Retro Thing

Talking View-Master

There's a lot of chatter coming from the toy aisle these days.  Cheap digital sound systems have made it possible... irritiatingly possible... for every toy to have something to say.  Talking toys used to be a rarity, mostly because it used to be really hard to accomplish.

Initially View-Master wasn't sold as a toy, reels often featured scenic and educational subjects as well as children's fare.  View-Master reels had remained the same since their introduction in 1939 (and are still compatible with modern viewers), but in the 70's View-Masters were targetted at kids, Talking View-Master audibly took the little reels in a new direction.

A Talking View-Master reel will look familiar to most of us, with the addition of a rear mounted clear plastic record (clear because light still had to get through to the images).  You advance through each of the seven pictures in the regular way, with an extra button on the back to activate the sound effects and narration for each picture.   

It works far better than you might think.  Dropping the reel into the viewer does entail a bit of procedure (detailed by a sticker on top), but once it's loaded up it all works.  You can replay the sound from a single image as many times as you want, and advancing to the next picture advances the record as well.  As you'd expect, the fidelity isn't the greatest.  Even with fresh batteries, the sound warbles and changes speed.  Good enough to be charming, but some of my reels sound almost sinister.

Through the years there have been other attempts to add audio to the View-Master experience.  The 80's put the reel and the record on a single (again non-compatible) long card.  The 90's yielded squat cartridges (compatible?  Not even close.) with digitized audio technology, yet it had difficulty keeping things in sync - a problem View-Master had solved 25 years before!

Finally last year, View-Master got it right with the Super Sound series.  Each backwards compatible reel comes in a neat plastic case with a sound chip embedded in it.  Load the reel into the Super Sound viewer which also has a slot for the special carrying case.  The sounds form the chip remain in sync with the images you're viewing.  Crisp digital sound, and the reels alone are still viewable with any View-Master ever made.

Perhaps the novelty of talking toys has well worn off, but when combined with brilliant 3D imagery you've got something that's still unique to View Master.

Related posts:
The View-Master Never Left Us

Wooden Automobiles

Mercedes Benz is getting a lot of press for their 100% recyclable RECY roadster entry in the LA Auto Show's Recyclable Design Challenge. The competition encourages manufacturers to put together an environmentally conscious car. Mercedes has taken the challenge to heart by using wood in its construction, and I'm a sucker for a sleek wood-grain finish. It's kinda like an old Woodie station wagon with some extra testosterone. Of course, the treehugger in me screams out that there's really no such thing as an environmentally friendly sports car.

The RECY is by no means the first wooden car -- Check out Jerry Nickel's wooden Cadillac. It features dual V8 engines and 4,183 individual pieces of mahogany, five gallons of glue, 60 pounds of drywall screws (so it doesn't squeak?!) and four gallons of varnish. It took him four years to assemble and -- thanks to it's 1000 cubic inches of engine displacement -- is anything but environmentally friendly.

RECY: the Recyclable Wood Roadster from Mercedes-Benz [via a tip from Matrix... thanks!]
Jerry Nickel's Wooden Cadillac

Retro-Style LED Watches

Here's a link to an interesting store full of LED watches. In addition to dozens of slightly too modern dot-matrix designs, there are quite a few vintage and not-so vintage 7-segment LED timepieces, including a genuine $395 "new old stock' Pulsar:

Complete set .... New in Box with wrench & instruction book! This awesome PULSAR 3502 Sport is 100% Mint - New Old Stock! Featuring 1970s state of the art Pulsar LED technology with capacitance (sensor buttons). You lightly touch the activation buttons to activate the large...laser bright display! Quoted as "Bullet Proof...The best module Pulsar ever made". Classic style all stainless case and adjustable band. With NEW (not vintage) inner and outer Pulsar/Seiko type boxes and stickers.

Even though the Pulsar looks cool, my favorite watch of all is the $69.95 DIY kit, since it requires enough assembly to feel like you've accomplished something clever without really having to exercise your gray matter.

LED Watch Superstore

Whimsical Whizzer Motorbikes

This is one occasion where the word 'motorbike' literally means 'bicycle with a motor attached.' The original Whizzer bicycle motor was released in 1939 at a price of $54.95. By 1948, Whizzer had managed to sell more than 150,000 bolt-on units. They introduced the Pacemaker -- billed as the 'only complete motorbike' -- for $199.50 in June of 1948. The company's last engine design was released in 1952 before they morphed into Whizzer Industries, Inc. and diversified into toys, windows and sliding doors. To their credit, the factory continued to offer parts for the old bikes until 1965.

The Whizzer name was revived in 1998 and Whizzer USA Inc. began to offer a new range of retro-style motorbikes. As with many products, the modern version is manufactured in Taiwan. Their latest model is the Whizzer NE5. It's available in a 26 or 24-inch frame and sports a 1.95 HP 138cc 4-stroke engine. The stock model is capable of reaching speeds of 25 mph, although they're capable of much more than that with a bit of tweaking.

The company claims their bikes can be registered and insured as mopeds in many jurisdictions, but I'd check with the authorities before purchasing -- mopeds in my little corner of North America are restricted to a maximum engine displacement of 49cc. The Whizzer site doesn't list prices, but the NE5 with centrifugal clutch has been spotted for around $1595 on the web.

Whizzer NE5 Product Specifications

Free Solar Water Heater Book

David Bainbridge (now an Associate Professor at Alliant International University) published The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book back in 1981. It has been out of print for many years, but is now available again on the 'Net as a downloadable acrobat file. I've only skimmed it, but there are a lot of clever ideas hidden on these 25 year-old pages.

"The water heaters covered in this book make a great DIY solar project.  For a few hundred dollars and a weekend of labor, you can build one of these solar water heaters.  It will pay back its initial cost in a year or two.   One of these water heaters can save about 4000 KWH in a year -- about the same amount of energy that a 1KW PV costing around $10,000 would save!"

The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book

The Scent of Moondust

Have you ever wondered what things smell like in space? I once concluded that a spaceship would smell something like a well-sealed dorm room -- a combination of sweaty socks, warm electronics and a hint of week-old pizza. It turns out I wasn't far wrong. Space traveler Anousheh Ansari recently reported: "As they pulled the hatch [to the ISS] open on the Soyuz side, I smelled SPACE. It was strange… kind of like burned almond cookie."

Things get even weirder on the moon. Almost 34 years ago, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan succinctly summed up the scent of moondust: "It smells like spent gunpowder." It turns out that the incredibly fine dust on the surface of the moon has a propensity to stick to everything. No matter how careful the returning astronauts were, they inevitably tracked it into their lunar module and smudged it everywhere. As soon as their helmets were off, the scent of moondust permeated the ship.

Interestingly enough, the only way to smell "the real stuff" is to take a trip to the moon. On Earth, moondust loses its distinctive fragrance:

There are hundreds of pounds of moondust at the Lunar Sample Lab in Houston. There, [NASA researcher Gary] Lofgren has held dusty moon rocks with his own hands. He's sniffed the rocks, sniffed the air, sniffed his hands. "It does not smell like gunpowder," he says.

Were the Apollo crews imagining things? No. Lofgren and others have a better explanation: Moondust on Earth has been 'pacified.' All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.

Apollo Chronicles: The Smell of Moondust [NASA]

Game Show "At Home" Versions

The crazy props, overblown sets, and the white-knuckle competition for matched corduroy luggage have long made game shows a staple of the TV schedule.  The television audience plays along vicariously through the on-screen players, so with every victory it's like you're there too scoring a sweet ceramic St. Bernard and a case of Penzoil.

It wasn't long before the "play along" aspect of game shows was exploited by creating scaled down board game versions (these were often consolation prizes on the shows themselves).  It's difficult to reproduce the gaudy excess of most game shows in these mini cardboard versions, but the most important element to capture is the fun and excitement of the television original.  Here are a few examples.

$10,000 Pyramid (inflation hit the show's title, eventually becoming the $100,000 Pyramid) has players feed each other clues to guess key words & phrases.  The main feature of the show is the multi-story elaborate pyramid set, replicated here with little cards and a special decoder lens.  It's rather fun, but oddly the final round (the game the very show is named after) isn't much like the TV version. 

Password was much simpler to capture in a home version (for one thing, the box is a third the size!).  Since the original game is not very gimmicky, the home game is merely a deck of cards and a special sleeve to read them with.  There have been at least 25 editions (superstitious Milton Bradley skipped version #13), and even the earliest versions seem to be at the thrift store all the time.  Lots of fun, especially on long car trips - even the driver can safely play along.

Beat The Clock is based on a wacky 1950's hit show pitting contestants against each other to accomplish wacky stunts.  The box includes enough props for 40 different skill games (less messy than the TV versions), along with the eponymous 60 second clock.  The classic party stunt game is tremendous fun even today.

As multimedia technology made its way into our living rooms, it wasn't long before these game shows made their way onto our televisions again, but this time in the form of video games. 

The first game console version of Jeopardy appeared in 1987 on the Nintendo NES.  I've got the 1991 sequel cartridge Super Jeopardy with caricatured players, and croaky synthesized speech.  In 1995, Sega CD (the CD-ROM add-on for Sega Genesis and Mega-Drive) featured a much more advanced version of Jeopardy.  The extra space on the CD allowed for thousands of questions along with lots of digitized audio and low-res video clips from the show - including Alex Trebek purring, "Better luck next time, player!".

Wheel of Fortune has been on practically every kind of console, including home computers like the Commodore 64.  Gameplay benefited from the computer's keyboard and better text handling ability (spelling out long answers with a video game controller tended to slow down gameplay).  You can also play the "home game" outside the home with versions on Game Boy, Game Gear, and even in the arcade.

To bring the whole "home game" concept full circle, the 3DO (a 1993 multimedia CD-rom system) features a game called Twisted.  It's not based on an existing game show, but does play like one.  It has a massive multimedia stage, comical prizes to win, even cheesy music and fake commercials - it all comes together to bring a very real feeling game show to your television.  Plus, one of the player avatars is a PEZ dispenser.  What's not to like?  Someone needs to re-release this one!

Today many game shows have official online versions, sometimes even offering real prizes!  If you'd prefer a more tactile game show experience, many updated versions of these games are on store shelves today (or available for pennies at your local thrift store).  Either way, it's a chance to play your TV favorites without waiting for Johnny Olsen's invitation to "Come on down!"

No More Yellow Envelopes

BBC Radio 4 aired a fifteen minute documentary entitled 'No More Yellow Envelopes' on Sunday. The broadcast followed the adventures of one of the last Kodachrome Super 8 movie cartridges as it made its way (in a bright yellow prepaid envelope) from the hands of a pair of Cine enthusiasts in the UK to Kodak's Kodachrome processing plant in Switzerland -- which closed at the end of September, 2006 -- and then on to a screening at the Bury Cine Society.

We're all going to miss the dreamy romance of Kodachrome, but don't forget that Kodak still aggressively supports the 41 year-old Super 8 movie format with five modern film stocks.

Listen to a recording of the show [BBC, via filmtastic OnSuper8]

Joy Buzzers & Whoopie Cushions

I squandered much of my childhood browsing the novelty ads in comic books. Believe it or not, the S.S. Adams Co. still exists and offers much the same product line that I remember from my mis-directed youth. It took me ages to save up the vast sum required to purchase a joy buzzer, fake poo and a razzberry cushion. And -- when the goods finally arrived -- I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the handheld buzzer was nothing more than a wind-up vibrator, rather than some almost-lethal electric people-zapper.

The biggest problem with the joy buzzer was that it just wasn't normal for 10 year-olds to go around respectfully shaking each other's hands. My friends were suspicious right from the moment they set their eyes on my odd smirk and outstretched arm. The razzberry cushion earned the highest marks, since it could be stuffed under a chair cushion at a moment's notice, although the fake poo on the floor elicited the most amusing response from my unsuspecting (and undeserving) mother.

The company celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006 with the release of a visual history entitled 'Life of the Party.'  And now you'll have to excuse me; I'm off to shop for some garlic gum and a dribble glass.

S.S. Adams Company Online Catalog

BMW Reworks the MINI... Again

BMW chose the recent Mondial de l'Automobile in Paris to unveil a revamped version of their modern Mini. It's several inches longer than its predecessor and features new suspension, along with a new 6-speed transmission and a 1.6 L 120 HP 4-cylinder engine in the base model. The Cooper S will include a 175 HP version of the same motor.  The interior is redesigned and stars an even larger version of the "classic" speedo in the center of the dash.

Brand sales and marketing director Michael Ganal also hinted at a broader product line: "We are convinced that it offers the ideal foundation for the expansion of the Mini family. Mini can be expected to deliver further product innovations and extraordinary activities in the future." I'm hoping for a budget version that acknowledges the Mini's origin as a fun and affordable car for the masses. I'd even be willing to buy two -- one for each foot.

New MINI goes on display