View-master reel Asterix et Cleopatra

I recently acquired the view-master reel of “Asterix et Cleopatra“. A view-master is a toy from my childhood that allowed you to view stereoscopic images. It shows your left eye a slightly different image than your right eye and your brain creates a 3D effect. The red view-masters are probably the most recognizable. One problem for me, I don’t own a viewer.

A quick search on the internet told me that it isn’t very difficult to digitize the slides with a dia scanner. It just happens that my old flatbed scanner has a dia scanning feature. The slides are very small and they come in pairs. On each side of the disc there is a slightly different image for each eye. Several websites told me scan in a high resolution, so that is what I did. There are also lots of tutorials on how to recreate the stereoscopic images for all kinds of 3D viewers … I will leave that to the enthusiasts. I will later scan all the slides and upload them here.

Slide

Here is an example of a slide that I scanned. It shows Artifis the villain of the story and some Egyptian workers talking in hieroglyphs. Because of the high resolution the scan isn’t very clean. That can also be an age thing of course. It would require some additional image processing to clean up these images and one can wonder if in that case just scanning the album isn’t a lot easier.

Booklet

The three view-master discs come in a container that also acts has a booklet. There is a little story for each slide. A single view-master disc has twelve images, but since there are two images for each eye, it effectivly gives you six slides. With three discs this gave the creators 18 slides to tell the story of Asterix and Cleopatra. The text is of course in French, which I will try to translate later as well.

Gallery