic stuff (the choice of music cues or the way shots are composed for 4:3) actually may express great meaning and even may be important to maintaining basic plot and character coherence. Of course, most TV shows, even well written and acted ones, pay zero attention to things at this level of detail in the sound and image, so it's understandable that many XF fans would assume it's the same- who cares if you lop off parts of the picture intended to be seen, or add random parts nobody was intended to see? The story is still advancing after all. That's what matters right? Well, not really in this show. It is much more aesthetically complex and sophisticated. It may be (certainly) very writer-driven, like all TV, but the reason the writers on this particular show were great is not just snappy dialogue or careful plotting (indeed they often goofed in that area), their genius is that they understood, better than anyone in TV EVEN NOW, how to tell stories cinematically- as producers as well as writers, they were able to co-supervise (alongside Carter and the brilliant directors they and Carter selected, such as Nutter, Bowman, Manners) the "visual storytelling" which Gilligan has talked about many times as the thing he learned on The X-Files.

When you pretend you are restoring a show to its best possible quality, and yet in the process you destroy the original visual compositions and remove and replace the original soundtrack in ways that may alter the plot and the meaning, what you are doing is disrespecting this "visual storytelling" and ensuring that future generations (those who will only know the HD versions) are not going to see the show as it was meant to be seen. This kind of stuff indicates that whoever was working on this so called remastering had no involvement with the original show and wasn't even familiar with it as a fan (any fan would know, even leaving aside the issue of faithfulness to the original, you could not replace that song with a French version because, to non-French-speaking viewers, it would make the plot of Beyond the Sea- one of the show's pivotal episodes- potentially nonsensical). Carter hinted as much when he said on his AMA last year that he was barely consulted on the HD versions and, in fact, he (in his usual quiet way in interviews) made clear his opposition to the 16:9 conversion of seasons one to four. He said he was hoping that a Bluray might be done with the original 4:3 versions for those seasons- and 16:9 for season five and onward, which he actually shot for 16:9. Of course he had no choice but to go along (Fox owns the property, he doesn't, and after all, Fox is right that many people with no understanding of the art, refuse to watch anything that isn't in 16:9 HD, so the show can increase its popularity by offering a version with today's fashionable look).