What, the nostalgia industry LIED to us?

beamjockey has been having lots of fun with the Life magazine photo archive, and here he's encountered one of the most famous Life images of all, the shot of an audience of people wearing 3D glasses.

I was just talking about this image earlier and referred to it as an iconic image of people wearing red/green anaglyph lenses. But it turns out they're actually not--the movie is Bwana Devil, some sort of killer-lion story made by none other than Lights Out! creator and "Chicken Heart" author Arch Oboler, and it was shot in color and shown using a polarizer process. So they weren't colored lenses. From critics' complaints it sounds as if they did darken the image quite a bit, though.

Anyway, one often sees (or at least I've seen) the Life image reproduced in quasi-colorized form, with red and green lenses drawn in on the glasses to be cute. It appears that this is not accurate.