My view on View-Master

View-Master.

Who doesn't love View-Master?

Apparently, the people who make View-Master don't.

I grew up on View-Master. View-Master was a little toy that used small paper discs featuring photographs of various things. You could look through your View-Master and see 3-D images of your favorite cartoon characters, TV shows, and (perhaps best of all) national parks.

Some View-Master reels had an audio disc that was actually a tiny record. These could be played in a battery-operated viewer that featured sound.

A poorly made View-Master reel might lose the glue that held the photos on the disc. So if you collected View-Master reels, you might eventually find yourself with piles of minuscule photographic slides that could never be reattached to the reels. Overall, however, it was a high-quality toy.

View-Master though is now owned by Fisher-Price - which unfortunately has announced that it's discontinuing this classic plaything, according to Wikipedia.

However, another account says Fisher-Price will keep making reels for cartoon characters such as Shrek and Dora the Explorer. But View-Master reels for our great national parks have been discontinued - never to be seen again.

View-Master's national park reels weren't just fun. They were educational. But now they're gone.

Fisher-Price's rationale for discontinuing national park reels is that families who visit national parks now prefer to spend the trip home watching DVD's instead of looking at View-Master reels.

Really? DVD's in the car? Won't they warp?

The America we grew up with is dead. It's dumbed down, wussified, gone into thin air, down the memory hole.

This story is like the one about Crayola giving awful, sickly sweet names to its colors or the attempt by 'Sesame Street' to downplay Oscar the Grouch. I'm surprised the reason for phasing out View-Master isn't something totally idiotic, like small children being afraid of the viewer because it looks too much like a comic book villain.

View-Master is yet another entry in the long list of things being robbed from today's children (and adults).

(Source: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/40705617.html)