Viewmaster
So this is a page focusing solely on something fun, namely View-Masters, the 3-D toy of yore, popular from the 1940s until its ebb in the 1980 and eventual complete decline by the end of the 2000s. However, in those 60ish years many reels of different countries and cities and places therein, were issued. Also films, cartoons and TV shows as well as things of general visual interest; circus, rodeos, races, wild flowers, marine animals, you name it. I’ve been collecting for years and have a vast collection, and I thought I’d share a few examples of things that might interest you. I’m not working on anything view-master related (I wish!) but it’s something I enjoy, and I would it would be fun to show.
My custom viewmaster sleeves
One of the things I do from time to time is take the 1980s-onward blister packets and do new… or I should say “old” packets with the reels of those sets. Blister packets were something Toys “R” Us suggested for better in-store placement and sales, which I guess maybe worked for a time, although opening them and storing them were a drag due to their shape and design. And the graphics of those designs? Forget it. Terrible. The picture choices were sometimes so bafflingly bad, you’d think the designers had a betting pool going on how quickly they could drive View-Master out of business by creating an unappealing product.
So what I’ve been doing is creating fake S3 pages for these blister reel sets to keep them in. That way I can store them along with all the countless packets I have in this old envelope form. The S3 packet design was an earlier design I’ve always liked and it’s fun to choose the image and the packet covers, then print it and assemble the printed sheet into a finished envelope.
Here’s an example of what I mean. This is the blister pack of the Rocketeer film from the early 90s (great 3-D btw). See what I mean about the design?
Now, this is what I did, following the original layout and word choices of an S3 packet from the 1950s:
So I’ll be sharing more of my redesigns from time to time as well as other articles and interesting stuff about my hobby. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this and maybe some of you will even become collectors yourself.
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Custom Dune Packet
DUNE Packet Number 4058 Released 1984 Here’s the original blister packet. (And yes, you had to cut the side like that to get the reels ...
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