Lately, more often than not, when I've gone to a theater to see a movie, I've been handed a pair of glasses. Not the kind to help me see better (although my eyesight has been questioned by concerned haberdashers), but the kind to help me see deeper.
If you've seen any movie ads, you're probably aware that the latest advance in cinematic presentation is 3D. Over the course of the last few months, we've seen A Christmas Carol; Monsters Vs. Aliens; Avatar; How To Train Your Dragon; and most recently Clash of the Titans. And there were lots of others that we could have seen, if at the time we had felt wild and crazy and 3-dimensional.
The 3d movie phenomenon started in the 1950's, and has been steadily growing since then, except for a brief hiatus during the 60's; 70's; 80's; 90's and 2000's. This decade looks promising for the technology, because the audience demographic finally consists of just two groups: folks who were born after the 50's and think 3D movies are a new idea; and those who were movie-goers in the 50's but can't remember how many pills they've taken today, much less how many dimensions they were seeing on the big screen five or six decades ago.
Being born in late 1953, I'm close to the second category, but my long-term memory is etched onto my hard-drive... it's my short-term memory that goes through periodic reboots. In other words, I'm one of those geezers whose family has to wear name tags, but I can still remember a TV show called World of Giants where Marshall Thompson played a guy about 6 inches high. So I haven't forgotten my exposure to the 3D pioneers. Technically 3D movies were in their hey-day during the first few years of my life, when I was occupied with learning how to walk, read comic books, and hit my mouth when feeding myself (almost there on that last one). I didn't become a serious movie-goer till the early 60's. But back then, movies would periodically be re-released at the theaters rather than being shuttled quickly to TV, and some of the 3D movies released in the 50's came back around in theatrical release in the 60's, during the time when my big brother and I were being dropped off for Saturday matinees (and picked up on Sunday, if we had been particularly obnoxious that Saturday morning).
Before I ever saw my first 3D movie, I had been exposed to 3D comic books. For a young and naive comic book reader (yes, they used to exist), the occasional 3D comic book was a curious animal. The cover consisted of the the usual primary colors blasting their way into my still-tender retinas, and promised that, if I dared to crack the book open, the images inside would reach out and grab me by the throat. When I tried to preview the book before buying, it was the newsstand guy who usually did the throat-grabbing, so usually I'd fork over the dough and wait till I got home before seeing if the contents lived up to the hype.
When first opened, a 3D comic book looked like it had been left out in the rain. All the pictures were runny and blurred, like the comic books I tried to read in the tub. Attached to the book, though, and easily separated from the binding via the miracle of perforation, was a cardboard set of glasses with cellophane lenses, one red and one blue. Once these were donned and secured with strategically-placed daubs of library paste, the muddled mess on the pages became a diorama where every sound effect (Pow!, Ka-Boom!) floated above the page. The images weren't in color (they were sort of a strange tan-and white combo) but they were darned impressive to me. The glasses lived up to their hype a lot better than the X-Ray specs that were advertised on the back cover.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton