alt title(s): Three D Movie
We won't insult your intelligence by explaining what a
3D Movie is, but it may be useful to explain the commonly used ways of showing each eye the different image that's necessary for 3D.
- Anaglyphic: The classic red/blue or red/green glasses. Has obvious problems, such as not being able to do color well. On the other hand, it can be used for printed material and television.
- Polarized light: Depends on light whose wavelengths vibrate in different directions; two such images are projected and each eye is covered with a polarized filter that only lets one image through. Polarization isn't visible to the eye, so this allows colors and is how most 3D movies are done.
- The Pulfrich Effect: Carl Pulfrich discovered in 1922 that it takes the brain longer to process a darker image. An eye with a dark filter on it will see a different image than an uncovered eye because it's seeing the image from a moment ago. The two images combine into 3D... if the scene is moving and spinning in such a way that it works out, which limits the effect to novelty films. One well known example is Doctor Who: Dimensions in Time; to see it in 3D, just hold sunglasses over one eye.
- Field Sequential 3D: This works on televisions and depends on having special glasses that become light and dark many times a second, with each eye getting the images at different times, synchronized to the TV set. (Essentially the same idea was used on the Sega Master System video game console.) This is full color, but flickers. This has only been used for gimmicks, except for VHD, an obscure Japanese video disk format from 1990. This format had most of the 1980's 3D movies, and is a common source of 3D bootlegs.
3D movies really became a fad in 1952, starting with
Bwana Devil, and lasted only a short time; they were expensive to show and required special equipment that was often not used correctly. Famous ones included
Creature from the Black Lagoon,
Robot Monster, and
Dial M for Murder. The latter came out in 1954, at which point the fad was dead, and it was released as a normal film.
There was a second 3D movie fad in the 1980's, starting with the low budget Western
Comin' At Ya!, released in 1981. The fad lasted until 1984 or so and included
Jaws 3D,
Friday the 13th Part III, and
Amityville 3D. At this point, television stations would even occasionally show 1950's 3D movies using red/blue glasses.
After this, 3D movies trickled out, but only became widespread again in the 2000s, when IMAX had spread and when digital effects made it easy to create animated 3D (or computer-generated 3D, as in
Superman Returns). Well-known movies from this era include
Spy Kids 3D,
Beowulf, and the ending of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Movies in 3D:
- The Other Wiki has a list here
.
- The original House Of Wax was all but built entirely around the fact that it was a 3D movie — the scene with the guy playing with a yo-yo is decidedly lackluster when it's airing on TV.
- Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus The Best of Both Worlds Concert in Disney Digital 3D.
- The Nightmare Before Christmas, originally a fully 2-D Stop Motion picture from 1993, got a 2006 touch-up as a 3D Movie for its theatrical seasonal re-release for Halloween 2006.
References to 3D movies in media:
- The tenth Doctor Who uses what look like 3D glasses to see the void in Army of Ghosts/Doomsday.
- Fry and Leela attend a 3D movie in the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet". The glasses don't work on the one-eyed Leela, however.
- Muppets Take Manhattan: Scooter works at a theater showing a 3D movie.
- The Fifties fad of 3D movies is referenced in Back To The Future. One member of Biff's gang goes around wearing 3D glasses. He's named "3D" in the credits.
- The original Thirteen Ghosts used 3D. Its 21st century remake did not, but as a nod to the original, ghosts were only visible when viewed through special glasses.
