The Rolling Stones' trivia - Their Satanic Majesties Request 3D

... not the most perfect of The Rolling Stones' albums, yet its 3D cover made it an instant sought-after collector item.

After recently getting a 19 cm/s pre-recorded original tape on a 18 cm diam. plastic reel, whose box sports the VERY same 3D lenticular plastic gimmick as the vinyl 1st pressing in my possession.

Strange, I told myself...

I checked Wikipedia on the matter and found this:

"The original cover design called for the lenticular image to take up the entire front cover,^[20] but finding this to be prohibitively expensive it was decided to reduce the size of the photo and surround it with the blue-and-white graphic design."

Put side-by-side, the tape and the vinyl plaque are the very same, so, apparently Decca/London spent an arm and a leg for this 3D plaque and decided to do not go over-budget using the same size on the 30 cm sized cover and making a clouds/sky frame to fix the 3D smallish size.

Tapes were quite expensive in the hey days also if not as expensive as they are now... this very pre-recorded tape is fetching USD 200+ price-tags... the reel to reel sold poorly, so when they weren't more in demand, out of stock, deleted, etc. Decca possibly stopped to make the 3Ds and the 2nd vinyl disc reissues had the color cover-art replaced by a cheaper pix of the 3D itself.

Such an innocent satisfaction sort-of correcting the always great, useful and supportive Wikipedia.

Yeah!