Re: 3D Movies

[P3D Marvin Jones <72657.3276@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'd like to shed a bit of confusion on the subject. In the 1980's I made a
> copy of a list of movies "compiled by the Institute of Stereoscopic Research".
> 
> Dozens of movies are listed, and mostly they say "POLAROID" system. However,
> there are some differences:
>   Aleko (Russian) Late 1940s Lenticular; Concerto (Russian) 1941 Lenticular
> and several others from Russia, 1920s-1940s, lenticular process.
> 
>   Runaway Taxi    1925 Anaglyph
>   The Mask  1961 Anaglyph;  and the list goes on...but I don't.
> 
This is only confusing because it is a larger picture. All of the discussion of
polaroid vs supposed anaglyph projection of movies has related specifically to
the movies of the early 1950s. There was a great deal of interest in 3D earlier,
and most movies released BEFORE THE '50s were anaglyph prints. In the US, MGM
released several anaglyph shorts in the '30s and '40s, and other experimental
films were made as well. There were also other methods experimented with, such
as the lenticular system in which several Russian films in the 1940s were shown.
However, by the 1950s the polaroid system had been perfected to the point that
it was ready for commercial exploitation, and it was the basis for the entire
explosion of 3D feature production at that time. Much later, several low-budget
independent nudies and horror films were released with individual scenes printed
in anaglyph (because it's simpler to project, even if it's much inferior to
polaroid in terms of the image), and Universal tried an anaglyph reissue of its
two most popular 3D titles, Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came From
Outer Space (again, anaglyph to make projection idiot-proof, not to make the
presentation top-quality). The next big 3D phase, in the early 1980s, was again
all polaroid, although reconfigured to use only one projector instead of two. To
the best of my knowledge, other than reissues of earlier polaroid films, there
has never been a release of a single complete, feature-length 3D movie in
anaglyph since before 1950--only films like The Mask which incorporate anaglyph
sequences in a "flat" movie.

As I commented in a previous post, I think that one reason so many people seem
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 1996 15:59:48 -0500
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to remember the red/blue glasses is that they were so common as compared to the
grey polaroid glasses. Theaters usually tried to collect the polaroid glasses as
patrons left so they could be recycled--some theaters actually "rented" the
glasses by collecting a deposit on them when you went it. So there weren't
hundreds of them floating around being played by kids with all the time. In the
meantime, there were scores of comic books, magazines, cereal promotions and
other gimmicks at the same time that all used anaglyph, and THOSE glasses were
extremely common and widely distributed. They were used for only print art, and
NOT for movies, but they were much more common. I think that fact leads people
to associate them with all 3D of the era, including the movies.

On a related subject:

>On Fri, 16 Aug 1996, P3D John Dukes wrote:
>
>> I saw the Mars 3D show back in the 70s at Stanford as I recall, and
>> it was, and this I clearly remember(!), polarized.
>
>The 3D movie clips of Mars that we have on an old laser disc (don't 
>remember the title) were anaglyph.

A laserdisk can only hold an anaglyph image (or an alternate-field
image)--polarization is a method of altering the waves of projected light and
can only be accomplished by working with projected images.


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