View-Master

View-Master was a hugely popular hand-held stereoscopic 3D full-color image system. First sold in 1939, over 1.5 Billion reels have been produced. Production has pretty much come to an end in these days of cellphones and VR devices, but for a period of several decades, these toys were state-of-the-art.

Each pack included three reels. Each reel had 14 slides, being 7 stereoscopic scenes with a left-eye and right-eye image-pair. So that's 21 "scenes" for a complete story.

The physical slide itself displayed a very brief caption for the scene, and the accompanying booklet contained a slightly longer description including dialogue. A later enhancement to the format added a tiny plastic audio record to the disc, with a sound track. The audio playing-version required batteries and was much more complex. It wasn't hugely successful, and the simple "silent" version remained the dominant format.

Marvel was pretty disorganized back in those days when it came to licensing, and so the first Marvel View-Master reels didn't appear until 1977. Naturally, when Marvel did finally hit the View-Master, Spider-Man was among the first to feature in the line-up.