New on DVD - "This Is Cinerama" and "Windjammer" - NYTimes.com THE commercial life span of Cinerama was relatively short, roughly from 1952 to 1962, although the trademark continued to be applied to a number of less dazzling wide-screen processes until 1974. But for those who have experienced the full grandeur of its folly - three strips of 35-millimeter film, projected side by side on a giant, curved screen that effectively took possession of the spectator's full range of peripheral vision - Cinerama endures as a transporting, almost mystical experience. Mounted in the front car of a Rockaways" Playland roller coaster, gliding slowly in a gondola down a Venetian canal or attached to a plane flying low through Zion Canyon in Utah, the Cinerama camera captured a vertiginous excess of detail that somehow seemed more real than reality. Cinerama has inspired a legion of passionate devotees, including Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who bought and restored the Martin Cinerama in Seattle, one of the few Cinerama theaters to survive with its curved screen intact. Today the Seattle Cinerama is one of three cinemas in the world where the original three-strip process can be presented. The others are the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, and the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. And now, thanks to another passionate Cineramaphile, David Strohmaier, you can add your living room to that list - or at least enjoy an evocative re-creation of the Cinerama experience on your HDTV. It was Mr. Strohmaier, a film editor by profession, who supervised the reconstruction of the 1962 Cinerama feature "How the West Was Won" for Warner Home Video four years ago. Now, with the help of some equally dedicated sound and image technicians, he has restored two more three-strip features: the seminal 1952 "This Is Cinerama" and "Windjammer," a 1958 film shot in a rival process (more on that below), for release through the independent label Flicker Alley. These discs may not have the pristine image quality of "How the West Was Won," but they represent a triumph of craft and dedication over original material in far more fragile condition, achieved without the benefit of major studio financing. Even the largest HDTV is no substitute for a 70-foot-wide screen, but even in miniaturized form, "This Is Cinerama" remains a magnificent piece of midcentury Americana - a seamless blend of idealism and hucksterism, poised between the concert hall and the carnival side show. The film opens with a brilliant piece of showmanship: an extended prologue, filmed in black-and-white and framed in the nearly square aspect ratio that was the standard for films at the time (a standard that Cinerama would play a central role in overturning). The celebrity newsman (and major Cinerama investor) Lowell Thomas offers the viewer a thumbnail history of Western art, quite seriously proposing Cinerama as the next step in a cultural evolution that began with cave paintings and passed through the Renaissance on its way to Thomas Edison and "The Great Train Robbery." And then, the curtains slowly pull back (a beautiful effect on the Blu-ray, using the actual screen of the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles) to reveal the full, enveloping range of the three-panel process, the curved screen recreated through the use of a matting process Mr. Strohmaier calls Smilebox. The audience is off on the most famous amusement park ride in film history, in what appears to be a single, unbroken take (in reality, two takes artfully blended), propelling the viewer over one complete, stomach-churning circuit of the Playland roller coaster, known as the Atom Smasher, long since demolished. The first act of "This Is Cinerama" is largely devoted to the landmarks of Europe, including a visit to La Scala in Milan, where the triumphal scene from "Aida" is presented in the powerful seven-channel stereo sound that was Cinerama's other technical marvel. But after the intermission the film becomes a delirious celebration of American exceptionalism, beginning with a visit to the pioneering Florida theme park Cypress Gardens, and culminating in a magisterial montage of aerial views, from Lower Manhattan to the Grand Canyon, accompanied by the inevitable Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing "America the Beautiful." The Soviets surely had nothing like this! There is no director's credit on "This Is Cinerama," but if the project has an auteur, it is most likely Merian C. Cooper, the film's credited co-producer (with Robert L. Bendick), whose long and fascinating career edged from serious documentaries ("Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life," 1925) into the technological innovation and unbridled showmanship of "King Kong" (1933). Cooper brought several of his "Kong" associates, including his co-director, Ernest B. Schoedsack, the composer Max Steiner (uncredited because of legal reasons) and the scenic artist Mario Larrinaga, along for the Cinerama ride. The film was an immediate huge hit, playing for over two years in its New York engagement and spawning specially refurbished (and some newly constructed) Cinerama theaters across the country. The success of Cinerama spawned several imitations, notably the Cinemiracle process (which used a different mounting system for its three cameras). The veteran documentary producer Louis de Rochemont (famous for his "March of Time" series in the "30s and "40s) used Cinemiracle to film "Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich," the record of a trans-Atlantic training exercise taken by a Norwegian high-masted sailing ship and its student crew. "Windjammer" could have used a bit more of Cooper's unabashed sensationalism. The film is mostly a straightforward travelogue, until the ship finally reaches New York Harbor and touches off a flurry of kaleidoscopic camerawork executed by the tabloid photographer Weegee. When the Cinemiracle company went under, Cinerama acquired its assets, and rereleased "Windjammer" as a Cinerama film in the "60s. The complex requirements of the three-projector system eventually doomed the original Cinerama process, and the company, beginning with Stanley Kramer's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963), shifted over to a single-strip, 70-millimeter format developed by Panavision. But by that point Cinerama's work was done. The system had imposed the wide-screen format that remains in broad use today (Fox's CinemaScope, which came along in 1953, was effectively a less complicated, less expensive version of Cinerama, using an optically squeezed image), and its old magic can still occasionally be felt in Imax theaters, when films like "The Dark Knight" and "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" open up to the giant format for certain sequences. Bigger doesn't mean better, but it always leaves an impression. Flicker Alley, Blu-ray/DVD combo editions, $39.95 each, not rated THE AVENGERS Directed by Joss Whedon, this film brings together a group of Marvel superheroes (including Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America and Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk) to battle Loki (Tom Hiddleston), a Norse god gone wild. With Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stellan Skarsgard. "The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre," A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in May. Disney, 3-D Blu-ray/Blu-ray/DVD combo $49.99, Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99, DVD $29.99, also available through Movies on Demand, PG-13 BOND 50: THE COMPLETE 22 FILM COLLECTION The complete canonical collection of James Bond movies, from "Dr. No" (1962) to "Quantum of Solace" (2008), issued in Blu-ray to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the franchise. The set includes nine films new to the high-def format. "It's not the mystery that entertains you, it's the things that happen along the way - the attempted kidnapping at the Jamaica airport, the tarantula dropped onto Bond's bed, the seduction of the Oriental beauty, the encounter with the beautiful, blond, bikini-clad Ursula Andress on the beach of Crab Key," Bosley Crowther wrote of "Dr. No" in The Times in 1963. MGM, Blu-ray $299.99, DVD $199.98, not rated EATING RAOUL Paul Bartel's 1982 black comedy stars him and his frequent screen partner Mary Woronov as a middle-class couple who pose as swingers to lure unsuspecting thrill seekers into their clutches. This is a Blu-ray upgrade for a film long available only as a notoriously bad DVD. The Criterion Collection, Blu-ray $39.95, DVD $29.95, R LONE WOLF AND CUB COMPLETE Many Western filmgoers encountered Japanese ultraviolence for the first time when a cut-and-dubbed amalgam of the first two films from this six-film series, retitled "Shogun Assassin," became a grind-house hit. Tomisaburo Wakayama stars as a masterless samurai roaming 18th-century Japan with his son, who travels in a booby-trapped baby cart. Now in a Blu-ray upgrade, with the scholarly annotations that are the trademark of the distributor, Animeigo. Animeigo, $59.98, not rated DAMSELS IN DISTRESS The writer-director Whit Stillman returns with his first feature since "The Last Days of Disco" (1998). Greta Gerwig, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Carrie MacLemore are Ivy League sorority sisters who show the ropes to a transfer student (Analeigh Tipton). Sony, Blu-ray $35.99, DVD $30.99, also available through Movies on Demand, PG-13