The Fisher-Price Movie Viewer Theater shows just how far kids' entertainment has progressed since 1978. The compact plastic film viewer shows silent Super 8 movies on a blurry little screen. It can also project a 10-inch image onto the wall.
Its best feature (speaking from personal experience) is that the film is hand-cranked, allowing kids to morph everyday Warner Brothers cartoons into bizarre reverse slow-motion cinematic works of art.
The only thing cooler than owning one of these would be to have one loaded with your own movies. Super8man was up to the challenge, and loaded his own Super 8 home movies into the F-P viewer, enabling his kids to manipulate their flickery images on-screen.
Conveniently, the viewer is compatible with standard Super 8 film. Super 8 film is still available, and it'll cost about $25 to shoot and process a 50 foot cartridge.
The next step is to carefully pry open one of the old yellow cartridges and replace the film inside with your own Oscar-worthy footage. Super8man reports that the cartridges come preloaded with about 12 feet of film, but he thinks they'll accommodate up to 50 feet, giving a maximum running time of 3 1/2 minutes at 18 frames per second.
Before it can be loaded, the new film needs to be spliced into a continuous loop. Loading it into the cartridge is guaranteed to be a fiddly process, and paying careful attention to how the prepackaged film is positioned will definitely make the replacement process easier.
The Fisher-Price Movie viewer was also available in a hand-held version that resembled mom & dad's real Super 8 camera. It requires no batteries, you simply point it at a bright window of lamp and turn the crank. Both models turn up frequently on eBay, although prices vary considerably.
Visit Super8man's how-to page for full instructions
Browse Fisher-Price movie viewers on eBay

First up is Claudia Bestor & Tony Hall's look at the world of model trains, thanks to the members of the Pasadena
Model Railroad Club. Giles describes it as "a retro mix of old school hobby and those who
clearly enjoy it and a lovely example of a single cartridge documentary."
Yesterday I wrote
but the feed reel is replaced by a socket for the special film cassette. The idea is that you'd load up all of your home movies into special cassettes ahead of time, then just snap one in on home movie night and the show begins faster and easier than ever.
Projector cassettes seem to be a solution in search of a problem - I don't think that it's the threading up of the projector that kept people from making home movies. The fact that these formats are a rarity today is testimony to how uninteresting the idea was to amateur filmmakers. Then again, making this crucial step a little easier would make for smoother running on movie night, and allow your guests less time to make their escape between reels..
Some of these smaller magazine 8 cameras were marketed towards women as "fitting in your handbag" and "no complicated controls to master". Uh, okay - points for getting dad out from behind the camera, but let's be a little more enlightened about it.
Of all of my home movie gear, this screen may be my favorite. It's only 1" thick, and at about 31" wide it's small enough to store easily while remaining large enough for watching movies with a group. Since it's all one solid piece it never wrinkles. Being freestanding makes it surprisingly versatile, but the best part is just how darned classy it looks.
He explains the process: "The first step was to obtain the correct dimensions of Super 8 film, make a template, and arrange video frames onto the Super 8 template. To avoid the laborious task of cutting and pasting hundreds of frames of video, it was converted into the "filmstrip" format using Adobe Premier. In Photoshop, the aptly-named filmstrip was cut and pasted onto the template.




