DVD World

Here we go again with another exciting issue of DVD and Blu-Ray World, the home entertainment magazine packed with fascinating, little known facts. For example, did you know that Dick Van Dyke’s real name is Penis Van Lesbian, and despite the evidence in Mary Poppins, he wasn’t a real Cockney? Hard to believe, eh? Anyway, as we continue to move into the digital age with the arrival on the scene of bigger and better plasma and LCD screens, we hear the next big thing will be 3D tellies that you can watch without silly glasses, unless you happen to wear silly glasses in real life.  Philips developed a prototype a while back and now the Japanese are running with it as well. The technology apparently works by throwing a different image to each eye and angling them so that one eye picks up one and the other picks up the other. The down side, of course, is that when these tellies come on the market they are going to cost around the ten grand mark, and there isn’t exactly going to be a ton of 3D material out there for us to watch. With this in mind it could be up to a decade before 3D TV makes real inroads into the market, and in the meantime we’ll have to be content with those cardboard glasses and DVD and cinema releases like Coraline, My Bloody Valentine 3D and James Cameron’s much-anticipated Avatar, which reportedly has some of the best three-dimensional imagery yet seen on screen. My favourite 3D story, by the way, concerns House of Wax, the first truly ground-breaking 3D flick made way back in 1953. Ironically, its director, Andre De Toth, was one of the few who could not appreciate it - he was blind in one eye! Right, enjoy the mag… I’m off to read I Was A Failed Lion Tamer, by Claude Bottom.