JOURNEY INTO THE THIRD DIMENSION

Mentioning View-Master 3D slides the other day set me thinking about the toy that was so much a part of my '50s/'60s childhood and, in particular, those recreated scenes from Disney animated features that I loved almost as much as the films themselves...

Of course, that probably seems rather childish, but it should be remembered that we are talking about a time that was not only before DVDs, but before videos!

As a Disney-nerd, I could only see the studio's classics when they were re-released at the cinema (at roughly seven years intervals) or when clips were occasionally screened on TV (in black and white) on compilations shows.

Being obsessed, I collected books and records that had still photographs from the films and - once I'd discovered shops that sold them - sets of the advertising lobby cards that used to be displayed outside cinema marques.


The View-Master slides were the next best thing - and, in a way, better even than stills from the films because they were in 3D!


The story of View-Master is a fascinating one dating back to it's launch at the 1939 as a souvenir of the New York World's Fair and, quaint though it now seems, there really was a time when seeing a 3D image of a giraffe on the African veldt projected onto your living room wall was quite a thing...

Click on image to enlarge

I yearned for - but never had - one of View-Master's 'Give-a-Show Projectors', [and, as you'll see from the comments below, they weren't called 'Give-a-Show' (they were something else) and they didn't actually project in 3D], but I did spend a lot of time viewing my Disney movie slides and those of Disneyland: the Californian Never Never Land that, at the time, I could only ever dream of visiting...


Just like being there...

Well, no, not quite! After all, none of us would have taken a photo of the castle with the spires chopped off and the scene generally cluttered up with an ice-cream cart and a load of bloody tourists!

However, the addition of Disney titles to the range of slides undoubtedly helped popularise View-Master by widening the repertoire of subjects from the instructional and educational to pure entertainment. And where Disney led, others followed and there were soon numerous popular sets featuring most of the top TV shows (The Munsters, Flipper, Batman and so on) as well as other cartoon characters such as Yogi Bear and The Flintstones...


And yes, I did buy The Flintstones set (well, it had dinosaurs in it, didn't it?) although it was chiefly the Disney sets that made a monthly dent in my pocket-money.

Some, like Jungle Book (left) accompanied newly-released movies, others were based on the back-catalogue of Disney classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, and Peter Pan.

But, as a Disney completist they all had to be collected!

These are just a few of my favourite slides...








What was so remarkable about these slides based on animated films and TV series was that the selected scenes were built as models based on stills from the originals and then photographed with 3D cameras.



Much of the art work in the early years was by and Florence Thomas, whose models were carefully hand sculpted and painted and who appeared on many TV shows in response to public interest in View-Master.

Here she is working on a scene from Walt Disney's 1963 film, The Sword in the Stone....


The attention to detail is exceptional - the books and paraphernalia cluttering Merlin's cottage, the miniature tea-things and the fact that Wart is in mid-fall from the hole in the thatch to a chair at the tea-table!

Florence Thomas' assistant was Joe Liptak who went on to be one of the best View-Master artists, creating the models for most of the the Disney sets. Here he is posing with one of his scenes from the 1953 feature Peter Pan which - like a lot of scenes from that film - included flying effects...


And here is Joe again, some years later, constructing a set based on a scene from the animated version of Robin Hood with the leonine Prince John and his sibilant, serpentine sidekick, Sir Hiss. One gets an idea from this photo of how much work went into creating just one of the twenty-one slides from a particular set...


And here's the finished scene (revealing that the above photo has, in fact, been flipped!) courtesy of Tim Hodge of Bald Melon who left a comment and link below...


There are a couple more View-Master slides (this time from Jungle Book) on a post blogged by Tim last year along with the following instructions on how to see them in 3D without the aid of a viewer...

"To view them in stereo, you will have to use the 'cross-eyed' method. That is, cross your eyes until you can see three images instead of just two. Then the center image should pop out in 3D. It takes some practice if you've never done it before."

Thanks, Tim! I got it! What's more it works on those earlier Disneyland castle photos!

So, there you have my unashamed paean to View-Masters! Of course, like all nostalgia items, the appeal of the View-Master slides is less to do with what they are than what they were --- once upon a time...

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Apart from using Tim's cross-eyed system you can get a sense of how good (or not!) the View-Master 3D effect was by visiting What My Dad Saw: scroll down to 'Labels' on the right-hand side-bar and click on 'View Master' which will allow you to view Batman and Flintstones slides --- with movement effect!

And you can find out lots more information about all kinds of 3D from the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon, which city was, for many years, the home of View-Master.

Images: 'Ode to View-Master' (top left) by iloyd; Captain Hook and Tink slide from Kerry Callen's Blog; Flintstones slide from What My Dad Saw; all other slides from various contributors to flickr