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Earthquake!

S

sharkeeper

Lifer
I know most people here probably don't remember 1974 so please bear with me. 🙂

If you watch this movie on DVD, you probably will wonder what all the fuss was about! Well when it came out on DVD I snagged it up just to see if the transfer would've included the Sensurround information routed to the LFE channel. It did not and I was most disappointed.

So what is Sensurround? Taken from here:

Sensurround Horror Stories
..the projectionist consumed a lot more alcohol on the job than normal to try and numb his headaches from the constant rumble and vibration in the booth!

I took my girlfriend to see "Earthquake" and she complained about a sick stomach! We were in the balcony and it felt like it was a roller coaster at times.

When The Branmar Theater in Wilmington, DE, which had shown all the Sensurround films closed in the late 80's, you could still see the cracks in the ceiling from the process!

In Billings, Mont. they opened ?Earthquake?. A knickknack/china shop occupied one of the storefronts. Needless to say, the morning after the opening all the wall-mounted breakables were in pieces on the floor. For the rest of the run, that store had to take down all of their wall displays every night and put'em back up the next day!

I received an e-mail last night from a gentleman in England who's wife got a nose bleed watching "Earthquake" in Sensurround!

Ceiling tiles would vibrate loose and fall on the audience, giving the true earthquake effect. On "Battle of Midway", I walked inside on one of the rear beasts [speakers], and it was vicious.

The owner of a cinema in Luxembourg thought that the number of subwoofers proposed by the installer wasn't enough so he doubled it. Result was that the first time they played ?Earthquake? the hotel next to the theatre was evacuated because people were convinced a real earthquake was happening

At the Fairlawn during the presentation of "Rollercoaster", it was found that in either theatre, the Sensurround noise would intrude into the sound of the other theatre. The only option was to run the picture simultaneously in both houses.

There were, of course, numerous tales associated with the running of this print (?Battlestar Galactica?), such as the elderly lady who lived behind the Fairlawn, complaining to the Toronto Transit Commission that they were running their subways especially loud at 8:00.

UA Fox Theatre in Hackensack, NJ. The theatre was an old 1800 seat Egyption Art Deco with an awesome balcony. Sensurround presentations ended when part of the plaster ceiling came crashing down during a showing of ?Rollercoaster?. Nobody was hurt, but the fact that 10 seats got crushed spooked the management.

At the Penn Centre in St Catherines Ontario the effect was so powerful the booth floor separated from its slab and sank 2 inches

At the Elaine theatre the shockwaves killed all the goldfish in the pet shop at the other end of the mall. One of the most interesting aspects of the Sensurround "experience" was watching the crowd reaction. I saw a couple people get up and run out of the theater in fear! Really! The down side was going to a movie in a auditorium next door.
Click to expand...

Now I did get to experience this in one of these theatres and let me tell you that the above claims are 100% correct. When the trembling started, images on the screen appeared to lean back and forth because the acoustic wavefronts would move you. The excursion was incredible. I have a good HT LFE setup that is capable of 140 dB at 10 Hz and have yet to produce this effect! It could be content related however I did get a lot of the blurriness/nauseating sensation from playing a splendid recording of Space Shuttle Atlantis through the system. It was rudely interrupted when a shelf holding my nearly 8000 dvd's and cd's decided to take a dump and my wife said not to do that again.

I just wish the movies themselves had the content. If Earthquake on DVD had the LFE as strong as the original motion picture, this would be the best movie to show off those of us who have HT's with 180 kW subwoofer systems.
 
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