I Saw Tit in 3-D

3-D Movies are mounting a comeback. Again. Be still, my bleeding eyes. Again.

At age 7, I stumbled upon the famous photograph of a movie theater audience staring up, enraptured, at Bwana Devil (1953) through paper eyeglasses with colored lenses.

Some nearby authority figure explained to me that those people were watching a 3-D movie, and those glasses enabled the images to jump right off the screen.

The immediate, flawlessly logical question I blurted out then was: “So why isn’t every movie in 3-D?”

Nobody could explain it to me.

Seven was also the age when I happened up Pops McBeardo’s Playboy stashed in the bathroom hamper, so my unspoken query was: “And why isn’t Playboy in 3-D? And what about dirty movies?”

The answers would come. As would I.

First, 3-D movies are an agonizing spelunk into crossed eyes, headaches, paper-cuts from the glasses, and the whole thing doesn’t really work, but the promise keeps the hopefuls – led by me – coming back, time and miserable time again.

Second, Playboy in 3-D in the 70s -- when it boasted natural-knockered, mountain-muffed centerfolds on the order Marilyn Lange -- would have proven lethally sexy to grown men, let alone second-grader me, so Hef was doing us a mitzvah.

Third, it was 1975. There were dirty 3-D movies all around me at the time, but I could barely get an escort to see Benji, let alone The Stewardesses.

It took another seven years before I finally experienced 3-D. First, I had to endure the agony of being forbidden to see Comin’ At Ya! (1981), the legendary Spaghetti western revival of the gimmick, simply because it was rated R.

The McBeardo Parents must wonder, on occasion, how things might have turned out how they’d been slightly less psychotically overprotective of my early entertainment choices.

When the 3-D kung-fu epic Revenge of the Shogun Women (1982) hit New York the following January, I thought maybe I could con an older cousin into taking me, but then I caught wind of Andy Warhol’s 3-D Flesh for Frankenstein (1974) with being re-released soon, and opted to save my chits for that expenditure.

Unfortunately, the week Frankenstein played Brooklyn, I got a 50 or a zero or some other typical grade (for me) on a test, and Moms McBeardo grounded me. Let me point out to all you parents reading this: in the early ’70s, my mother joined a (temporarily successful) campaign to ban The Three Stooges from New York TV and, a few years after that, my old man forced me to rip up all my Mad magazines with him. My first tattoos were images of Alfred E. Neuman, Larry Fine, Jerome “Curly” Howard, and Moses “Moe” Howard, respectively. Connect your own fuckin’ dots.

When I finally did get to strap on the cardboard specs, it was for a reissue of House of Wax (1953) with Vincent Price, which delivered the 3-D goods while also making plain why Hollywood discontinued the 3-D craze the first time.

The next one was killer: Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982). Not only was it in “Super-Vision 3-D”, which employed gray glasses that improved on the multicolor models (although even the most sun-drenched scenes appeared to be shot at midnight), but the world got to enjoy hockey-masked maniac Jason Voorhees popping some schmoe’s eyeball straight out of his skull and over the seats, as well as sudsy lovely Tracie Savage soaping her suck-sacks in the shower.

Years later, Tracie came off as all business while anchoring L.A.’s Channel 4 News. Consider that as you reach out help her lather up while watching Friday the 13th Part 3 on a spanking new 3-D DVD from Paramount.

As cornea-scorching and brain-hemorrhage-inducing as 3-D came off on the big screen, on video, the technique was less preferable to running face-first into a pitchfork aimed at eye-level.

That acknowledged, the Friday the 13th Part 3 disc is pretty okay (much like the mega-budget F-13 reboot currently slaying the box office). It makes use of old-school red-and-blue 3-D glasses, but the actual effect is better here than I’ve ever seen it anyplace else.

Granted the competition has not been severe, dating back to 1982 in New York when Channel 9 and Channel 11 duked it out by airing Gorilla at Large and Revenge of the Creature on successive nights.

And I never did get to my one free mitt on Sexcalibur (1983), the first mass-marketed 3-D hardcore porn video, because by the time my local video store was staffed by dudes I knew from school, it had plopped out of circulation.

Again, I wondered why 3-D could not sustain itself. Especially in the realm of pornography. And then I was reminded again. Especially in the realm of pornography.

Throughout the 1990s, vintage 3-D sex epics circulated as midnight movies, and I saw them all (except, curiously, The Stewardesses).

Wildcat Women a.k.a. Bad Lolita a.ka. Black Lolita (1975), Hard Candy a.k.a. Lollipop Girls a.k.a M 3-D! The Movie (1976),) and Disco Dolls in Hot Skin a.k.a. Blonde Emmanuelle (1977) continue to turn up in funky theaters to this day, where they continue to injure audiences in the ocular cavities.

Pathfinder DVD even issued these chestnuts on 3-D discs in 2003. If you value existing without a permanent migraine, you will approach them with caution.

Tragically, Prison Girls (1972), the 3-D showcase for dairy queen Uschi Digard and her screen-rupturing triple-Ds continues to elude me to date in any venue (except, of course, for 2-D samplings at MrSkin.com).

Two big red-and-blue cheers, however, for Shout! Factory issuing a swanky 3-D package of The Stewardesses and, as with the Friday the 13th Part 3 disc, getting it as right as this brain-puncturing gimmick can be gotten.

The Stewardesses: 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition includes 3-D and 2-D versions of the movie in both color and black-and-white, 3-D outtakes and screen tests, a short on the history of 3-D, a short on the history of The Stewardesses in 3-D and, incredibly, the gut-busting SCTV bit 3-D “House of Stewardesses” with John Candy as spook movie host Dr. Tongue.

The 3-D, as always, is hit-and-miss. Regardless, you must see the tits on the misses in The Stewardesses.

Let me state pointedly: I have never seen a more sumptuous gathering of primo boob-meat than in The Stewardesses. And that is quite a point(s) to make.

Whereas Russ Meyer delivers the good in gargantuan, mega-gallon fashion, and the bodies of work of, say, Jane Birkin and Misty Mundae satisfy on the most demure end of the mammary spectrum, the breasts in The Stewardesses, regardless of size, are all, bewilderingly … perfect.

One flight attendant after another doffs her top and out pop the most buoyant, flawlessly formed, succulently inviting, perky-nippled gazongas you could possible imagine, two at a time and in the miracle of 3-D, to boot!

Begin with buxom Paula Erikson. Her melons are massive and mock gravity as though they were filled with helium.

Then move on to curvaceous Christina Hart whose double-vanilla-scoops with lip-smacking strawberry toppers carried her from The Stewardesses to the British softcore smash Games Girls Play (1974), the sexed-up Billy Jack rip-off Johnny Firecloud (1975) and Mean Dog Blues (1978), where she co-stars nude alongside Kay Lenz nude (the real-life Mrs. Keith Partridge) and Tina Louise nude (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island!).

From there, dive into Beth Shields’ hairy-snatch masturbation, future General Hospital (and Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio) star Monica Gayle performing naked yoga, Janet Wass doing a dude, and Katrina Frank doing a chick and just gawk, slack-jawed, at the creamy dream-balloons that emerge from their shirts.

My personal favorite Stew is elfin blonde Patricia Fein, whose tiny ta-ta’s are topped by two of the puffiest, deep-pink nerples ever photographed. And even though muff-maniac McBeardo normally prefers a wildly untamed pubic thatch, Patricia’s shaved-bare labia circa ’69 -- and especially when surrounded by the otherwise uniformly lap-fro’d cast -- exudes a sense of deviant daring that only compounds her mightily miniscule milk-spigots.

On top of all this toplessness (and bottomlessness and everyhinglessness), The Stewardesses also boasts a psychedelic acid trip that climaxes like a particularly rich ABC After School Special.

And, again, in 3-D.

The sight you lose and the optic nerves you cripple must be measured against the sperm you kill.

Using that criterion, The Stewardesses is worth earning blindness-wings for.