What, the nostalgia industry LIED to us?

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And the incident that inspired the movie was apparently the same one adapted for "The Ghost and the Darkness".

[jwgh]

For some reason I have a framed copy (non-colorized) of the Life photo, but I haven't gotten around to hanging it up anywhere yet.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

My old 3D glasses are green and red or blue and red, glass, circular, and look nothing like the ones I see in photos. I can't figure out WHEN these 3D glasses would have been used. It almost certainly would have had to been the 1930s.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Or even the 1920s.

Newspaper articles about 3D movies usually open with the paragraph about how, in our modern world of today, the glasses aren't the silly red/green or red/blue ones any more. I was amazed to discover that this has been true of the majority of 3D movies for over 50 years.

But the colored lenses, in many incompatible formats, survive to this day as the easiest way to display stereo images in print, or on a video or computer screen. There are places that sell them over the Internet, and you basically have to specify which particular DVD you're trying to watch.