Over one billion reels and a hundred million viewers have been sold since the View-Master's introduction. Partly an estimate, the tally was done a few years ago and any exaggeration that might have crept into the figures has been wiped out by the millions sold in the meantime.

This means that over seven billion color stereo images have been seen by who knows how many people through those 100 million viewers. Market research shows that up to 85% of the public has heard of View-Master, and few products can come close to that level. In fact, when you find yourself faced by one of those painfully exasperating people who seem incapable of grasping the concept of a stereoscope, the most effective recourse is still to say,
       "You know, like a View-Master"!

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There are of course aspects of View-Master that leave its format and content open to specific criticism, but if planet-wide popularity and plain staying power mean anything at all, the little discs with the notches on top must be regarded as a vital part of the history and potential of stereo imaging. As much as anywhere else, the history of View-Master began

underground . . . . .

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AN IDEA & A WISH

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Visiting the Oregon Caves in the summer of 1938, William and Norma Gruber had arrived at the final point of the tour where the guide invited people to rub a "wishing
stone" just before returning to the bright daylight of southern Oregon. Norma Gruber stopped to rub the stone after her husband, a practical minded Portland piano tuner and amateur stereo photo-grapher, had walked on past the polished stone He turned and asked, "What do you think you're doing?" "I'm just wishing that something would happen to your idea!" she told him.

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William Gruber's "idea" involved the use of 16mm Kodachrome movie film in a compact viewer for the inexpensive mass production of full color stereo  trans-parencies. In the late 1930s, only a few amateurs like himself had made 3-D
slide pairs on the popular new Koda-chrome film. Commercial stereograph production was still limited to black and white - whether in the remaining Keystone output or the "modern" 35mm filmstrips from Tru-Vue. Gruber was an avid stereo enthusiast who had assembled several of his own paired camera rigs. He was certain that the combination of color and stereo could be popular and profitable - if only someone with the needed capital and business base could be found.

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With his stereo rig (a tripod-mounted pair of Kodak Bantam Specials) on his shoulder, William Gruber walked out of the cave exit and directly in front of Harold Graves - who was attempting to photograph some deer. Stereo cameras were just as good for starting  conver- sations then as they are now, and instead of asking Gruber to move, Graves' question was, "What kind of a camera do you have there?".

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Harold Graves was president of Sawyer's, a Portland photo finishing and post card company in desperate need of a new and profitable business idea. Few details are
known of that first conversation, but Norma Gruber remembers hearing William say at one point, "Well, you're just the person I've been wanting to meet". That evening, the two men talked long into the night in the Oregon Caves Chateau, going over details of how 16mm images could be spaced on a reel at the proper 2 1/2 inch separation for the eyepieces of a simple stereoscope - and how seven pairs would fit in an alternating sequence that would
repeat without presenting any upside down pictures. Mr. Graves was impressed enough by the concept and its potential to waste no time in persuading the Sawyer's
partners that such a system would be an ideal new line for their company. (William Gruber was later to gladly credit his wife's timely rub of the stone for all that ensued.)

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Sawyer's partner Edwin Mayer borrowed $50,000 from a relative for machinery and supplies to start production. The company had no money to offer Mr. Gruber for his
idea, so he accepted a percentage of future profits and went to work designing a machine to mount the tiny pieces of film in the reels - an essential element in any
commercial mass production of the new stereo transparencies. As a young man in Germany, Gruber had become a master piano tuner and an expert in the design and repair of organs and player pianos with their air-activated linkages. He applied this kind of precision craftsman-ship to the first "reel machine". With air hoses hissing and cutters and prongs chunking and clicking, workers sat
around the machine performing mounting functions that would be automated in later versions of the machines that today remain the heart of the View-Master reel production process.

When money ran low, Mr. Gruber would tune a few more pianos and then return to work on the machine, telling his wife, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if it made
enough money for two weeks vacation every year?". Despite their dedicated enthusiasm, it's doubtful that the people involved with the View-Master in 1938-39 had any idea how popular it would become and how many vacations it would pay for!

 

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The original viewer (later dubbed  the  "Model A") was first sold with 15 scenic reels on blue stock with glued on gold labels containing the title and captions. A few, perhaps a little later, were done on tan-yellow stock with a blue ring encom-passing the scene windows. The most commonly found of the early reels are those on yellow stock with captions printed directly on the reels. (Some use yellow stock on one side and white on the
other.) All reels produced in 1939 and the early 1940s are printed with hand lettered captions without scene numbers. The blue and yellow reels have only a single notch at the top, but there are hand lettered white reels with a single notch as well as some with double notches. The notches
serve to position reel blanks in the mounting machines, and later machines were designed with register systems
requiring double notches. It's probably safe to assume that any double notched reel with type-set captions dates from after 1946, but more precise dating can be difficult. Reel numbers don't help much, as newly issued reels with some new scenes of old subjects kept the original number.

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The name "View-Master" was apparently chosen by people within the Sawyer's organization. William Gruber according to his widow, hated the name - claiming it sounded too much like Mixmaster or Toastmaster. He had favored a more imaginative exotic name, but the easy product identity inherent in "View-Master" won out. Years later, a delightful vindication of his complaint about the name occurred when "Archie" cartoonist Bob Montana was sent a promotional View-Master and his young daughter
inserted one of the reels in the Toastmaster!

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In late 1939, enough viewers and reels had been produced for the first regular sales of the product to begin in Portland. The View-Master's introduction to the rest of the world, however, came when it appeared at the New York and San Francisco World's Fairs in 1940. Public response to full color stereo in this new format was so positive that by 1941 a thousand dealers around the country were selling all the viewers and reels that Sawyer's could produce.

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THE WAR YEARS

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Sawyer's sudden new growth was cut short by World War II. Shortages of film, plastic and paper would have crippled the operation and possibly ended the View-
Master's existence if the army and navy hadn't recognized the visual training potential of View-Master's convenient
viewers and stereo images. Between 1942 and the war's end, about 100,000 viewers and 5 to 6 million reels were ordered by the military - assuring the plant a supply of raw materials and maintaining an active work force to help prepare for post war production. The training reels are mostly black and white and deal with ship identification (using models shot on a hazy set) and aircraft gunnery range estimation reels with range circles and model planes 
in stereo. In 1943, the Model B viewer was introduced featuring a streamlined design, a stronger hinge, and heavier construction throughout. (The lightweight Model A could warp if left in the sun!)

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With the end of the war, the public demand for viewers and reels exploded - having been kept alive by limited reel
production and advertising. By 1946 there were "stacks of requests" from stores asking to become View-Master dealers, but none had been added since 1942 because production couldn't even satisfy the needs of the original 1,000 dealers. Two new buildings were added to Sawyer's downtown Portland operation and new automated machinery was installed for increased production of reels and viewers. The company incorporated in 1946, an export department was established, and personnel grew to 150
people. At this point, Sawyer's was still one of the leading producers of postcards and photographic Christmas cards in the country but the expanding View-Master line was soon to put an end to those operations. 

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As early as May, 1946, plans for the creation of a View-Master stereo camera for amateur use was announced to the press. That same year, Stereocraft Engineering Company was established as an associated company to design and produce just that kind of totally new consumer product as well as specialized manufacturing equipment for Sawyer's.

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That year also saw the introduction of the Model C viewer - the first to allow insertion of reels without opening the front of the viewer. Over the next ten years, this solid dependable device was distributed around the world in the millions and served as the basis for the design of all standard models to follow. Compared to any of the models before or after it the Model C is practically indestructible and a good percentage of these square, no-nonsense black viewers remain usable today.

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By the early 1950s, Sawyer's had sold about 6 million viewers and production had increased enough to supply around 6,000 dealerships. In 1952, the then 300 employee company moved to a complex of new buildings designed to  accom-modate such a growing operation in suburban Progress (near Beaverton), Oregon. The new plant was something of a showpiece of modern factory  con-struction of the early 50s, and  Sawyer's was one of the early companies to help inspire the creation of suburban "industrial parks" in years to follow. The new plant eased production bottlenecks and allowed output to come closer to meeting demand. Already the largest single consumer of Kodachrome 16mm Duplicating Film, Sawyer's became only
the second firm ever permitted by Kodak to do its own Kodachrome processing.

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TRU-VUE

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When Sawyer's purchased the Tru-Vue stereo filmstrip company of Rock Island, Illinois in 1951, they did more than eliminate the only serious competition in the field of stereo transparencies. Tru-Vue held the license to use Disney characters in their new line of color stereo filmstrips
aimed at the children's entertainment market - an area of increasing interest for Sawyer's since issuing their first fairy tale reels with subjects like "Little Red Riding Hood" in 1946. The plan was to redesign the whole Tru-Vue system into an efficient product (concentrating on children's stories, cartoons, and popular  enter-tainment figures) that would sell in toy stores. While the new viewers and rectan- gular seven-scene cards were being designed, Sawyer's continued to sell some of the Tru-Vue color filmstrips in new boxes with the Beaverton address. (These are now among the most rare of all the Tru-Vue filmstrips. See STEREO WORLD July/August 1980.)

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Tru-Vue was a completely separate operation within the View-Master plant with its own photo, advertising, and sales staff and different production equipment. Tru-Vue cards even used different film - the then-new Kodak Print Film using color negative originals rather than duplicating transparencies. With the help of Tru-Vue, Sawyer's was able for a few more years to maintain its concentration on scenic and educational subjects and its "image" as a
serious successor to the classic stereo-scope. Children's stories and cartoon characters continued to appear, of course, on reels and by the late 1950s were a significant part of View-Master's whole line.

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CAMERAS AND PROJECTORS

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One of the buildings at the new Sawyer's plant was occupied by Stereocraft Engineering Company. Headed by partners Karl Kurz and Gordon Smith, the company designed and built the View-Master Personal Stereo Camera (intro-duced in 1952) and the Stereomatic 500
Projector (introduced in 1953). While the View-Master camera joined the 3-D photo-graphy boom a bit late compared to the Realist, it had a number of unique advan-tages to offer consumers over what had already become the "standard" Realist slide format. The View-Master camera, designed by Gordon Smith, featured  the  "Film Miser" lens shift that allowed a strip of pictures to be taken along the bottom half of the 35mm film. Then, at the end of the roll a turn of the center knob on the front of the camera moved the lenses up so that a strip of pictures could fill the top half of the film as it was rewound. With 37 pairs to a "20 exposure" roll of film, the camera gave more rather than fewer stereos per roll. Awkward as the camera might seem today, it was relatively "user friendly"  compared to its competition - once you got used to the lens-shift system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Perhaps its biggest advantage was the fact that 6 million people already had viewers, and personal reels could be shared among family and friends with the assumption that anyone who didn't already have a viewer could get one for under two dollars at virtually any department, camera, or souvenir store.

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The main drawback, of course, was the task of properly mounting the tiny images in the personal reels. While they offered a mounting service for already processed
film, Sawyer's main emphasis was on the sale of View-Master film cutters and blank reels for people to mount (and edit) their own reels. Including the cost of film,
processing, and reels, each view came to about 12 cents ("Less than snapshots" was the line featured in Sawyer's ads). The personal reel mounting service offered by Sawyer's involved no automated equipment beyond employees with film cutters and white gloves, and the  company didn't exactly promote the service in the camera's ads - even the instruction booklet packed with the camera omitted mention of it (it was explained on a separate slip of paper).

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For "serious" stereo photographers, the small image size was almost an addition of insult-to-injury; the Realist format being small enough already! Sawyer's own photographers generally used nothing smaller than the Busch Verascope f40 camera with its horizontal format, and
usually employed paired combinations of full-frame cameras. The fixed-focus View-Master camera also left something of a void in the "normal" close up range of 4 to 6 feet, where images would be acceptable only if conditions allowed stopping down to f/16. Besides that, there were no reels with narrow "close up" windows, as offered in standard format stereo slides. For close ups at 24 to 36 inches, prism/

lenses were available to snap on the front of the camera.

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While the View-Master Personal Camera never came close to dominating the 3-D boom of the 50s, (about 25,000 made) it was sturdy and many are still in use - with
personal reels still available. For many stereo photographers, there is something very appealing about seeing your views securely mounted in permanent order in a
reel. The quality of original transparencies can of course exceed even the best commercial duplicate reels, so personal
View-Master stereos can rank among the best 3-D images produced. - In the mid 1950s, some Sawyer's employees formed a club called "The Stereo Shutterbugs" and went on regular outings around the Portland area to shoot (and later vote on) groups of assigned stereo subjects.

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The Stereo-matic 500 Projector is regarded by many as one of the most well designed stereo projectors ever made. Mirrors direct even light from a single 500 watt lamp through polarizers and 3 inch lenses that will project up to a 50 inch image. Horizontal separation of the images is coupled to focusing, so the only other controls on the projector are a vertical alignment lever and the scene change lever.

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SAWYER'S PUBLICATIONS

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Three official Sawyer's publications existed that today provide a wealth of background information, statistics, and delightful trivia relating to View-Master products and the people who made them. THE DEALERSCOPE was started in 1948 "To make available interesting facts
about View-Master dealers, selling methods, promotions, and other subjects . . Distributed to the thousands of  View-Master dealers, it often covered far more than just the sales-hype promotional gimmicks limiting other such wholesaler-to-retailer newsletters. For the employees,
Sawyer's NEWSREEL was later followed by NEWS AND VIEWS, which was published until the company as purchased by GAF in 1966.

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NEWSREEL and NEWS AND VIEWS ran the usual stories of employee retirements, babies, vacations, and softball games. But the unique nature of the View-Master
product, in its accumulation of images from all over the world and its equally wide distribution system, resulted in a
fascinating range of articles and photos (all flat) in these company magazines. An account of photographer Rupert Leach's 1956 trip through Russia was illustrated with several photos and required three installments in the NEWSREEL. A photo in one DEALERSCOPE shows him during a visit to India, talking to Indira Gandhi while in the background Prime Minister Nehru is busy looking through a View-Master.

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The wide popularity of View-Master becomes evident from reading even a few of the company publications. More than just buying them and stashing them away in a closet, people really used and enjoyed the product in a way that seems charming but unlikely today. There are stories of teen-agers with collections of hundreds of reels and of people buying over $100 worth at a time from dealers. One girl sent in a 44 line poem she had written about her View-Master! A story in a 1949 DEALERSCOPE tells of a student in the African Gold Coast offering in a letter to
trade monkey skins for more View-Master reels to add to his collection. From both Mexico and India came stories of young street merchants offering the equivalent of penny-a-peek looks through a View-Master tied to a pole. Perhaps best of all is a story from a 1966 NEWS AND VIEWS
concerning a man from Ghana who added this P.S. to an order for a viewer and some packets:

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"Please when sending me some of your View-Master products, kindly put them in a strong package otherwise they will be stolen. Please kindly write on the package in which the products are in this phrase:
'HE WHO WILL STEAL THIS WILL GO MAD' in order to frighten the messengers so that they may not steal it."

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The Sawyer's plant itself was one of the more popular attractions among local industries open for tours. In 1956 alone a team of guides took "well over 2000 people" through the plant including everyone from school classes to cub scout troops to tourists to foreign visitors. While
View-Master photographers received no credit on the reels, they did get frequent attention in company publications. The first issue of the DEALERSCOPE carries a
front page story on a 1948 visit by Rupert Leach to Israel in the midst of the violence surrounding the establishment of the new state. Leach was Sawyer's photographic director and the story reports that the same trip took him through England, Switzerland, France, Ireland, Palestine, Syria, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and South Africa. "He brought back close to 4,000 pictures."

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Fred Bennion succeeded Rupert Leach as photographic director, and a 1962 NEWS AND VIEWS article relates his work photographing a staged story packet called "FBI Agent" (#B700) at the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. One scene involved J. Edgar Hoover welcoming a new agent, and Bennion was granted exactly two minutes to shoot the scene - which Sawyer's claimed to be "the
only stereo picture of J. Edgar Hoover in existence". Photographer Weldon King covered the background and launch
of John Glenn's 1962 space flight. An article in NEWS AND VIEWS detailed the tight coordination of several Sawyer's
departments in getting the film processed and reels made for a special packet ("America's Man In Space") (*B657) that was ready for sale in New York in time for Glenn's ticker tape parade - exactly one week after the flight!

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William Gruber himself, though never an actual Sawyer's employee, did  photography for several special projects
and stereographed Pope Pius XII at ceremonies in Rome. Some people have assumed that he did much of the
stereography for early View-Master reels, but he was too busy perfecting the reel mounting machinery to help build up the original image library in 1938-39. By 1941 and 1942, Gruber was able to travel around the country with Ladd Goodman making stereos of scenic attractions.

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CUSTOM AND ADVERTISING REELS

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From the beginning, custom made reels for commercial promotions have been a part of the View-Master operation - generally with a minimum of 1,000 reels per order.
Sawyer's quite actively promoted this service, and large orders for custom reels were often announced in the company publications. No single list of all the firms to have done reels seems to have survived, but they included Nash cars, Seagram's whiskey, Lyon's kitchens, Coleman
furnaces, White Stag sportswear, and Steiner towels. One of the more unusual applications was the "Visa-Dine" View-Master stereo-illustrated menu at the Ganzt Steak House in Sioux City, Iowa. With the printed menu card came a viewer and a reel with views of the seven different dinners offered. Customer reaction had been so good that the owner intended to place viewers in all the nearby
motels!

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Some of the most sought-after of all the custom reels of the l950s are the 3-D Movie Preview reels that appeared in special (probably sealed) viewers in theater lobbies in 1953-54. The reels and viewers where ordered by the National Screen Service Corporation, but "Preview Kits" were also distributed to any View-Master dealer who subscribed to the service. Included were monthly shipments of a reel and posters for each upcoming

3-D movie from, most of the major studios. The idea was to "make dramatic traffic-stopping tie-ins with the widely acclaimed
3-D movies now showing in all parts of the country". Preview reels sent out in August 1954 were: "Those Redheads From Seattle", "Wings of the Hawk" "Second
Chance . and "The Stranger Wore A Gun".

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THE VIEW-MASTER BOOKS

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William Gruber's ultimate hopes for the View-Master were that it could be a serious medium of  educational  information and photographic expression as well as a commercial success. The general feeling was shared by Sawyer's management and, in effect, the company became a publishing house for stereo-illustrated books - some originated by Sawyer's itself and others done for outside
individuals or institutions. The publications ranged from the elegant 33 reel "Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitat"
complete with Model C viewer, to brief medical monographs with a few reels and a plastic folding viewer. Most of the books were medical - one year's list alone names 24 reel-illustrated books with titles like "Cochlear Anatomy", "Arteries of the Brain", "Atlas of the Uterine Cervix" etc.
Vets are represented by "Stereo Atlas of Small Animals Surgery" and several dental subjects are covered as well.

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Some books intended for Sawyer's own popular market included reels but no viewer. These included "Alpine Wild- flowers", "Succulent Plants", and "Unlocking Earth's Secrets". The last on the list was an explanation of basic geology intended to kick off a "Visualore" series of
consumer-oriented science books using the best possible stereo photography to reveal basic concepts. Portland journalist and free lance writer Claude Baskett was hired
to write the text, and when the series idea was dropped he stayed on as a staff writer of the booklets in the Sawyer's and later GAF packets on science, history, and numerous other subjects.

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By far the most ambitious projects were the large, multi-volume book and reel sets photographed by William Gruber  exploring subjects of specialized interest. With a solid text by Dr. Alexander Smith, "The Mushroom Book" (as it's come to be known) remains unequaled in its field
for the dramatic realism of its illustrations. Its main draw-back is that it can't be taken into the woods easily for on-the-spot identification. Finding and photographing in close up stereo the 231 examples took over a decade, and "Mushrooms In Their Natural Habitats" was finally pub-
lished in 1950.

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With Dr. David Bassett, William Gruber photographed every section of the human body (literally inside and out) using the facilities and prepared examples at the Stanford Medical School. The book, "A Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy" uses sequences that move into deeper and
closer stereo detail showing various structures of the body. Some stereo x-rays are included as well as shots of dye-injected blood vessels. The largest and most recent project was "Chinese Art in Three Dimensional Color" by Harry M. Garner and Margaret Medley. Mr. Gruber
traveled all over the world doing stereo photography of Chinese art objects in public and private collections including objects in nearly every material from the Neolithic period to the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1912.

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William Gruber died in 1965 before the work was completed. When asked about a fitting memorial for her husband, Norma Gruber asked that the book be finished, and Rupert Leach was brought back to work at View-Master to complete the photography. Due to fears that GAF,
which had just purchased Sawyer's, might not take the project seriously the "Gruber Foundation" was formed to finish and market the four-volume, 1,258 view set, which was published in 1969.

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The reels are in folios bound into the front and back of each volume and the set includes a lighted focusing viewer on a special stand. Unlike any of the other View-Master books, this set is still available from Reel 3-D Enterprises.
Sawyer's also published a series of "Correlated Classroom Materials" for grade schools consisting of combined
books, records and View-Master reels in the late 1950s.

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Sets were available on music, science, and children's stories, but most of the offerings in the catalog are "supplementary" and consist of the regular three-reel packets selected for their educational subject matter.

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INTO THE 1960s

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In the late 1950s, original Sawyer's partner and general manager Edwin Mayer had died and Harold Graves, president since 1930, had retired. In 1959, Robert Brost of the Chicago office became company president and began a program of modernizing production, products, and management. By 1963 there were 660 employees with an annual payroll nearing $3 million annually.

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According to a former sales executive, one of the most important single elements in the increasing sales of the 1960s was the introduction of shrink-wrap packaging to
View-Master reel packets. The packets had already nearly completely replaced sales of single reels, and the new plastic wrapping process safely sealed the reels in the packets insuring longer shelf-life - a big difference for retailers tired of paper envelopes which quickly became dusty and faded looking. The glossy new look of View-Master products brought new displays in new outlets, but also brought the era of the open-backed envelope inside
the plastic - a frustration for collectors for years to come. The seemingly incomplete envelopes allowed a dealer code to be impressed through the plastic of an already wrapped packet into a piece of carbon paper inside. This resulted in the store's number appearing on the reel list
order form, so that even if the customer ordered future packets directly from the factory, the dealer would get a commission.

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THE FOREIGN CONNECTION

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Sawyer's had established a major distribution center in Chicago in 1949, and in 1952 Sawyer's Europe was established
as an affiliated organization in Belgium to serve countries where monetary or trade restrictions made trade with the U S. plant difficult. At one point, Sawyer's operations also existed in India and Japan, but most trade continued to flow from the main Oregon plant - which in 1964 was awarded the President's "E" Flag for a 75%
advance in export sales in the previous 3 years.

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The Belgium operation grew into a major manufacturing and design center with its own versions of the current viewer  models, its own reel printing and mount- ing equipment, and its own packaging styles and innovations. As with many other things, the 3-D photography boom  came later to Europe and lasted longer (interest having been more steady for years). In 1962, the Belgium plant intro- duced the View-Master Mark II stereo camera to the European market. Its diagonal film path allowed the full
width of a roll of 35mm film to be filled with View-Master format images on a single pass through the camera. The

concept seems to have been an inde- pendent solution to the format problem, although it had been proposed ten years earlier in a rejected design for the new Sawyer's Tru-Vue viewer and for the never-built "Personnette" camera. The Mark II was a light weight and less expensive stereo camera of far simpler design than the Personal. Sawyer's saw the 3-D boom as over in this country, and
didn't promote the new camera here with anything like the effort made on the Personal (on which production had
ended in 1956). It was introduced in the U.S. for $78.50 - much lower than the initial price of the Personal - and remained on reel lists from 1963 to 1965 with its special film cutter listed in dealer's catalogs until 1975.
 

THE GAF YEARS

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By 1966 Sawyer's had over 9,000 retailers in the U.S. alone and sales had grown from $9 million in 1963 to $29 million in 1965-66. Employment had grown to 1,300 with more working during peak periods. Three shifts were required and special parking arrangements had to be made
along with a traffic director on duty between shifts! The company was simply growing faster than its resources - both physical and financial.

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When General Aniline & Film Corporation (the current incarnation of the original E. & H.T. Anthony Co.) offered to buy Sawyer's, the management and main stockholders expressed interest and meetings were soon being held to explain the move to employees along with stories in NEWS AND VIEWS. At an October 1966 stockholder's meeting the promise of continued growth with a larger organ- izatization (combined with the prospect of increased value for their shares) resulted in a solid vote for the acquisition with less
than one percent of the shares voting against the proposal. Sawyer's had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the
GAF conglomerate - retaining its local management and providing to GAF a photographic equipment manufacturing arm to go with the film production division of GAF.

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People at Sawyer's had been given the impression that the company would be allowed to retain the Sawyer's name, but that, like the publication NEWS AND VIEWS, was soon to disappear along with more and more of the kind of employee morale that had taken the company so
far since 1939. The View-Master had become a minor item in the busy high-level dealings of one of the country's
largest corporations. Attention to promotion of View-Master products was spotty, and hardly kept pace with the changing markets of the 1970s and 80s - even though a number of new products were introduced. After producing one last viewer under the GAF name, the Tru-Vue
line was dropped and the eventual move of most View-Master subject matter into the toy oriented market was signaled. Fortunately, some interesting lines started by Sawyer's were followed up - as with the "World of Science" packets and the "Old Time View" series using high quality
copies of Keystone views to fill packets on old cars, planes, ships, etc. With the best reels of the Nature packets and "World Travel" packets like the 1972 "Inside China Today", enough was produced to maintain at least some awareness of the View-Master's potential.

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Even the move to an emphasis on entertainment subjects wasn't enough to guarantee sales, and GAF introduced
some new 2-D projectors and the 3-D Talking View-Master to try to regain growth in the market. But for a device intended mainly for children's stories, the GAF Talking View-Master required five steps (and usually the help of an equally frustrated adult) just to get a reel started properly! Even then, sound quality was atrocious at best and the translucent records made a burlesque of the concept of a light diffuser.

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Perhaps the most basic change that GAF made in the product was the switch from Kodachrome duplicating film as the stock used in View-Master reels to a Kodak
print film similar to that used in Tru-Vue cards and employing a color negative as the "original" from which the 16mm final prints are made. While the deep color
saturation and permanence of Koda-chrome are lost, there is more control of color balance and contrast through the
intermediate step of creating the best possible "internegative" from which to work. Permanence, perhaps, was seen
as less important in a reel of "Scooby Doo" than it had been in a reel of the World's Fair - the latter probably being stored carefully in the same drawer as the family
photo album, and the former as likely to be stored in a box somewhere under the couch with the Barbie clothes and bubble soap.

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VIEW-MASTER INTERNATIONAL

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News of layoffs at View-Master were seen in the Portland press through the late 1970s, and by 1979 the total employment figure had dropped from about 1,500 (in
1966) to around 250. The entire GAF empire was coming apart at that point - and they had sold or were trying to sell the film manufacturing and processing divisions and the roofing material division among other enterprises that had been acquired in recent years. In late 1980 GAF
announced that the entire View-Master operation in Oregon and Belgium was up for sale - along with seven other GAF businesses. Within a year, businessman Arnold Thaler had assembled a limited partnership and with the help of Integrated Resources Inc. of New York, had
purchased View-Master under the name View-Master International Group for a reported $24 million. Some change was evident in a matter of months in store display racks. Packets, some with the GAF name still in the corner, were starting to be packed in blister-pack cards with bold new graphics and colors. Gradually, the
View-Master name was clearly featured again on viewers boxes, and packets as the new company restocked the racks with its own product - including the new packaging treatment for the reels, now naked to the world within their plastic bubbles on hanging cards.

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Collectors and enthusiasts who might have hoped for a return to the View-Master of the "Mushroom Book" days
were, however, due for disappointment and even disgust. Even the few science, nature, and old-time view packets
that GAF had carried were no longer in store displays. The rule seemed suddenly to be "If it's not from TV, the movies or the funnies, it can't be on a View-Master reel."
Worse yet, when the packet based on the movie "E.T." appeared, it was found to be made up of all flat images - some very skillfully separated into different planes for some 3-D effect. It all seemed a bit depressing for the work of a company that had added to its name, "The 3-D 

Company".

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The View-Master International manage-ment is well aware of the criticism and equally well aware of the much
narrower market open to their products. As easy as it is to blame television for virtually any problem, its importance
in the matter of public awareness of and need for images (scenic, scientific, or event oriented) is very direct. Today's color television programming provides a variety of interesting images far beyond those available by the flick of a switch in the 1950s and 60s. A few hours of "Nova" or 
"National Geographic Special" can provide more picture information than a hundred science or natural history packets -
and for most people, movement provides as much of an added dimension ti the images as does 3-D. The entertainment packets find a successful market not despite the similarity to television shows, but because the characters and stories are identical to what was on the screen - like buying a poster or T-shirt or lunch box of
your favorite character. Scenic, science, or nature reels can't achieve this identifica-tion with any specific personality or story, and may be regarded by most people now as rather static generalizations of the detailed, moving images they've
already seen on TV.

 

The stereo aspect of the images in entertainment packets may, in fact, be somewhat incidental to the personality
recognition factor of just having the familiar character "in hand". (This may be much of the reason that complaints
about the flat images in the "E.T." packet came mainly from stereo purists and collectors.) Young children are even less impressed by the 3-D in their reels of favorite characters, and many may not be able to see 3-D through the viewer at all. A study at Purdue University found that
only half of children between 4 and 5 could see 3-D through a View-Master. Many use only one eye due to overly wide
viewer lens spacing, inability to under- stand the viewer, developmental problems associated with eye muscles, or simply the habit of holding the viewer with a hand over one of the diffusers!

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Sales figures for non-entertainment packets in recent years tell much of the story behind current policy. Coverage of the recent visit to the U.S. by the Pope involved an event that drew huge crowds, and yet the packet sold poorly. Similar timely coverage of John Glenn's space flight in 1962 sold well, and the packet covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II sold nearly Vl million copies. The recent Royal Wedding packet on the other hand, sold only a few thousand even in Europe!

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The GAF series of packets using repro-ductions of old Keystone views sold well for the first year or so of release (30,000 to 40,000 each) but sales dropped off sharply once the specialized market was saturated. Scenic packets had been relatively poor sellers for some time even during the GAF years. In some cases,
they did well only in the area near the subject of the packet. Whether they could have been promoted more effectively and with more imagination than GAF showed
is of course open to debate. It would have been interesting to have seen what Sawyer's strategy would have been in
the 1970s.

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Several people interviewed at View-Master International made the point that the cost of keeping scenic packets up to date and introducing new ones has gone up considerably and would today no longer be matched by sales - even if sales could be improved. Many of them also
pointed out that scenic and specialized packets are still made as custom orders to be sold in or around attraction like Knotts Berry Farm, the NASA Space Center, Cypress Gardens, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

 

One potential "event packet" that was impossible to ignore was the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, only 50 miles from the View-Master plant. The day of the big
eruption, View-Master Senior photo- grapher Hank Gaylord was flying back from assignment in the east when his
plane flew directly over the billowing ash cloud. His cameras were right there with him, but all the film had been safely packed away and checked in with the luggage! Later, two trips were made over the mountain to obtain stereo pairs that could be used in reels, despite the lack of
any interest on the part of the GAF main office in New York. Nothing would per-suade them that this was more than just another "journalistic" matter beyond the scope of  View-Master.

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Current View-Master Creative Direc-tor Gary Evans relates that talk around the plant was that the eruption would have been covered if it had occurred in New York. (It's not hard to imagine the hoards of stereographers who would have been scrambling up through the ash if the eruption had occurred in 1880!)

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THE EUROPEAN DIFFERENCE

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The View-Master plant in Belgium con-tinues under the new company to be a separate operation with its own models of views, its own selection of subjects and its own marketing strategy. In Europe, scenic subjects are still marketed along with TV, Fairy Tale, and Cartoon subjects and the multitude of nationalities within the marketing area makes the situation different. Scenics, for example, are color coded (on blue cards) under the heading "Countries" and the total volume of any particular packet is much lower than in the U.S. Packets are printed in at least
16 different languages, but not every subject is issued in every language and some reels are printed with additional
languages on the back side. To whatever one attributes the cultural differences, scenic stereoviews do find more of a market in Europe. Besides View-Master International there are two companies in France producing Tru-Vue style scenic cards (Lestrade and Bruguiere) for the European market.

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One of the biggest selling packets of all time is the Belgium produced set of reels on Mecca. "Makkah Mukarrama" is also sold as a gift box with 4 reels of Mecca
and a viewer, and a good percentage of the pilgrims to the Holy Shrine apparently buy one as a visual token of their visit. The Belgium plant also markets one of the most imaginative View-Master oriented games yet devised. Called "Pyramido", it consists of a set of plastic pieces that
can only be assembled into the proper three dimensional form by study of the game's View-Master reels.

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A PACKET'S PROGRESS

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Decisions concerning just what TV or movie characters and stories to use for packets (actually they're now called
"Cards") depend on complex matters of market research and arrangements for licensing the use of some very valuable "properties" - names, faces, stories, and drawings. For a feature involving live story photography, the first step in actual production generally involves a review of
the film or program script by the View-Master staff writer and photographer to determine if and how it can be translated into an entertaining packet. Senior Writer/Developer Jane Davies explained that she then writes a list of scenes that seem important to the story for  the  photographer to try to capture in stereo. The complex shooting schedules required in TV and movies often make this hard, since locations may be miles apart and story sequences in different order. The stereography is nearly always done during rehearsals, and even then, the sound of the paired Nikons used by View-Master can require moving back from the set and using a pair of longer lenses. (An advantage of the twin SLR rig, and of its wider than normal separation, is that 105mm lenses can be used without loss of stereo effect.)

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The eventual scenes used in the reels (and the captions) depend largely on what the photographer is able to get on the set or location of the production. Good shots involving sub-plots or minor characters in a story can present a real challenge in caption writing, and can sometimes require the use of split frames to explain the action within the 21 scene limit. Once the 21 scenes are chosen, "internegatives"
are made of each original transparency on 70mm color negative film. Any cropping or image combinations are done at this stage, and the processed negatives are checked on a video color analyzer to determine as closely as possible the correct color balance to be achieved in the next step - the printing of thousands of frames (after test reels are made) of each right and left negative on 16mm print film.
After careful checking, the processed film is sent to the reel mounting machines where these masterpieces of pre-compu-terized automation cut and mount the frames from 14 spools of film onto each waiting reel blank at a pace and rhythm that has an almost hypnotic effect on most visitors. After a trip through a packaging machine that combines reels into sets of three and seals them on
their cards, the story is ready for shipment and sale.

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THE FUTURE

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Sales of the new Talking View-Master had been "good" according to an executive at the Portland View-Master International Group Headquarters. Although store shelves haven't been cleared out by customers fighting over them, sales have been close to the expected level for a new and fairly expensive toy department item. Many parents probably remember the clumsy, doll-voiced GAF Talking View- Master of a few years ago and hesitate to spend money on anything that reminds them of it. This could mean a slow sales growth for the new product despite its  nearly total improvement over the old design.

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Sales of the new Talking View-Master had been "good" according to an executive at the Portland View-Master International Group Headquarters. Although store shelves haven't been cleared out by customers fighting over them, sales have been close to the expected level for a new and fairly expensive toy department item. Many parents probably remember the clumsy, doll-voiced GAF Talking View- Master of a few years ago and hesitate to spend money on anything that reminds them of it. This could mean a slow sales growth for the new product despite its nearly total improvement over the old design. With only two controls (an insert/remove button and the scene change lever) the new viewer chimes into life as soon as a record/reel card is inserted, and from that point you just listen and look - guided by the automatic electronic tone. As improved as the sound quality is, it's limited by the 2 inch speaker and the relatively slow speed of the
small record. The release of more talking reels will help sales somewhat, but the big test is the release (and degree of success with a slightly older market) of the Talking
packet of Michael Jackson's "Thriller".

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View-Master Creative Director Gary Evans sees considerable potential for the Talking View-Master in the rock music "video" image field - depending on the response
to the "Thriller" reels. The possible stereoscopic effects that could be used in the already richly imaginative world
of "MTV" type productions are limited only by the mind and eye muscles of the observer. With some video 3-D segments already history, rock videos could lead (and finance) the next generation of stereoscopic innovation. View-Master is now in the fortunate position of being
able to provide handy, color 3-D stills (complete with sound track) of any such productions whether the originals
are in 3-D or not.

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People at the View-Master plant were confident that careful planning of on-set stereo photography would mean no more flat packets like "E.T." would be produced to contradict the company's slogan "The 3-D Company". Late last year, the public sale of stock was announced, and
shortly after it was learned that the stock certificates would indeed be in 3-D! Actually, the design is a perfectly
dignified anaglyph of the company name in front of a globe to convey the international nature of the corporation.

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Company representatives were unwilling to be more specific about upcoming 3-D products beyond saying that there is a good deal of interest in motion images combined with stereo. No one was willing to comment on the possibility of a talking projector, 2-D or 3-D, although with the records in the path of the light as with the old version, the design would seem more practical.

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Whatever one thinks of the current range of subject matter, View-Master as a company and as an established
stereo format is again committed to true stereoscopic imaging and the  development of systems to maintain a
market for it.
 

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Claude Baskett
Jane Davies
Richard Dubnow
Gary Evans
John Lawler
Jean Poulot
David Starkman