Thursday, March 5, 2009

View-Master R.I.P.

Another of my childhood memories going down the tubes! The View-Master, a source of hours of educational fun for me as a child, is about to stop production. My favorite View-Master reels were of two types: the childrens' stories and fairy tales that were done in a kind of early form of "claymation" which to my childhood mind were miracles of 3-D, and those travel reels which showed pictures of places I'd visited on road trips with my parents. I still have a bunch of them somewhere, as well as a very old View-Master viewer, from when they were all black and much heavier than the later, more colorful models.

My daughter had a View-Master and enjoyed it when she was a kid too, so at least their charms lasted through a couple of generations. But I guess there was absolutely no way that the View-Master could possibly compete with sophisticated video games and hand-held picture viewers. Sad. Here's a pretty good article about the demise of the beloved View-Master. http://tinyurl.com/cz6p6v

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is SO wrong.

I don't know if my mom still has it, but we used to have a View-Master reel of Winnie the Pooh and the honey tree. It scared the hell out of me when I was little. Now, I think I'm sort of vaguely jealous of Pooh, who got stuck headfirst in a beehive and got an up-close look at the comb and its inhabitants. :)

Beth said...

Oh, I LOVED the View-Master! It was so cool to see pictures in 3-D. I'm sorry to hear of its demise. :(

Hugs, Beth

Ace Jackalope said...

Noooo!

I still have my Batman View-Master reels and a few others. I always wondered how the shooting of a TV episode went when they were also shooting for View-Master.