The basics of producing a stereophotograph of real life places were well-established by the time the View-Master arrived, but producing images of imaginary scenes was a bit more involved. [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble] took a look at how the fairy tale and media tie-in reels may have been made.

Staring with simple dioramas, View-Master eventually developed an entire team to work on fairy tales. One of the most influential members was sculptor [Florence Thomas]. She was instrumental in updating many of the original fairy tale reels from small scale miniatures to 1/6 scale dioramas for the scenes. Unfortunately, the department was eventually cut and all the original miniatures thrown away.

Before VCRs, View-Master was the primary way people could interact with their favorite TV shows and movies when they weren’t being broadcast. TV shows could be photographed while in production in Hollywood with a stereo camera giving great visual detail. Some cartoon and movie reels were less engaging, having been made from promotional images, giving more of a paper cutout appearance rather than “real” 3D. In either case, many of these visual techniques have been lost with little documentation on how they were achieved.

We previously covered [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble]’s History of the View-Master and how you can digitize the disks for posterity.