Professor: Stuart Pankin	Voice of Max: Stuart Pankin
Elvira: Herself	Narrator: Harry Shearer
Director: Ben Stassen

30 Second Bottom Line: We learn about the history of 3-D and see where the current technology is taking us. The large format of IMAX is used to bring drama to these events.

Story Line: Absent minded professor Stuart Pankin hopes to unveil his new 3-D technology, Real-O-Vision but is thwarted by continuous technical glitches. Elvira sings a song in the process, but she keeps getting interrupted as the machinery breaks down. The professors' sidekick MAX (voice also by Pankin), tries to entertain us while he works on fixing his invention.

The major function of MAX, a flying robot that looks somewhat like an oversized metal bug is to make wisecracks and fly into the audience to thrill us.

Some good history of 3-D is shown such as a recreation of the Lumiere brother's 1903 "L'Arrivee du Train" which literally scared audiences out of the theater along with some clips from campy 3-D movie classics from Hollywood's 3-D heyday in the 1950's.

Tell Me More About It: In 1953 there were 30 3-D movies made and by 1955 with the fad over and the arrival of wide screen cinemascope, 3-D had all but gone away.

You may already know from using ViewMaster as a kid, that the 3-D effect comes from each eye seeing a different image that our brain combines with additional perspective.

The one positive thing about this film is that it makes clear that the key value of 3-D is the extent that it projects an illusion of throwing things into the audience. This relationship to the story is THE value of the technology.

This is the only IMAX film that I have seen that I disliked. The glasses gave everything a dark image and the story is so goof ball with the absent minded professor and the dancing and singing Elvira, that at times my eyes hurt and I was glad that the film was less than an hour. The history is interesting and if the story offered something I cared about, this may have been a good movie.

The entire film is pointless and for the life of me, I can't think of why anyone would enjoy this film other than the historical value that it presents. One thing that IMAX needs is at a minimum to be visually pleasing for a film that will cost more than $10 and only last 45 minutes. The good intentions of Encounter in the Third Dimension are admirable, but they are not enough to float the boat even with a large screen format. Here, the big screen just means way too much of a bad thing.