The Bubble (1966 film)

This article is about the 1966 film. For other uses, see The Bubble.
The Bubble

British quad poster
Directed by Arch Oboler
Produced by Marvin J. Chomsky
Arch Oboler
Written by Arch Oboler
Starring Michael Cole
Deborah Walley
Music by Paul Sawtell
Bert Shefter
Cinematography Charles F. Wheeler
Edited by Igo Kantor
Production
company
Midwestern MagicVeurs
Distributed by Arch Oboler Productions
Release dates
  • December 21, 1966 (1966-12-21)
  • 1976 (1976) (Re-release)
Running time
112 minutes (Original release)
93 minutes[1] (1976 re-release)
Country United States
Language English

The Bubble is a 1966 American 3-D science fiction film in color, later re-released under the title Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. It was written and directed by Arch Oboler and starred Michael Cole and Deborah Walley.

Plot

A young couple, Mark and Katherine, are traveling on a small airplane and are forced to land in a remote town where the people are behaving oddly. They then attempt to escape from the town, but discover that there is a giant glass-like force field bubble around it that prevents anyone from leaving.

Cast

Production

The Bubble utilizes many gimmick shots that serve only to showcase the 3-D, which in 1966, after a dozen years' near-total absence from U.S. screens, was once again a novelty interesting in itself. Some gimmicks are marginally plot-related, such as Katherine reaching out to greet her husband, her arms stretching out to the viewer, but many are not. An electrical worker climbs up a power pole, the pole shown from above so that it projects out into the audience. Various objects are thrust out at the viewer. For no logical reason, a tray of beers defies gravity and slowly floats out of the screen to waft about in midair and tantalize the audience for a while before slowly returning. Scenes of vacant-faced townspeople strolling along the sidewalk in a daze while repeatedly opening and closing umbrellas, prolonged beyond any storytelling necessity, are revisited at intervals. Much of this gratuitous footage was trimmed out before later re-releases, unburdening the film of roughly twenty minutes of its original nearly two-hour running time.

Technical and historical importance

The Bubble marked the introduction of the economical Space-Vision 3-D system. Unlike the two-camera, two-projector systems used to make and show the 3-D feature films of the 1950s, Space-Vision used a single ordinary movie camera with an external optical attachment that allowed it to simultaneously photograph the left-eye and right-eye views stacked in an "over-and-under" configuration on a single frame of film. Because each image was only half the standard height, this resulted in a widescreen aspect ratio with roughly the same proportions as CinemaScope. A special attachment on the projector allowed the two images to be projected through oppositely-oriented polarizing filters and superimposed on a screen provided with a special non-depolarizing surface. As with the feature-length 3-D films of the 1950s, the audience had to wear Polaroid-type 3-D glasses so that each eye would see only the image intended for it. Space-Vision was used for Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1974), the only widely shown 3-D film of the 1970s. Functionally identical over-and-under systems, branded with various names, were used for most of the films made during a revival of 3-D that began with the release of Comin' at Ya! in 1981.

See also

References

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