I'm not going to spend too long on this at least
I don't think I am but this box has been sent to me by one of the people who supports me on
Patreon, a chap called Mike. He sent me a picture of something he said I might be interested
in and it brought back some childhood memories. So let me open the box and show you what I've got. So
this was one of my favourite toys as a child and I can't remember what happened to mine so I was
surprised to see one again after all these years. I've found it in the Argos
catalog from 1980 although some people will recognise these cartridges. These
Disney cartridges from their Movie Viewer system that originally came out in 1973 but this version
of a device that plays them this was from Corgi and it came out in the UK. I don't know if
it came out anywhere else and it was like a little kind of television with a remote control
but you can also project on the wall so let me open it up and I'll show you. Now it's been
a good 40 years since I've seen one of these but I remember the look of it very well, I also
remember it seeming a little bit larger when I was a child. I remember carting this around the
house with the remote control here, wired remote. I think this was a kind of reimagining of this
product for the video age in a way. The time when this came out people were getting video recorders
in their houses with wired remote controls so of course kids always like something that looks
like what their parents have whether it's a a small vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower those kind
of things. Well in this case it's mimicking your parents video recorder and television setup. Mike
definitely had more cartridges than I did for this device I seem to remember only having two perhaps
three. One of them was I think it was Donald Duck in a caravan going down a mountain pass and then
the other one I'm sure was Herbie the you know the Volkswagen Beetle. You can see how these
cartridges work here there's a loop of 8MM film so it just goes on there around there across
there and then back onto this side again and you can see here we've got a mirror and this
section's clear and then this section's frosted so effectively inside the machine a light will pass
through here hit that mirror there which will then shine onto the film at the front here and then
that gets projected out onto either the screen or onto the wall depending upon how you adjust
the aperture on the side of the device. So that is how they work but whether or not it does
work or not we're going to find out in a minute, let's just see what other titles it had available.
Now this is a European release of course so what we've got here are four different languages
but they're repeating the same thing so it says other available Walt Disney cartoon cassettes
and then in red those are the English ones. Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Dalmatians,
Pluto, Goofy, Mary Poppins, Robin Hood, Match of the Century, Herbie Rides Again, Donald Duck, The
Tortoise and the Hare. Now I say English I mean the thing's silent there's no audio on these at
all. The one that's a bit of an unusual one he's got here is the Incredible Hulk which it says
on the back of here other superheroes cassettes available. I like the way he's crossed out any
foreign languages no we will not have those and it doesn't say which ones but obviously there's
pictures of them so you can kind of imagine which Marvel superheroes we're talking about here.
Now the thing that I remember about this is that it took a heck of a lot of D cell batteries and
those were expensive back in the day that might be why it disappeared after a while I mean every time
you wanted to use this thing it would burn through those batteries pretty quickly and they cost you
quite a bit so I remember this is the thing to you know raise it up a little bit when you're
projecting it but I think that opens it up and then this should just pop open, there
we go. Right so what's that? Six D cells. Doesn't seem like a big deal nowadays but six
D cells were pretty expensive for a child to source back in the day and parents would soon get
bored supplying them with more and more of them I don't think you can plug this into a power
supply anywhere, no. Okay, well fortunately as an adult now I can afford D cell batteries
so let's put some in and see if it works. Living large with the Alkalines Amazon basics. Now
Mike hadn't tested this because he didn't have any D cells in his house so I really don't
know whether this is going to work or not. Let's put that one in first of all so you
can see how it fits inside the machine. Okay moment of truth. Nothing, yeah nothing at
all. Hello maybe it's just a bad connection. No it doesn't want to play ball does it looks
like we're gonna have to open it up after all. Okay so we've got inside, as suspected
there's quite a bit of empty space in here. This is the main unit really that does all the
work so if you look on the right here you might be able to just make out there's a white wheel
on the right hand side and that is what connects with this on the cartridge which advances the
film. Now on the other side of that wheel on the outside is this plastic wheel and there's
a rubber belt which travels over to this wheel and there's a rubber belt from that
wheel down to the motor in the bottom. If we can get this powered up there's a very good
chance it should work. Now there are two wheels on the top here this right hand one that's the focus
it just adjusts something in the tunnel here, moves the lens forward and back but that's the
bulb, light from that travels down this tube here and depending upon the position of this wheel
the light will either bounce off that mirror and shine out of the side of the cabinet here
so you can project your image on the wall or if the mirror is in that position the light
will travel down here, bounce off this mirror which then travels across here bounces off this
mirror and projects on the front of the case. Now I don't know if you can see
this but these mirrors are rather misty. Over the years they've fogged up a bit so
they need a bit of a clean I've got the various tools here to do that but yeah if we can get it
working, definitely clean the mirrors that might help improve the image a bit but i think the
first thing to do is to see if we can get this whole thing operational by putting some power
into the wires on the battery compartment here. Right let's flip the power switch see
what happens. Oh that's good news, oh and that's not such good news. Looks like
the bulb's gone. Yep bulb's dead probably a good opportunity to replace that with something
a little bit brighter hopefully they do a like an LED bulb that would fit in there. I assume
you take this screw out to remove the bulb let's find out. Yeah there we go. Okay looks like I need
to find one of these or something very similar. Okay I've ordered a bulb it doesn't have this
magnifying lens on the end but hopefully it'll do the job it's about as close as I could get.
So now I want to move on and clean these mirrors. Well it's better but it's not perfect,
I think that's as good as I'm going to get with that though. Next we've got
this mirror at the back this is easily removable so I can clean this one up
a little bit better than the others. Yeah a bit better but again not
perfect. Just shows that you can't improve these too much they're very poor quality
mirrors but this is about as good as I can get so we'll stick with that. Now next we've
got this screen and this is intentionally fogged so we don't want to clean all that off but
we just want to make sure we get rid of any dust. Okay thanks to the magic of editing it's now
four days later. My various spares have arrived including the LED bulbs so let's have a look
at those first. Now these are multi-voltage bulbs they had quite a wide range of voltages
you could feed into them without any problem. I got two of them just in case one of them
was faulty. They don't have the little lens on the top to focus the light but I'm hoping
it's going to work let's pop it in here. First off let's just see if it fits. Now the
other one was just sort of slotted in there they weren't screwed in. A bit of a tight fit
I might have to cut some of the plastic away, but uh yeah let's just let's just
leave it there like that and I'll switch it on and see if it lights up. So
let's put the power through, there we go. Right okay well that's a good start, I just
need to cut a little bit of plastic away from this just to let the front of it fit
in because the other one was more tapered towards the front whereas this is a bit
fatter where that white plastic ring is. There we go perfect fit. Okay one last test. Okay that's fine. Now I wonder if
there's anything I can do about these rubber belts. I noticed it
was slipping a little bit and at one point one of the belts fell off, which kind
of gave me the impression that maybe it's going to do that once I put it back together again,
which wouldn't be ideal. So you see that is that just feels a little bit loose that one
then so yeah that's not doing the job is it? So this one's a little bit smaller so we'll
start at this end this time, pop it on here. Now you don't need to worry about
square belts being twisted I get people emailing me saying you put the
belt on twisted with square belts it doesn't matter they straighten themselves
out. So let's just switch this on now. It definitely seems better with that new belt on
there so let's see if we can find one that would would fit the rear. Let's try that. Seems okay. You can
tell it's a lot quieter as well. Okay so let's pop this back in here. Right so
there's these holes at the bottom and there's appropriate parts here which fit in there
so let's just pop those two things together. Okay I think we should give this a test so
what I'll do I'll project it on the wall as we don't have the screen on the front
so I've adjusted that on the side there we'll turn it this way around and um put a
cartridge in here. There we go right let's turn the lights down and see if this does
anything oh yeah definitely something there. So there you go that was as exciting as things
got when i was a kid. A few issues there obviously not very bright although I seem to remember from
being a child that it wasn't very bright either. There's one thing I want to sort out before
putting the lid back on this and it's the power issue. At the moment this is supposed to run
off six D cells, nobody really wants to do that and besides that all the battery connectors have
snapped off and they're loose. So rather than mess around with any of that, just bypass it, run
the thing off a DC power jack. So I'm going to put that in the back, make a hole here somewhere
and wire it up to the connectors on the inside Well it's a pretty shoddy soldering job, but
they're attached so that's all that matters. Now I've noticed there's a bit of a crack
up here so I'm going to glue that together with some epoxy resin. I don't have to be
too neat with this because it's all on the inside but I could do with just getting the
things stuck together a little bit. I'll just put a big blob on the inside and then hold the
thing together with some tape while it dries. I didn't realize quite how broken
the fittings were for the case this is the only one that isn't damaged here
on the corner. This one has lost the end off it I've managed to find that part there and
then these two are snapped off at the base and I've got those here so I'm gonna have to glue
all those back in. Okay it's the next day, this has dragged on way too long so let's just put it
back together these things are now glued in place. Now I'm really not sure whether that LED bulb is
bright enough but we'll test it out I'll turn the lights down here we'll try this cartridge,
Herbie Rides Again I'm pretty sure this is one of the ones that I had back
in the day. So let's have a look. Okay well the positives are that it's working.
The negative is that that screen is just way too dark. It's clear that that bulb is not
bright enough for this one or at least not focused enough for it to work properly so I'm
going to have to go shopping for a different bulb. I could get it down to well freeze frame like
that which is something I used to like doing as a kid you could just run these things in slow
motion you could also run them in reverse as well. But these clips I think they're only like a minute
or two minutes in length it's not very long at all in fact let me time it from
the time the car does a wheelie there and see how long it
takes to come back around again. Yeah so it turns out it's approximately a minute. This is what we had for entertainment
when I was a child. The Quibi of its day. I did go through all the cartridges to see if
any of them looked significantly better than the others but they didn't. Now this is one
of the films I do remember having with mine. That one I recalled that had a caravan in
it on a mountain pass that was actually a Mickey Mouse film I've looked it up called
Mickey's Trailer and that wasn't included with these carts. Now some of these films
were a little bit the worst for wear with quite faded colours and a couple of them couldn't
be properly focused either. But talking of faults I've got to apologise for the variable audio
quality throughout this video. I ran into some microphone issues which only became apparent
once I started editing the footage together. It's these cartridges that are really the star
of the show though they made super 8MM film kid proof as well as easy to use. Unfortunately
the cases are sealed and as they aren't mine I can't snap them open to have a proper look at the
mechanism. However you can see how all they need is a rotational movement on the wheel in either
direction to advance the film one frame at a time. Very simple but resilient and effective. It's
no wonder that these were used in many different toys over the years. As well as my motorised
Corgi system with its wired remote control, Mettoy made the Disney branded hand-cranked movie
viewer and a similar device was also marketed under the Fisher-Price label and later under
the Kenner brand. Some of those later Kenner sets seem to command quite high prices and it is
a little bit bizarre that they made a one minute edit of the R or X-rated at the time Alien movie
to sell to children. As well as all these handheld devices there were a couple of similar products
to the Corgi Movie Vision. This Fisher-Price one had the same ability to project on the built-in
screen or externally, although the film in this one was still advanced by a hand crank and over
in the US there was also the Snoopy Drive-in. "When the game's called off and you're feeling sad
the Snoopy Drive-in Movie can make you feel glad. Three d-type batteries not included. Look out
Snoopy. I could even make it go backwards. Watching Snoopy's fun to do you can
get a groovy Snoopy movie viewer too. Kenner's new Snoopy drive-in movie and movie
viewers sold separately. Each with one cassette. These things were so widespread in the 1970s there
can't be many people around my age who won't have vague memories of one of the devices that played
these cartridges and you don't necessarily have to be that old as just a few years ago Fisher-Price
reintroduced a number of their classic toys as collectibles and the movie viewer was one
of the toys they included. Based on my past experience of replacing normal bulbs with LED
equivalents I would have expected that this would have been brighter than the
original bulb that came out of the machine and whilst it does look bright to the camera
and the naked eye, it's not bright enough once it goes inside the machine to properly light
up the screen or to project out to the side. So it looks like if anyone wants to get this
thing working properly they'd have to replace the original bulb with a direct equivalent. Now this
is an E10 with a focused lens on the front and once I put it under the macro lens I was able to
read the specs off it. It's 2.5 volts 0.5 amps, and after a lot of time hunting for a bulb that
matches those *exact* specs I've drawn a blank. I mean it's really easy to find plenty of bulbs
that match some of the specs but not one that meets all of them. For example I can get an E10
that matches the correct voltage and amps but only in the wrong shape and size and without the all
important lens on the end. Or i could get a bulb with the lens and the rest of the specs except for
the required brightness. So after much searching I've had to throw in the towel on this and leave
the quest for this elusive bulb to Mike to pursue if he wishes to. But I've got a feeling that even
with the correct bulb in place the image is going to be pretty poor regardless because of the state
of the mirrors. They're made from plastic and over the years they seem to have lost much of their
reflective ability and no amount of cleaning will help. They've just gone dull. Now if you had the
time, the skill and the patience you could perhaps replace all those original plastic mirrors with
new glass ones that you've carefully cut to size. But then again you've got to ask yourself the
question as to whether or not it's really worth spending any more time on this. After all, even if
this projector worked perfectly, you're still left watching silent Super 8MM, faded, blurred films
that are one minute long extracts from movies and cartoons that you can often source in full length
and in far better quality and with sound from perhaps a DVD a Blu-ray or a streaming service to
watch on your nice big television in your lounge. Sometimes childhood toys are best left as fond
memories because revisiting them as an adult has a habit of taking some of the magic away
from those memories. As to what to do with this now well that's down to Mike, I'm sending
it back to him with his new power adapter. It's in better condition than it was when it arrived
and he can just about watch his old cartridges on it now and no doubt seeing it working again will
bring back a few long forgotten memories for him just as it has done for me. But that's it
for the moment as always thanks for watching.
Oh gosh that kicked off a wave of nostalgia! Great video as it answered a question of how the system worked which I was curious about as a kid
I had the FP version.
As always, enjoyable to watch. Didn't even notice how my clock skipped 20 minutes.