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This is more for fun than anything else, but sometimes I just look at visual effects today and think to myslef "I wonder how audiences in the 30's, 40's and 50's would react to todays effects?"

I can just imagine reactions if you showed Jurassic Park in a theater in those era's, people would probably either keel over from fright or go running out of the theater Blob style.

I can see it now, news papers would be running headlines that real Dinosaurs exist somewhere and this Speilberg fellow found them and made a movie with them LOL.

My favorite scenario to imagine is taking Titanic back in time to, say, 1913 and showing it to an audience and maybe even some willing survivors of the disaster...on second thought, maybe not them.

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Greg_S_H

I don't know about showing them a modern movie, but I have thought how great it would be to be able to go back in time with this technology in tow and introduce it by releasing "revolutionary" new movies. Picture the pod race exactly as it appears in TPM in a Buck Rogers serial. Or, hell, the ultimate fantasy: Star Wars introduced in the '30s! Same great story, same great technology, but with '30s actors! That reminds me of the Far Side where the time traveller drops a Coke bottle millions of years in the past and says something like, "Let them figure that one out!" How different would cinema be today if the motion control camera and other '70s breakthroughs were introduced fourty years earlier?

Shawn_KE

Or how shocked some would be at some of the movie. Say Devils Rejects, show that to a 1930's crowd.

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StephenA

I think it'd be even more fun to show people back in the early 1900s movies of today, especially since they didn't have movies with around back then.

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Leo Kerr

I've a friend who'd rather drop Top Gun into, say, the 30's.

Maybe even the mid to late 40's.

Why? Because in some of the scenes, as the airplanes are doing steep maneuvers, you see 'instant-cloud' forming on the top side of the wings.

It's likely scientists would say, "that's impossible. In order for that to happen, you'd need to have..." all sorts of parameters that would be impossible for all known flight at the time (speed, air dynamics, et cetera, yielding flight dynamics that would rip even the best 'modern' airplane to shreds instantly.)

Yet it isn't even a special effect!

Leo

Stephen Orr

If you know your film history, there were folks who thought the dinos were real in the original "Lost World", animated by Willis Obrien.

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Garrett Lundy

Nah, they'd just complain that Spielberg's War Of The Worlds wasn't a 100% faithful adaption of the original radio broadcast, which would probably result in some new form of Hollywood blacklisting, and then you'd ruin the future for everyone!

But yeah, the dinosaurs would probably cause a few heart attacks.

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nickGreenwood

Maybe if they had the technology, Tolkien would've more than approved of the LotR films.
Maybe some of the high def cameras Lucas and Rodriguez are using now. Heck I want one of those, but I don't a hundred grand to spend...

Actually, show them Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and see what they think.

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Dave Poehlman

Interesting topic... the line between what's real and what's fake on-screen has become pretty blurred. In fact, I don't find myself asking "how'd they do that" anymore and just write things off as CGI.. which, I must admit has taken some of the magic out of movie watching for me.

There's something to be said for watching a stuntperson risk their life being thrown through the air for a 3 second scene. There's a level of excitement there. Now wires are CGI'ed over and actual actors can fly through the air with little or no danger.

I'm not saying I don't like CGI effects.. I'm just saying, I don't find special effects that "special" anymore.

As for what people from the past would think... they'd freak... until they knew how it was done.