I have a View-Master. I have some View-Master reels. For some reason, I can’t seem to find both of them at the same time. Ever had that happen? You have two components that need to be brought together for either of them to have any meaning, but either one or the other seems to be supernaturally elusive.
When you’ve accumulated stuff — massive, unyielding amounts of stuff — it is inevitable that some stuff gets hidden in the cracks of other stuff. I know I found the Ziploc bag that holds those peculiar stereoscopic disks, and I know I thought to myself that it had been a long time since I looked at them. I decided to track down my red View-Master with the orange crank and take a detour down an old road. But I couldn’t find the damned thing. So I put the disks away for safekeeping, until the View-Master itself showed up.
Well, while digging through the endless STUFF, looking for something completely different, I finally found the View-Master, all shiny and like new.
Now I can’t find the reels.
Granted, at least a year had passed between these two incidents, but still; I smell conspiracy. Somebody doesn’t want me to look.
The View-Master was one of those things I had as a kid that I had solely because it was something that every kid should have, at least if you were born at a certain time and made it through childhood at a certain time, which for me was the late ’70s through the ’80s. You have to have had a Rubik’s cube, a Magic 8-ball, a View-Master, a Magic Snake (good grief, the time vacuum that was the Magic Snake) and so forth. These were the toys that weren’t action figures or video games.
Now, I have to confess that I didn’t have a lot of disks for the View-Master. I had a decent stack — maybe the equivalent of the size of a cheeseburger — but I wasn’t drowning in circles. And the ones I had were … odd. I mean that in the best possible way. I think. I really don’t know. They were odd. They were disjointed in theme, because you could buy random packs of disks.
View-Master disks had 14 tiny photographs that formed 7 images that were usually taken from either a movie, a television show, or some other form of media. With that big crank, you turned the disks with a satisfying “ka-chunk” sound, and you are taken through those 7 images, which is a mere chunklet of whatever media you were imbibing from the disk. You could continue the story on consecutive disks, if you wanted.
If you are staring blankly at your screen wondering what could possibly be entertaining about that, all I can say is that you had to be there.
If you didn’t have the disk necessary to continue the story, then you could just insert a different disk and pretend the story was continuing there, which lead to wildly disjointed and random storytelling.
I admit it; I could get lost in those things.
There was something almost mystical about them. The stereoscopic nature meant that there was a 3D quality in the image, giving it an eerie depth that allowed you to almost climb inside the image. Because of this, details popped out that might ordinarily have been glossed over. With a still image presenting a fraction of a second of ordinary film, you’re watching a frozen moment in time, and studying the details there, the expressions on the faces, the captured mood, everything. And the clarity enhanced if you looked closer to a light source, flooding the images with more light, more exposure, more depth.
Out here, in real life, there was nothing that connected Herbie the Love Bug to One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. But in there, frozen in those seven images, there was an entire world, alien and familiar at the same time. Nothing made sense, but everything made sense. It wasn’t like television, it wasn’t like a book or a comic or a video game or anything else. It was completely different. It was as simple a piece of entertainment as it gets, but the simple act of yanking the crank (giggle) pulled you along from scene to scene in this quiet space outside of time.
Like I said, you had to be there.
One of these days I’m going to finally find both the reels and the View-Master at the same time. It’s been decades since I looked into it. It’s been decades since I stepped back into those round worlds, so finite and infinite at the same time.
If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know where I am.