Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Did Vikings Really Wear Horned Helmets?

It's a great question, and one we were ready to investigate. It turns out we didn't have to: A detailed account of Viking haberdashery appeared on the Web back in 2004, under the aegis of the Explainer's arch-nemesis, Cecil Adams. That article from the Straight Dope certainly merits reading in full, but here's a summary for anyone who's pressed for time:

No, Vikings did not wear horned helmets. According to TSD, "contemporary Viking era artwork shows roughly half of Vikings in battle bareheaded, while the rest wear unremarkable dome-shaped or conical helmets." The idea that Nordic invaders of the ninth and 10^th centuries wore headgear festooned with ox horns developed a thousand years after the fact, when a Swedish artist illustrated them as such for a poem based on an old, Icelandic saga.

Helmets with horns or wings do seem to have been used for ceremonial purposes by Germanic and Celtic people in the centuries before the Viking Age. Thus the horned headgear in early stagings of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (based on a Celtic legend) or the winged hats worn by his Valkyries. But there's no reason to think the Vikings themselves indulged in the practice.

Will the Masters in 3-D Turn Me Into a Golf Fan?

This year's Masters is undeniably about Tiger Woods' return to tournament play. In the meantime, another milestone has gone relatively unnoticed: ESPN's 3-D telecast of the Masters is "the first live national next-generation 3-D broadcast of a major sporting event on TV." Yesterday, ESPN and Time Warner Cable held a promotional gathering to show off the 3-D greens and fairways. (You'll be able to watch at home if your cable provider offers the dedicated 3-D channel and you have a 3-D enabled television set. So, basically you won't be able to watch at home.) I traveled to a swanky, improvised lounge in the heart of Manhattan's Time Warner Center (scenically located right in front of Borders) to see whether viewing golf in three dimensions would make me into a fan.


The verdict? 3-D TV is undeniably cool. The novelty of seeing Augusta National's green hills pop out against smooth ponds didn't wear off over the hour or so I spent watching the tournament. Even so, it's a little disorienting to watch 3-D programming on a nonmovie-theater-sized screen. I agree with Slate's Justin Peters that the experience was more like watching a "living diorama" than it was wholly immersive. Any time I started to get truly absorbed in the 3-D, I'd notice the area outside the screen and the effect would be partially ruined.

Alexander Dudley, vice president of public relations for Time Warner, told me that a lot of people at the company think golf is better suited for 3-D than many other sports—football, for example. "Someone said that the natural light of the outdoors enhances it," he explained. "There's a lot of panoramic shots, there's a lot of undulations in the landscape, there's water, there's trees. There's a lot of opportunity to create the 3-D imagery."

There's certainly some truth to those claims; the landscape of a golf course does look pretty great in 3-D. Yet because balls aren't flying directly at the screen and players aren't waving their clubs at the camera, the 3-D aspect doesn't fundamentally change the experience of watching golf on television. I wasn't very interested in golf before I saw the Masters in 3-D, and after seeing it, I still haven't been struck by an urge to follow the tournament.

Putting nuts might herald the advent of 3-D technology as a major step forward. But for laypeople like me, this gimmick isn't enough to make golf fun. We'll continue getting our Tiger news from the usual sources: the tabloids.

How Is Avatar Not an Animated Film?

Among the nonstories coming out of this year's Oscar nominations is the fact that Pixar's Up has become the first film ever to be picked for both the best picture and best animated feature lineups. (That's not such an impressive feat when you consider that the latter category has only been around since 2001.) Somewhat more interesting is the fact that Up is only the second animated film to receive a best picture nomination, after Disney's Beauty and the Beast in 1991. An animated movie has been the highest-grossing film of the year at least a dozen times since the academy started handing out its awards. Yet no other cartoon—Disney, Pixar or otherwise—has ever had a shot at winning best picture.

Unless you count Avatar.

According to a Hollywood Reporter article from 2008, the film (then in production) was slated to end up 60 percent computer graphics, with plenty of special effects and animated backgrounds in the "live action" shots. For comparison, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—generally considered to be an animated film—consisted mostly of live scenes and backgrounds with animated characters drawn in. So why wasn't James Cameron's CGI-soaked epic also nominated for best animated feature? 

In a smart analysis of this question posted to RopeOfSilicon.com, Brad Brevet reviews the academy rules on what makes for an animated feature film: "A significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture's running time."

If you trust that Hollywood Reporter number from 2008—and ignore all the CGI backgrounds and special effects in Cameron's live-action shots—then Avatar would fail the 75 percent test.  But so would another film that was on the shortlist of possible nominees: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. As Brevet points out, only six of that film's characters were animated: Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and their female rivals, The Chipettes.

Avatar may not have a chance at winning best animated feature, but Brevet reminds us that it's all but guaranteed the Oscar for best visual effects. "Why is the CG in Avatar considered visual effects," he asks, "while the CG employed for a Pixar or DreamWorks film [is] simply considered animation?" 

Avatar = "Apocalypto" + George Lucas

More than 100,000 people were expected at IMAX movie theaters Friday night for "Avatar Day," a 16-minute sneak preview of James Cameron's science-fiction epic. In what the New York Times called an "audacious marketing ploy," 20^th Century Fox made an extended trailer for the film—which is due to be released in December—into a major theatrical event with ticketed showings on more than 100 screens. Yet despite all the hype (and all the hype about the hype), the screening I attended in midtown Manhattan was only one-third full.

It's too bad; I would have liked to see how the footage played to a crowd. The smattering of viewers at the AMC Empire theater watched in near-silence as the CGI-heavy, three-dimensional action sequences played on an enormous screen. No doubt some were put off by the movie's cornball heroes. As I watched a tribe of blue-skinned cat people wearing loincloths and glitter makeup wrestle their way through an enchanted forest of savage beasts and glowing jellyfish, I couldn't help but wonder whether this is what Apocalypto might have looked like had it been directed by George Lucas.

Much of the ballyhoo for Avatar has focused on Cameron's supposedly groundbreaking technical innovations, which may account for the film's estimated $240 million budget. (In March, a writer for Time wondered whether the revolutionary special effects might "be the thing that forces the theaters to convert to digital.") Here's what I can tell you based on the trailer: The 3-D effects do look pretty darn good—they're easy on the eyes and do a wonderful job of immersing the viewer in the film's alien-jungle psychedelia. My only complaint is that some of the off-planet scenes suffer from a rather pronounced dollhouse effect, with the real-life sets and human actors appearing weirdly small.

I'm less sanguine about the computer graphics. The scenes shown Friday were almost exclusively CGI: animated feline humanoids doing animated flips as they hurled animated spears at animated dinosaurs. I'm sure the algorithms used to construct these battles were as sophisticated as any in the history of filmmaking—but everything still looked a little off to me. The movements were too smooth and slippery, like Yoda's cartoonish acrobatics from Star Wars. For all Cameron's technical wizardry, the digital characters in Avatar remain lodged somewhere on the far slope of the uncanny valley.

Will the 3-D Revival Go the Way of Pixar's Up?

The 3-D revival appears to be a success. With $68 million in receipts over its first weekend, Pixar's Up may become the highest-grossing 3-D film of all time. Only 11 3-D movies have ever pulled in more than $50 million over their entire runs-and five of them have come out since last fall.

The 3-D boom interests me for two reasons: First, because I've been a fan of the medium since I was a little kid; and second, because of a prediction I made in April that may soon turn out to be deeply embarrassing. In an article entitled "The Problem With 3-D: It hurts your eyes. Always has, always will," I declared that the 3-D bubble would soon burst because problems with stereo cinema technology had not been fixed. "Eventually, inevitably, perhaps unconsciously," I wrote, the eye strain 3-D movies cause will "creep off the screen and into our minds."

It may be time to start hedging my bets. I still think the future is dim for live-action 3-D movies, and I don't believe Jeffrey Katzenberg's claim that everything will soon be produced in stereo. But I now believe the revival could find lasting success ... in children's movies. Here are three possible reasons why:

1. Kids are too young to remember Jaws 3-D.
One of the problems facing the marketers of 3-D cinema is the medium's sketchy past. The last wave of 3-D films in the early 1980s comprised a run of dreadful horror and sci-fi flicks, from Friday the 13^th, Part III to Metalstorm. Hollywood has been aggressive in targeting youngsters this go-round, perhaps because kids are an audience that hasn't been tainted by 3-D's unsavory past. At least seven more animated 3-D children's movies are scheduled for release this year.

2. The 3-D effects are better in animated films.
It takes a lot figuring to get the cinematography right in a live-action 3-D film. For one thing, you have to decide how far apart to place the two cameras during shooting. (In general, the further apart they are, the more intense the illusion of depth, and the more eyestrain for viewers.) But the makers of an animated film have full control of the frame, since every pixel is generated by a computer. It may be easier to correct for imperfections in the stereo effect in computer-generated imagery—and that would in turn lead to a cleaner, more comfortable experience for viewers.

3. Kids may be less susceptible to eyestrain.
No one knows exactly why 3-D movies cause headaches, fatigue, and nausea, but the most intuitive theory has to do with what's called the convergence-accommodation disparity. In short: In order to see the 3-D special effect, you have to point your eyes at the screen while you focus them at a depth somewhere in front of the screen.