A mystery solved; a quest begins

A friend was over a while ago, and for some reason we started talking about those weird old 3d-ish pictures that were prevalent when we were kids. Neither of us had seen any in so long that they were kind of fuzzy in our memories. We remembered them as plastic-coated strange scenes that may or may not have been photographs.

As someone who is greatly enamoured of eBay, I felt certain that we could find some on there, but what were they called? Since a search for a "plastic-coated strange scene that may or may not be a photograph" was unlikely to bring up an auction for what we were seeking, I tried to google to discover their actual name. Unfortunately, there were too many other 3-d technologies hampering my search, and I soon gave up.

Then, yesterday, I was on eBay looking for something ENTIRELY unrelated, and I stumbled across one of them! It was ugly, but it gave me some more search terms to use. Not only was I able to find out their name, but I was able to purchase a couple postcard-sized ones that I really like from a seller in Bulgaria! This lovely little gal will be on her way to me shortly:

Quite dreadful and fabulous all at the same time, no?

They're called lentographs or lenticular photographs. Photographs of a scene are taken from several different angles, the pictures are chopped into verticle strips and intermixed to form a single image, then a sheet of plastic that's made up of lots of verticle prisms is laid on top of it for the 3d effect.

I had one of Little Red Riding Hood in my room when I was little. I loved it, and I remember spending a lot of time staring at it, moving back and forth trying to see behind the figures. I found one on eBay that's just like the one I used to have - turns out it's really quite creepy:

To be honest, though, that just made me want it all the more.

Unfortunately I missed the end of the auction (plus it went for over $30 if you include the shipping, which is more than I wanted to spend). Oh well, at least I have a chance of tracking one down now that I've increased my vocabulary.