Who likes or collects View-Master stuff?

[Justin]

Anyone else here like or collect View-Master stuff? I always loved View-Master. What an interesting medium and such a pop-culture icon. I had the classic View-Master "toy" when I was little, I remember having a few Dumbo's Circus discs. When I was about 10 my grandfather let me look through his View-Master stuff from the 1950s and 1960s. This was definitely not a child's toy, it seemed expensive and felt more akin to a camera or photo equipment from that era. View-Master seems like one of those things that came close to the World of Atari but the two never quite connected.

 

 

[Atarileaf]

My older brother, who has since passed away, used to have a fairly large viewmaster collection. Stuff from the 60's and 70's mostly I believe. Now that I think about it, I don't know what happened to it after he died. Man those pictures bring back memories. I would think that some of those would be worth quite a bit. I'm not up on Viewmaster value but it would be a really fun hobby to get into.

[RickR]

I LOVE the View Master.  View Master was invented in my hometown of Portland, OR.  The factory that made them was here for most of my childhood. 

 

Here is a picture of my meager collection.  I have about 50 reels.  The old viewer is long gone, but I kept the one we bought when my kids were young.  Mid 1990's.  You guys are right that the older viewers were really special.  They were heavy and had glass lenses and metal cases.  I have no idea what happened to ours.  The modern ones work well, but feel cheap. 

My favorite reels are the "travel" ones (example:  Yellowstone, Crater Lake, etc).  They really capture landscapes of things that in many cases no longer exist.  The other really cool ones are the ones where they made and photographed little 3D vignettes.  A lot of the old Disney ones (Snow White, Pinoochio) were done this way, and those ones have a "Rankin / Bass" style of art and a 3D effect to them.

 

As far as collecting goes, these things just don't come up that often that I've seen.  But when I see them, I usually grab them.

 

Also pictured is my Fisher Price movie viewer.  I need to find more moves for that thing too.

 

 

[RickR]

Thank you, Justin, for bringing this topic up.  Now that I've got my collection out (to take the picture), I'm really looking forward to looking through some of the reels.  Some of these things are really like time-machines...you actually feel/smell/taste your memories from 30, 40 years ago.  Just like music or art can do. 

[CrossBow]

No idea what year they were from but long ago when I was about 10 or 11 we lived in my grandmothers house. She had another house she had built and lived in and so we lived in this old house of hers. Anyway, my stepdad and his brothers rooms were still left largely as they were when they were boys. I found in my stepdads old stuff an original pet rock and quite a few old viewmaster reels along with an older viewmaster.

 

The one thing I remember about this was that the pictures were way more vivid than any I had seen before and as a kid I had certainly seen viewmaster before. But these older ones had much bolder color and the 3D effect seemed to pop more. I also remember the reels were metal and not paper/plastic. Some of them has suffered a bit due to age because some of the slides were starting to fall out of them if I wasn't careful.

 

But yeah, that was the one and only time I had seen metal view master discs. And they were things like ship wecks of the ocean..there was one of the Great Barrier reef that was amazing to look through. Lots of reels on airplanes as my stepdad was and still is a huge plane buff and flies planes whenever he can. Wonder what happened to those old viewmaster reels when we finally moved out of there? I know that several years after my mom and my stepdad divorced that the house was sold but no idea what happened to the stuff that was in it.