Star Wars hit our screens in the early days of the home video wilderness, and though there was lots of cheap merchandise associated with the film, getting a home copy of the movie itself was a real investment. Home movie enthusiasts could find "highlight reel" versions of Star Wars on Super 8 film, or you could watch an even shorter version using this toy movie viewer made by Kenner.Kenner already had this movie viewer toy in their catalog before Star Wars came along, so it was relatively easy to create a Star Wars cartridge to snap into the viewer (they also had a projector model). The operation is easy - you simply hold the viewer up to a light, and the crank moves the film along showing a short compilation of several scenes from the blockbuster movie.
The scant 45 second cartridge manages to cram in plenty of stunning special effects shots, the droids, and the climactic (spoiler alert!) lightsaber fight. This Movie Viewer is mine from when I was a boy, and from the condition of the film, I clearly watched this highlight reel a LOT. This was the first time that I could watch footage backwards and at variable speeds, so this device was probably my first exposure to the idea of analyzing a film - as only an 8 year old can.
Movie Viewer type toys are pretty much gone today given that a child can just get a full quality DVD of a film, and even watch it on the go using a cheap LCD player. Even dedicated children's formats like VideoNow aren't significantly different from their original sources. That said, I remember really enjoying having even a little piece of Star Wars that I could watch as much as I wanted. I guess that's called "on demand" now...
3 comments:
I don't remember ever seeing that in the house... You probably hid it from me 'cuz you knew I'd break it. (I used to break and/or lose a lot of stuff. It drove JPX mad. One of my earliest memories is opening a jawa and within 5 minutes accidentally dropping his gun down the drain.)
Yeah nothing's changed, I still have to hide my things!
You owe me one Jawa gun.
My favorite little brother toy-bashing story is when I came back from college and decided to retrieve a couple of Super Powers figures I'd left behind and all I found was Dr. Fate's forearm.
The cool thing about those viewers is the BACKWARDS thing. I loved that! You had total control with that crank; you could spin it back and forth really fast and watch the characters move like those people on Sesame Street who would assemble letters from huge pieces of red foam.
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