For a brief and silly stretch of the early 1980s, the movies threw themselves at you. You sat in a packed theater in cardboard glasses, and things leapt off the screen and into your lap.

Spears. Snakes. Flaming arrows. Jaws did it. Friday the 13th did it. Amityville did it.

And it all traces back to one film few expected to matter. COMIN' AT YA! (1981) was a spaghetti western shot in the Spanish desert, dressed up as the American frontier. It quickly made its two and a half million dollar budget back and ultimately took in about twelve million in the United States.

Its distributor, Filmways Pictures, had only ordered 90,000 pairs of 3D glasses for a limited two-city launch. Because demand exploded instantly - likened at the time to "Star Wars business" - Filmways had to rush-order 5 million more pairs of glasses.

Studios noticed. By the end of the next year the trade papers counted sixty 3D projects in the works.

Tony Anthony wrote, produced, and starred in it, and to secure a wide release he designed a cheap 3D projection lens himself. Long after the 3D boom collapsed, Anthony was still refining optics, and he turned that obsession into a company building equipment for eye surgeons.

And as I type this out I realize the man's name is Anthony Anthony.