Day 197: View-Master Spider

Before Ipods...wait, go back. Before DVDs...wait, even further. Before VHS...are you kidding me? Go way, WAY back. Back to when you listened to stories on a record player and probably read great adventures more than you watched them. Back to when Wizard of Oz was on TV once a year and it was a family event with buttered popcorn. Back when you had to get up off the couch to turn the channel. Yeah, right about there. That's when View-Master was in its prime. Let me give you a brief history (the good parts) of View-Master from our good friends at Wikipedia. The View-Master we know today--that is, the basic design we're used to--was introduced at the 1939 NY World Fair as an alternative to postcards. In the 1940s, the U.S. military saw its potential for personnel training and purchased 100,000 viewers and nearly 6 million disks from 1942 to the end of WWII in 1945. In 1951, the owner of View-Master bought out its competitor, Tru-Vue, and thus obtained licensing rights to Walt Disney Studios. Fifteen years later, View-Master began producing disks that featured child-friendly subjects, like popular TV shows of the time, and little else has changed since then other than companies merging, etc., etc.

When I was a kid, we had a View-Master projector that would get so hot you thought the whole contraption was going to melt and start the house on fire, and for a time, I think View-Master (or a competing company) came out with film cartridges that fit into a toy with a handle that you would turn to watch the movie (with no sound, of course). For kids during this era and during the advent of View-Master as a toy, this was as close as you came to seeing a movie without actually going to one. Pretty much. And even though it's more difficult to find good View-Master reels for the kiddies today (that's if they'd actually WANT to look at a View-Master), I'm still in awe when I put the View-Master up to my eyes and see such a teeny tiny picture in bigger-than-life quality. Fireworks, the Grand Canyon, even Bert and Mary on the rooftops of London--they all remind me of how we can be in awe of something so simple and technologically archaic. The View-Master reel I used for this spider is from Cinderella. Josie decided it would be fun to start cutting it up; it's okay, I did that with a few back in my day to see what they'd look like when taken apart. If you look at the picture closely, you can see the evil Lady Tremaine, in her non-3D glory.

Materials: View-Master reel section, foil tape, metal gear finding, black and silver bugle beads, silver and orange seed beads, silver wire