Viewmaster Ads, 1958 & 1960

[thedabara-cds.livejournal.com]

When I was a kindergartener, I LOVED these!!

Comments

[pronker]

Oh these were fun! Made of sturdy bakelite that blocked the outside world while we went 3D into adventures ... I still have one lonely reel, found when cleaning out Mom's home 2 years back.

[bradygirl_12]

I loved these! My sister and I had several sets and would swap them. Even Mom and Dad looked at them. The 3-D effect was really cool. :)

[hutchlover.livejournal.com]

Me too!  I had the Minnie Mouse , then graduated to the plain red one.

I think we had most of the Disney slides they produced.

Our toys were so much more fun then what my kids had, I think.

[bradygirl_12]

A lot of our toys required imagination. They were very simple and only a kid could make something of 'em in some cases! I do think the Internet comes in a 'finished' mode so that kids don't have to work as hard to get anything out of it, if that makes sense. :)

My toys tended to be books, comics, skates, balls, bike, and pedal car (we sold that for some nice change a few years ago). My sister and I had dolls, including Barbie, dollhouses, tea sets, and a bowling set with plastic Yogi Bears as the bowling pins. ;)

During the summer, we watched the local kiddie show (Major Mudd!) while eating breakfast but were outside the rest of the day, even eating lunch outside. Any other TV shows were just before bedtime when it was too dark outside to play. We had no time to sit in front of our childhood's equivalent of a computer screen! We were too busy having fun! :)

[hutchlover.livejournal.com]

Your assessment makes a lot of sense. The only time I recall my kids really using their imagination was playing n the snow and with their Barbie's and Thomas Train & Lego sets.

Spirograph, un-setted Legos, Barbies, board games, bikes & roller skates, Light Bright, Etch A Sketch = all these makes our brains work. I would still play with Light Bright today, I loved that so much.

[bradygirl_12]

Board games! We had Monopoly, Candy Land, Risk, Clue, and other games like Operation and Silly Skier. :) My sister's favorite when she was very little was a game where you used an attached magnet to move a bumblebee along an obstacle course. It was so cute! :)

Etch-A-Sketch was fun, and we had re-usable pads where you wrote or drew on it with the plastic pencil and then pulled up the plastic and it would disappear and you could start fresh.

Colorforms was inspired by Romper Room, I think (we also had the punch balls, police cars and stick horses). My sister and I had Wendy the Weather Girl! :)

Paper dolls were always fun. We had the bought kind and my mom cut out the original ones BunnyGirl and I made.

In the summer we'd take our Barbie dolls outside and set them up on the tree seat for club meetings, and then have a pool party, using Tubsy's tub (a doll made for bathing), though we pretended it was filled with water because water + Barbie dolls don't mix. :) We would have the dolls prepare food and we'd have adventures, mysteries like we read in Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books. My mother always told the tale of washing the dishes at the kitchen sink and seeing dolls fly through the air as they dived into the pool. ;)

We were child fans because we had sketchpads and drew our own General Hospital stories (We loved the nurses' caps. Alas, they are no more).

[hutchlover.livejournal.com]

I loved Trixie Belden!

She was so much more "hip" than 'Nancy Drew.

[bradygirl_12]

Trixie could be cranky, hated housework, and got into trouble. I loved her! Nancy was too perfect! :)

[carma-bee.livejournal.com]

my sister and i had a mickey mouse viewmaster when we we kids, with a container full of reels, i loved it! still have it, can't see myself letting it go

The word of the day is, “eBay”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

- which is where I picked up a 1948 Sawyer viewer of Bakelite, as seen above.  I still had my own 1960s standard GAF viewer.  Weirdly, View-Master and reels are still made and sold, and recently I bought a modern-day viewer at Wal Mart.

What makes that fun is something they don't hesitate to tell you - the design of the discs has never changed.  I can slot my Star Wars “Clone Wars” discs into my 1948 Sawyer or “Scenic Mexico” discs into my Wal Mart viewer as I please with no problem.

Little things amuse little minds…  but that IS rather unusual.

[christhawk.livejournal.com]

I didn't remember how old my Viewmaster was until seeing these ads. I inherited my dad's and all his discs from the 1950s, and on looking it up, I'm pretty sure it was a Model C. The C had ridges on the eyepiece, and I can still remember how they felt different than my cousin's 1980s red Disney version. The slides last a long time - they were only slightly faded when my sister and I had them. We had a pretty big collection, but the ones I remember best are the ones my dad got as a souvenir on their trip to Disneyland sometime in the late '50s. I may have never actually been to a Disney park, but I know the one from then very well!

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

Although I was born in the 60s, I never had a ViewMaster; I never knew it at the time, but I've never been able to merge images. Therefore the 3D effect was lost on me.

I had my first eye surgery in 1965, to correct strabismus. Although I wore an eye patch for amblyopia [lazy eye] I never had any doctor diagnose my lack of binocular vision; I still don't know how common it is, but I would figure it isn't just one-eyed people who have it. (BTW, I have two working eyes.)

[progbear.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea ViewMasters™ once had so many accessories! Cool! My cousins had a Talking ViewMaster™, but the “talking” part (an acetate record which attached to the outside of the reel) didn’t work.

I remember the reels they did for 2-D cartoons like Peanuts and the Flintstones, which were effected via specially-made 3-D dioramas. These were always a bit unsettling.

[thedabara-cds.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the accessories are cool! Even now I'd love to get my hands on one of those 3-D projectors and a few pairs of glasses, but I can't imagine it sold that well at $120! And that's 1960's bucks!

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

Yow! I never knew there were actually accessories for Viewmasters. I remember having one when I was a kid. It was a plain ol red one from the late 60's or early 70's. I don't know what ever became of it or the various disks we had.
I kind of miss those old, simple toys.