in Musings

View-Master scenic reels being discontinued

viewmaster_1-300x200Remember how I was waxing nostalgic about View-Masters last year? Word comes today that Mattel has stopped making the View-Master scenic reels, only leaving the animated ones like Dora and Shrek.

Listen to this moronic analyst:

Toy industry analyst Sean McGowan with Needham & Co. said View-Master has been in decline since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

“That’s not what the kids are looking for in the back seat of the car,” he said. “They’re looking for a DVD that plays on the back of Daddy’s seat.”

Yeah, kids aren’t looking for books in the back seat of the car, either, but that doesn’t mean books are endangered.

I believe the View-Master is in decline because it hasn’t been marketed at all. It’s a device that has entertained children and adults for generations – and would continue to do so, given the chance. It needs no electricity, you can drop it and it still works, and what other 3-D toys are out there, seventy years since its invention?

Someone should buy that business from Mattel and run it properly.

  1. At work, we just created some view-master slides for a client, and I saw them yesterday for the first time. It made me flash back a few decades to my youth. My son will definitely have one.

  2. I remember gawking at the scenery reels and being amazed at the wonders of the world. Electronic gadgets still don’t do 3D and I doubt they will anytime soon.

    I’m going to scour eBay for a View-Master set for myself (and, maybe for our kids, too!)

  3. I remember the daughter of a lawyer in town, Nancy Nesbit. An old family, representing mining interests and very prominent. They lived in our neighborhood before moving to the fancy neighborhood. I would visit occasionally and they had one of those viewers and about a 1000 disks. They had everything from Roy Rogers to Grand Canyon pictures. Sometimes a picture is like a starting line where your mind hears the gun and runs into all the possibilities.

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