The Dimensions Don't Add Up

I have never made my feelings towards 3-D a secret - I don't like it, don't see the need for it and the fact that movies studios insist on continuing to make movies using it annoys me. I feel like it is a cheap gimmick designed to cover up a bad movie because no one has ever left a great movie and thought, "Man, if only that was in 3-D it would have been so much better." Also, I feel like America has already rejected 3-D technology many times over so I don't know why the entertainment industry keeps trying to bring it back. I think the biggest problem is that tickets to see 3-D movies cost more and in a time when people can pirate movies the day after they are released and more consumers are staying home to watch movies than ever before, shouldn't the movie industry be trying to make it cheaper to go to the movies, not more expensive? I guess it still works for kids movies because that generation hasn't discovered how useless it is yet, but for the rest of us if they never made another movie in it we would hardly notice. That is why the idea of 3-D TV may have been one of the worst in recent memory. Most TV personalities don't look good in high-def, so thinking they would look good coming right at us is crazy. In fact there was only one place I thought 3-D TV may have a place and that was sports. I assumed it would come in very handy for a sport like golf in which you don't always have great depth perception and the undulation of the greens often can't be appreciated on regular TV. But when ESPN recently announced they were ending their ESPN 3-D experiment I figured that was the end of it. However, it turns out people simply refuse to let 3-D die because now it is getting added in places which don't make sense.

I had to take my truck to get its yearly inspection this afternoon. Because I have never been in a mechanic's shop which was air conditioned, was looking at a wait of nearly an hour and today's temperatures were again well over 90 degrees, I quickly left my vehicle there and headed to a nearby store to pretend to be interested in what they were selling, but mostly to partake in the free air conditioning. While I was in that store I saw this. For those of you who don't feel like clicking through, I will explain what you are missing. It is essentially a slip 'n slide, but the days of the slip 'n slide you and I grew up with are long over. Because the newest idea for toy makers is to take an old, simple toy and add lots of complicated pieces, with the new versions it is all about finding ways to add extra water and most of slides also have a theme involved. To add extra water to the mix on this particular version you end your slide by going through a ring which sprays you with water and this ring is shaped like a shark's mouth to also gives the illusion that the shark is eating you. That would have been more than enough but to make the experience extra complicated the toy comes with a pair of 3-D goggles and the shark's teeth are in 3-D to make it look like they are coming right at you. This may be the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life.

Are companies so desperate to make 3-D work that they are now applying it to everything? Obviously it wouldn't be the first time people shoehorned their product to fit a fad (I remember when I was a kid and one summer when glow-in-the-dark toys were suddenly cool. For the next year everything had to be glow-in-the-dark or it was useless.), but at least in that situation people were trying to glob their crap in with a successful idea. Here the idea failed and they are still putting it on everything. Normally you would think people would be in a hurry to get away from a public failure (there is a reason Segway accessories never became a cottage industry) but maybe they don't know how many people don't like 3-D. Also, let us not overlook the problem of applying a visual trick to a physical toy, which is idiotic. I really want to know - did the people who pitched this toy not know the difference between 2-D and 3-D? The whole point of 3-D is to give the illusion that something is coming at you - when you are sliding down a slippery piece of plastic towards the shark's mouth the teeth are already actually coming at you in 3 dimensions. Thus, there is no need to put them into 3-D to make them look like they are coming at you. Even the people who put "Dredd" in 3-D would say that is overkill. Apparently the movie makers of America may finally have given up on pushing 3-D movie on us, but they have simply handed the baton off to the toy companies to keep it going.

Seriously, how many bad products, movies and TV shows must we ignore before corporate America finally realizes that forcing 3-D down our throats will not make us enjoy 3-D? You would think the fact almost no one bought 3-D televisions when they were being pushed so hard a couple years ago would have been yet another clear indicator of that, but I guess not. (By the way, how pissed are you if you were one of the people who shelled out a couple hundred extra dollars for not only the 3-D TV but multiple pairs of 3-D glasses? Now you have all this extra technology and with ESPN out of the game almost no programming to use it with. This must be how people who bought BETA players must have felt. Moral of the story? Sometimes waiting to buy new gadgets pays off.) What we are left with are toys which don't even makes sense, all in an effort to keep reminding us that 3-D is a thing and that it is never going away. Hopefully these decisions were made a long time ago and we're just trying to burn through the inventory (the fact this toy was in the discount bin did give me some hope). If nothing else you hope these toy makers learned that if you are going to halfway rip-off a film in the name of making a toy at least go with the original "Jaws" and not "Jaws: 3-D" because that movie sucked.