Retro coolness.
A few weeks ago I ordered a View-Master from Amazon for my little brother Joey’s birthday. I was lamenting to the Snook that nowadays you only seem to be able to buy the “themed” View-Masters, like Winnie-the-Pooh and Finding Nemo, and they only come with a few disks each. (I ended up buying some old disks of Disneyland and fairy tales off eBay.) Anyway, the Snook suddenly goes, “Hey, did you ever have a Talking View-Master?” I’m like, “Whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis?” I’d never heard of such a thing. He claimed to have a View-Master that took special disks with little records attached to them and the viewer would actually play the sounds as you watched the scenes. Wha?? I was skeptical. He kept imitating the voice of his Spider-Man disks, walking around for days going “The Amazing Spider-Man!” in a nerdy American accent. So, since his Mom happened to be coming down this week – and since the Snook family are notorious packrats that never throw anything away – he had her bring it over tonight. It actually exists! The sound doesn’t work yet but the viewing mechanism still seems pretty good. He’s got a canister with about fifty old disks in it too, like Disney stories and Star Trek and “Wonders of Asia” and Aesop’s fables. I have been having a total View-Master nostalgia trip. Some of them are live-action and some are cartoon, but most are those weird diorama-type things where the characters are little dolls set up in three-dimensional space. It’s so weird playing with one of these again, like falling through a time warp. We’re going to crack it open and clean it up and see if we can’t get the old record player working again…