The 3-D Experience: Safe For Kids?
3-D movies are in your face, but are they worth it? 3-D. The medium, once associated with campy nostalgia, is now high-tech and ultramodern.
Among the many choices parents and their kids face when headed to the box office—superhero adventures, animated family films, terrifying gore fests, more superhero adventures—a new choice has emerged in the past few years: 3-D. The medium, once associated with campy nostalgia, is now high-tech and ultramodern. Stylish plastic specs and billion-dollar blockbusters have replaced the flimsy, cardboard glasses and B-movie schlock.
3-D has often been an attempt to bring people back to the movies, beginning in the 1950s when television threatened to keep folks home and glued to the small screen. A third dimension promised something new and potentially exhilarating at the local movie house. But it wasn’t long before it became synonymous with second-rate genre flicks and lumped in with cinematic gimmicks like Smell-O-Vision. Later attempts to revive the phenomenon (Remember Jaws 3-D?) didn’t do much to dispel those notions. Then, in 2009, came James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, which combined 3-D with sophisticated motion-capture technology to create an immersive film experience that crushed box office records and conquered the world. Avatar’s success opened the gates for a 3-D revolution.
