Grand Canyon or ... Dora the Explorer?

Fisher-Price's announcement that the company will no longer produce scenic View-Master wheels fills me with a pang of nostalgia.

As a baby boomer in good standing, of course I had a View-Master, with a bunch of the wheels. Those things were great, because you could see places you're probably never going to visit in dazzling, 3-D color.

You just might remember what I'm describing here. These wheels have (give or take) seven images, 14 tiny photos (actually miniature slides), and you load them into a cheap plastic viewer. The wheel typically has two notches, which tell you where to start viewing -- when they're in the up position in your top-loaded viewer, you're good to go. To see the next image, you click on the viewer's slide. The twin slides gave each frame a 3-D effect, just as twin speakers give you a stereo effect. In fact, the viewer and wheels were first sold to promote 3-D photography.

I think my View-Master was also one of the toys I did not dismantle as a kid. I can't tell you how many Etch-A-Sketches I've torn apart because I was mystified how they worked (the usual result is a gigantic mess of some possibly-toxic gray powder). But the View-Master, there's really nothing to dismantle. What's in there? The workings to the advance lever? Low tech at its finest.

But these wheels fell victim to our instant-gratification, animated, gotta-have-action society. You could go onto a computer and see just about anything you want to see (and probably some things you don't want to see) live, in action, and all that. The View-Master wheels? Boring, kids say. And the sales figures showed that much.

Fisher-Price, a division of Mattel, stopped making the scenic reels in December. But the View-Master is not dead; the company is still marketing reels of animated characters like Shrek (I know who that is) and Dora the Explorer (I'm drawing a blank here). OK, pop-culture marketing.

Maybe it's my age, but I think I'd rather check out views of the Grand Canyon, the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and the Pacific Northwest than Shrek.

Oh, well. Another casualty of our times.