In Hollywood’s somewhat frantic search during the 1950s to find ways to best television’s increasing appeal, various different cinematic visual innovations were introduced–3D and Cinemascope being the most famous. But there were others that were actually superior to those innovations yet not fully utilized to their best advantage. One of them was the ‘Technirama’ and ‘Super Technirama’ process in which the film was run horizontally through the camera instead of vertically, creating a larger, higher resolution film frame. On top of this, an anamorphic lens optics compressed the image horizontally to facilitate even wider compositions. Technirama’s improved image quality heralded a more expansive cinema experience, enabling the production of historical epics such as ‘Spartacus’ and ‘El Cid’ as well as films less epic but more enjoyable (in my opinion) as ‘The Music Man’, ‘The Leopard’ and ‘The Pink Panther’. Unfortunately, for reasons you’ll discover when you watch the nifty little (four minutes) doc about the process, theaters rarely projected the film using the process properly. Nonetheless, the image resolution was superior enough to allow the Technirama cameras to be used into the 1990s. The only thing more astonishing than that is that 3D actually made a comeback in the decade after that…