Peter invents non-annoying open captions

Published on June 28, 2005 By PJ_ In Movies & TV & Books

The other day I was reading an article on How Stuff Works about 3D glasses. The clear ones that don't screw up the colors work by using polarized light. One lense lets up-and-down polarized light through, and the other lense lets side-to-side polarized light through. That way they can show two different images on the screen, and each eye only sees one of them. That's how you get the 3D effect.

Then last night I started thinking about a conversation I had a few months ago, just before watching The Incredibles in Ingle auditorium. Some people, you might be aware, are annoyed by captions in movies. They're distracting and, unless the dialog is in another language or otherwise difficult to understand, they're redundant. But you can't just turn them off, because without them some people (the deaf and hard of hearing) would be completely unable to watch movies. The person i was talking to suggested special glasses with a black stripe across the bottom for people who didn't like captions, to block out the bottom few inches of the screen. i suggested that it would be better for someone to invent a way to put the captions on the screen so that only people with special glasses could read them. That way all theaters, everywhere, could put the captions on without bothering anybody, because the people who didn't want to read them wouldn't have to. That would be a good way for the NTID to spend its research money, because once something like that was invented they would be able to go into any movie theater in America with their special glasses and enjoy the show.

Well, they can take their crack team of scientists off the case, because I've solved the problem for them. Show the movie in up-and-down polarized light, and the captions in side-to-side polarized light. Watch the movie with your naked eye if you want to see the captions, and watch it with polarized glasses if you don't. Filter out all the captions and none of the movie. Sure, you'd have to replace all the movie projetors, but wouldn't it be nice to not feel like an asshole anymore for excluding people because you find the accomidations they need slightly annoying?

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