Sheer nostalgic pleasure: the Viewmaster Viewer

Google Cardboard is pretty much the new Viewmaster. Fun for an hour or so, but then I ran out of material.

Sometime in the 80s or 90s, my wife and I were at a store that had Viewmaster reels (probably some national park concession stand or something), and in addition to the usual nature pictures, they had viewmaster reels of cartoons. It just seemed wrong, because most of the characters were still 2D-flat, just at different distances from the foreground.

A couple of decades ago, I had a (film) stereoscopic camera, though it’s gone wherever old pieces of consumer gear go after a few moves (and of course film’s getting harder to find), but it was a cool thing to have.