Memories of the '80s: 3D Makes a Brief Comeback

3D Movies were big in the 1950s. Movie studios felt threatened by television and feared they would lose business as those who owned sets would stay home rather than pay for movie tickets. The studios looked for any gimmick that could only be reproduced in a theater and not at home on a television. It was impossible to reproduce 3D on black and white sets, so theaters had an exclusive on that technology. Inevitably the gimmick that the motion picture industry chose to combat television was CinemaScope, or Widescreen as it is better known today. The 50's 3D boom lasted from 1952 beginning with Bwana Devil, and ended in 1955 with The Return of the Creature. No less than 50 full length features were released in 3D including Robot Monster, Kiss Me Kate, House of Wax, Hondo, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Dial M For Murder, as well as dozens of shorts ranging from Donald Duck to Woody Woodpecker to The Three Stooges.

3D movies did not go away after 1955, but were made more infrequent and usually only by independent or foreign studios. The 1970s saw a brand new gimmick called Sensurround. Created for the disaster movie Earthquake it used high frequency sound to cause the theater to shake during the earthquake scenes. It was inevitably only used on three other movies. Hollywood was ready to abandon gimmicks as they had discovered the high concept special effects laden instant blockbuster. But things changed with an Italian Spaghetti Western called Comin' At Ya in 1981. The movie was a surprise hit just like that there was a demand for 3D movies. First came reissues of '70s movies like Revenge of the Shogun Women, followed by reissues of classics from the 1950s including House of Wax. But inevitably newly produced 3D movies followed.

These movies went by weird names that almost guaranteed that the movie would be a load of garbage. Movies with names like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Treasure of the Four Crowns, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn and the cartoon Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. The first new 3D movie to be released after the success of Comin' At Ya was called Parasite, a low budget horror movie with a cast of unknowns, including a young Demi Moore fresh from General Hospital. The movie centered around a scientist who has smuggled two genetically engineered parasitic creatures out of a government lab, one in a canister which is later stolen by a motorcycle gang and another which has eaten it's way into his stomach and is now dormant. While the government agents search for him he hides out in a remote backwater town in the west where he tries to figure out how to remove the dormant parasite from his stomach. Meanwhile the bike gang has removed the other parasite from the canister where it begins to eat them one by one. It then turns it's attention to 1940s movie star Vivian Blaine ( best known for starring with Laurel and Hardy in the Fox movie Jitterbugs ) who is playing a washed up floozy who inhabits the town along with the roving gangs of thugs who make up the rest of the population. This sets things up for a nice 3D shot of the worm like Parasite, which has somehow climbed up onto the ceiling, dropping down on poor Vivian which is shown from her point of view looking up at the creature. After chewing it's way through her body it goes after the few people left alive in town, which is pretty much just Demi Moore, the government agent and the scientist who's own parasite is getting ready to pull an Alien imitation and burst out of his stomach. Plenty of gore in this move even in scenes without the parasite. Early on the scientist gets into a fight with some random roving thugs which ends with one of them lanced through the chest with a pole so that his blood pours out of the other end right into the camera.

Aside from using scripts from the B movie reject pile Hollywood showed very little imagination. Since these movies inevitably would have 3D in the title somewhere Paramount decided it would be cute to release one of the third movies in one of their franchises as "Part 3D". The low budget Friday the 13th franchise was chosen. The original idea for the franchise was to have a new monster in every movie. But Paramount wanted to insure that Part 3D would be a hit and pressured producers to bring Jason back. Had the studio not spent the money on 3D effects then they may have allowed producer Frank Mancuso Jr. to go with his original concept of a different horror movie for each Friday the 13th installment. Instead not only did the third movie set in stone that the franchise would center around Jason Voorhees, but gave the character it's signature hockey mask. Other studios quickly announced plans for their own Part 3Ds. Orion produced The Amityville Horror 3D while Universal decided to release a third Jaws movie, Jaws 3D. Out of all the 3D movies released in the '80s Jaws 3D had the best production values and the best cast, including Dennis Quade, Bess Armstrong, Lea Thompson and Louis Gossett Jr fresh from winning an Academy award for best supporting actor. It was also a huge disappointment, most notably because director Joe Alves chose to cut away from the shark just as it was coming out at the screen, but also because the movie was simply too silly a followup to the first Jaws movie which was among the greatest films ever made.

Others tried their hand at 3D movies, such as Steve Guttenberg's forgettable invisible man comedy The Man Who Wasn't There or the X rated Blonde Emanuelle. But with so many poor quality scripts being used for these movies 3D quickly became associated with shlock and lost it's appeal fast. The '80s wave of 3D came to an end around 1985, but not before one last movie went into production. It was a co-production between Disney studios, producer George Lucas and director Francis Ford Coppola called Captain Eo and starred Michael Jackson as the title character. A short 17 minute science fiction movie made exclusively to be shown at Disney theme parks, Epcot Center in particular.

A side story to all of this was 3Ds emergence on the small screen. A company called 3D Video developed a technique that converted 3D movies into anaglyphic videos that could be broadcast on color televisions and seen in 3D with the aid of red and blue glasses. 3D Video intended to make most of their money back by selling the glasses but ran into a problem when viewers either kept their old glasses from past broadcasts or bought cheaper pairs from alternative sources. When the movie Hondo was broadcast in 3D during the '90s the red and blue anaglyph was reversed so that older glasses would not work and new glasses would need to be bought. There were other problems with televised 3D. A combination of broadcast standards and worries by stations that viewers without glasses would turn the channel caused 3D Video to edit the movies such that only parts of the screen were in 3D other parts and many times all of the screen would not be shown in 3D to prevent blurring. This jumping from 3D to regular 2D ruined the 3D effect. Another problem was that most televisions were unable to reproduce the correct color hues for the filters on the glasses to work properly. 3D Video tried to fix this problem by including a short clip before each film where the left side of the screen was blue and the right side white. Viewers were asked to look at the screen through the blue lens on the glasses and fiddle around with the television knobs until both sides of the screen matched. This meant that for most the 3D simply did not work at all and the televised 3D fad quickly fizzled out. But 3D Video could not have picked a better time to introduce 3D television, right when the fad was strong in theaters.