Along with the 18 inch tall action figure, Kenner Products released a board game and a hand held movie viewer in 1979. The movie viewer features a grey casing and a white manual crank handle mechanism. It was distributed with a single removable red 8mm movie clip cartridge. The ALIEN cartridge contains a condensed 1 minute version of the movie titled, “ALIEN TERROR”.
MegoMuseum forums member mazinz, successfully transferred the footage from one of these 37 year old devices via iphone to YouTube. Taking into account its age, the rough and janky content of the transfer is still amazing. Further consideration of worthy note as it was captured using a mobile phone mounted onto the viewer. Here is the footage retrieved from the old viewer:
More recently, AvP Galaxy forum member, Elmazalman, using mazinz raw viewer footage as a guide, re-edited clean content from the movie to reconstruct this item with steady clarity. Along with editing the reconstructed piece to match the original as much as possible, the ratchet socket sounds of the original 37 year old movie viewer have been retained along with the emulated aspect ratio to give us this reconstruction of the old footage for the Digital Age:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKfanwuaUIc&feature=youtu.be
The result is kind of cool, to say the least.
These old movie viewers originally appeared in 1975 and continued to appear throughout the late 1970’s. At the time digital mass market consumer entertainment technology didn’t exist and domestic VHS video recorders were new technology costing over $1000. The cartridges were interchangeable and Kenner made a decent range of them. Starting with Snoopy cartoons, they continued with Hannah Barbera animated content the following year. The Six million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman television shows followed and eventually Star Wars cartridges would also be released on the hand held crank handle format.
The last movie viewer item Kenner manufactured was “ALIEN TERROR”. Only a single cartridge was ever made based on the movie and Kenner ceased creating movie viewers along with any other merchandise for ALIEN soon after this item was released in late 1979. Contrary to some claims, the end of the product’s run was not due to an R-rated movie being marketed at children but rather fell victim to the increase of VHS entertainment becoming prevalent throughout family homes.
-Windebieste.
