View Masters From Outer Space (in 3D!)

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I think that my favorite old photos of Disneyland are the ones you find on View-Master reels.  Through the magic of stereoscopic photography, you get a perspective that you can't get any other way.  And the older they get, the more fun it is to (re)capture that "you are there" feeling.

Stereoscopic photography uses special double-lensed cameras, thereby replicating the two images received by your two eyes and producing a pair of photos that provide a 3D image when seen through a special viewer, or even "free viewed" without any device at all if you're adept at the skill you use in order to see "magic eye" images.

This kind of photography is nothing new.  It's been around since the middle of the 19th century.

As an interesting historical note, many Abraham Lincoln photos were taken as stereographs.  There are less than 135 known photos of Lincoln, and only nine of them were marketed originally as stereographs, but many "regular" photos of him are simply the left or right side of photos shot with a stereoscopic camera.  Stereoscopes were still a bit of a novelty in the 1860's, and photographers sometimes found it more profitable to print up one side of the stereoscope and sell it as a conventional portrait.  Sometimes the stereoscopic secret was not discovered until much later, when a sharp-eyed observer noticed minute differences between photos thought to be identical, and it was discovered that they were actually right and left sides of a stereoscopic image.  The two could then be recombined and the stereo effect recovered.  Some of those lately-recovered 3D images are among Lincoln's best-known portraits!

This would obviously be appropriate content for a Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln blog, but what does it have to do with the Haunted Mansion?  Well, the same thing happened to the Mansion that happened to Lincoln.  When the HM opened in 1969, they took the extant New Orleans View-Master set (three discs, 21 pictures) and trimmed seven shots out of it so that they could devote the third reel to the HM.  Those seven pictures are the only officially released 3D images of the Disneyland Mansion.  For the WDW View-Master set, they kept six of the seven the same and simply swapped out the exterior shot for a shot of the WDW exterior.

Very nice set.  But these six interior shots were simply the ones they selected to use in the View-Master reel.  The photogs took a lot more than six!  What happened to the rejects?  Well, a lot of them were perfectly good photos, and so Disney kept them in their files and continued to use the left or the right sides for post cards, souvenir guides, magazine ads, etc.  Looking at these, I have detected small differences between identical-looking photos and recovered at least three "lost" View-Master 3D shots of the Mansion interior, all taken in 1969.

This first one I have posted before.  In this case the stereoscope is the same as one of the View-Master shots, but I think it's much better quality than the VM version (see above).  One side is from a post card, the other side from a Panavue souvenir slide.

In this next case, one side is from Gordon and O'Day, Disneyland: Then, Now, and Forever (2005: Disney Enterprises), p 124 . . .

...and the other is from a 1970 ad in Vacationland magazine.

I had to colorize one of them.  Behold, the graveyard band in 3D:

This Death Coach shot is probably my favorite 3D shot of all.  The depth of field is amazing.  Actually, I have found three similar but slightly different photos of this scene, so I suspect there's a fourth picture floating around out there somewhere, and that there were at least two stereoscopic photos taken in succession during the same shoot.

You can also cheat and create your own 3D stereoscopic photos by clever juxtaposition of consecutive (or near-consecutive) stills from video footage when the camera is slowly sweeping horizontally and the subject matter is not moving too much.  Here are a few favorites I've created in that manner.  If you are able to do the "magic eye" thing, these should be no problem, but everyone's different, and you may need to drag them to your desktop and play around with the size.  Also, some people have better luck by reversing the photos and using a "cross-eyed" method.  Me, I can't do it that way.