I was rummaging around in Cousin Estil’s footlocker the other night when I came across a rare find: two pairs of 3D glasses. One pair had one red and one green lens, and the other pair had two gray-colored lenses. I knew exactly what I was holding in my hands and in a sense was a telling history of the use of 3D in the movies.
Ahh…3D. People either hated it or loved it. I remember my first 3D movie when I was a little kid. It was House of Wax with Vincent Price. I remember all the ballyhoo about the 3D effects, especially concerning the paddleball sequence where the fellow was hitting them into the audience. That effect brought ooohs and ahhhhs from the audience members. I was too young to really appreciate the effect and what it meant from a motion picture standpoint, I just enjoyed the movie.
Oddly enough, that is the only 3D movie I recall seeing, well, that and its companion Phantom of the Rue Morgue. I don’t know if my parents weren’t impressed enough to go see any others or what. The next 3D movies I saw were September Storm in 1960, and The Mask in early 1962.
As I got older, I developed a fondness for all things 3D. I found an old EC Classics 3D comic in a junk store and was fascinated by how it worked with those red and green lenses. I purchased all the 3D comics and books I could find and read up on the history of 3D and 3D movies. I missed the 3D revival in the early ‘70s but caught Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone and Jaws 3D in the early ‘80s. I wasn’t too impressed. The 3D effect wasn’t too good in Spacehunter and I got eyestrain watching it. I knew something wasn’t right, and only surmised it was the new 3D technology that was amiss. Instead of using two projectors in sync, the 3D images were squeezed onto one piece of film with the two images stacked on top of each other within each frame. A beam-splitter polarizing lens separated the images onto the screen, one for each eye. But going from a vertical orientation to a horizontal orientation didn’t quite seem to work. The composition of the scenes seemed a bit contrived, too.
I lived through the 3D TV broadcast events, still chasing that holy grail of a decently-presented 3D movie. I eventually found it in the late ‘70s at a college campus showing of It Came From Outer Space in 16mm anaglyph 3D, using the old red/green glasses. Only this time, the glasses were red/blue. To my delight, the movie worked, and the 3D effect, although sometimes “ghosty”, worked, too.
A couple of years ago, my nephew, Crazy Gary, invested in a 3D movie projector and invited me over to see It Came From Outer Space, Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature, all in 3D. They were magnificent! We watched them on 3D Blu-ray discs using those electronic shutter glasses and saw them as they were intended to be seen, thanks to Bob Furmanek and the gang over at 3D Film Archive who corrected and remastered them to original pristine condition. I was overjoyed. I had finally found what I had been looking for. 3D movies when done right were awesome.
It Came From Outer Space (1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) are two of Universal’s classics from their Silver Age of Horror and Science Fiction…the 1950s. Original radio spots from their initial release are hard to find, but Universal did release the movies to theaters in single-strip anaglyph 3D in 1972 (and in 16mm for rentals and later on VHS) and I have those spots, thanks to Cousin Estil. I proudly present them to you now.
So, don your 3D glasses and listen to these classics. But, watch out! They may just reach out from your speakers and grab your ears!
