CHILD’S PLAY

I like to listen to the radio when I’m pottering around in the kitchen. It drives my husband crazy, and he’s always asking me (berating, really), “Jesus! Can’t you stand a little silence?” Sure I can. I’m an only child. I know a lot about silence. I prefer sound.

The radio in the kitchen is usually tuned into KCRW, which used to be NPR Berlin until October, 2017. KCRW broadcasts out of the German capital, but unlike the old NPR Berlin, this replacement station is a 50-50 mix of weirdly wonderful, avant garde, eclectic music out of LA and public radio programming originating in the US. KCRW offers a Sunday morning smorgy of: All Things Considered Weekend Edition, The New Yorker Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, This American Life, Radio Lab, and Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

This Sunday morning I was listening to Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, and I heard that Mattel the toy maker is teaming up with MGM the media company to somehow make a live-action movie about the 3-D View-Master. Crazy, right? Without getting into the pros and cons of whether such a film should ever be considered for production, or whether it points to a pathetic paucity of ideas in Hollywood, I’d just like to say that the View-Master was one of my favorite childhood toys. It ranked right up there with coloring books and the kaleidoscope my father bought me. The kaleidoscope of my childhood is not to be confused with today’s crappy kaleidoscopes, with their cheesy plastic bits rattling around inside the cardboard tube and which don’t properly reflect the light and have an impoverished color pallet. Their effect is nothing compared to what I could achieve with my Big Box of 64 Crayolas. The modern kaleidoscopes don’t even sound like my kaleidoscope, whose glass tesserae made a smooth, whooshing sound when you rotated it, and which transformed reality into a technicolor, fractured fantasy world worthy of the silver screen.

Which takes me back to the View-Master. According to Wiki, the View-Master was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, four years after the advent of Kodachrome film. The View-Master consisted of two parts. Part A was the View-Master stereoscopic viewer. Mine from the 1950s was made of black Bakelite. Part B was a cardboard View-Master “reel “consisting of seven pairs of small color film transparencies. To view the reel, you simply inserted Part B into Part A, held the binocular viewer in front of your eyes, and pressed the button. Voila! When each of the 14 components of the seven pairs of images was viewed simultaneously and separately by each eye, the View-Master magically merged them into seven “scenes,” simulating a pretty wild 3-D experience. It was fabulous!

In 1951, View-Master bought out a competitor who had acquired licensing rights from Walt Disney Studios to produce reels featuring Walt Disney characters. But View-Master “reely” hit the jackpot in 1955, when Disneyland opened. My hands-down favorite View-Master reel was The Three Little Pigs. It made an indelible impression on my 5-year-old’s visual aesthetic. And I wasn’t the only one impressed by View-Master’s potential for enhanced visuals. Between 1942 and the end of WWII in 1945, the US military procured 100,000 viewers and nearly 6 million reels from View-Master for personnel training. I wonder what those guys were watching. Ten to one says it wasn’t The Three Little Pigs.