How to Hack a 1970s Fisher Price Film Viewer (Tutorial) Super 8

Hello, welcome to the unpopular archive. I'm JC. This is a FisherPrice film viewer and I made a film installation with it. I'm going to show you how. I was at the end of a decade of purging. I had come out as non-binary. My sense of my own identity was changing and part of that was changing my relationship to the objects that uh I tend to accumulate in great volume which is how I can have this YouTube channel. So, I sold and donated what I could. that left a bunch of large objects. What can I do? Well, I can burn things. You can get a burn permit on any farm. And uh had always had this in mind as a thing to do and it turned out to fit really well. I say I paid between 10 and 30 bucks. I might have gone up to 30 through marketplace. You find them in Value Village now and then. They're everywhere. Um, and they are cartridge-based. You have these little yellow cartridges. They used to come with one called, um, Lonesome Ghosts, which was a Mickey Mouse short. A lot of Disney, um, Sesame Street, Charlie Brown. There was this run in the 70s where they were very popular. And then, of course, shortly after the '7s, you got VCRs and this kind of this kind of thing became completely irrelevant. Basically, you've got got a silent version of a Hollywood film. Uh you uh have the the crank which advances the film after you focus. There's a couple little plastic lenses in here that you have to put your eye right in. So, you need to take off your glasses. And there's a crystal, a clear plastic part um that refracts the light in to a clear part of the cartridge. So you can uh you can put any Super Eight film in this, but they they were printed to run at five frames a second. You can run it slow, you can run it fast, you can run it uh backwards. It runs backwards fine. or you can just you can just sit and stare at a still frame all day. So, this is really for people who know how to shoot Super Eight film already and are looking for new ways to show it. If you want to know more about Super Eight, I suggest you check out my excellent uh neighbor up the Highways channel, Analog Resurgence. Fisher Price were the masters of tough plastic kids toys which were practically indestructible. But some things are destructible. I assume there's some kind of rubber washer in there that keeps the tension on the focus. And what will happen if that washer has dried out or whatever? You will get instant focus drift. You will you won't be able to keep the focus and you'll have to literally keep a keep your thumb up there or something while you crank in order to watch it. So that's no good. Sometimes [laughter] these things have been attacked by dogs. What the the crank involves a uh rotating piece which is held on by a plastic pin. They can pop off in which in which case you're left with this. You can get a get one that looks great like this. Um but the crystal is missing. That renders it um worthless really. uh except pop out the crystal uh and glue it into this one because like I said, this one except for the missing crystal is otherwise in good condition. You can also have ones with chewed uh chewed gear wheels on here. Uh it works on a sort of a eight stud system. There are eight uh rounded studs in there that are on a strip of plastic that is uh designed to uh to force upwards as the cartridge comes in. And uh this ramp is designed to uh facilitate that. At which point uh when it reaches the bottom, the eight studs connect to the holes in the red thing, which uh doesn't work if they've been chewed off. Frown face. So, these ones are useless as cartridges, but the film in them is still accessible if you want it to be because it's possible to open the cartridges. So, we have three cartridges here. Out of the six that I produced after two festivals, three of the cartridges have problems. This one is running okay, but it's a little long. Um, with these you have to kind kind of guesstimate what's a what's an appropriate amount of film you can fit in before it starts to bog the loop down, which we're going to get to soon. So, this one this one is too long. This one broke and this one is jammed. Now, I should also talk about chiseling these open. These ones because again, they're designed to be indestructible. They are glued together, but basically uh you start on this end because it's a it's a little more loose and you have to kind of pry it and pry it along both sides. And what I used for that was a paint scraper. I f found that was skinny enough but uh stiff enough that that that I could lift it up and uh and crack it open along the sides where the glue kicked in. And when you get down to here, uh, you have three studs that are holding it together. And those studs are actually glued, too. Uh, so you have to get something a little heavier and longer in there to kind of give it a pop. It is tough plastic, but it's also surprisingly flexible. I never had a a situation where these shattered outright. Although the uh when you take them off the sides are not completely perfectly smooth. They will be they will be jagged. So don't get confused about which back goes with which front. And when you open them up, here's what they look like. You've got uh got a loop here. The viewing loop is elevated from a well in the uh cartridge where the film sits and it sits around a uh a spool with a bottom on it that that rotates freely just enough to reduce friction. The head comes from the middle down the left side and comes in through here through the gate. This is what's this is what's called a gate with the with the two uh rollers on it which are spring-loaded from the other side. But there's no way to open that side without uh without breaking this thing off entirely. So you've got one sprocket wheel running both film both sides of the film in each direction. You can you can see uh the uh circuit that it's designed to move the film through once it comes up from the middle. And uh there are guides here. So basically, you want the outside loop running outside this guide, and you want the inside loop, just the first piece that's heading heading into the pathway running over that. So when you're putting it back on, you have to do a kind of jimmying routine where Okay, first first I start with the flat part. First I push the outer loop out that way. Then I catch that one. And then you kind of uh shake it down into position. And uh you should know pretty quick uh when you put it in the cartridge if it doesn't if it doesn't work or not. It basically just won't run if the mechanics are wrong on the inside. The way we watch it on a projector is heads out. The the the beginning of the film is on the outside of of the uh reel. This one the uh head because it has to come in from the middle is is heads in uh it is in the middle of the loop. And that means that the uh the loop of the film as it is uh purchased and uh run in every other circumstance is reversed and you're you have to backwards wind all of the uh you have to backwards wind the film against the uh the curl. You you have you have to uh re put the whole thing into reverse basically which means the emulsion is facing outwards and I will use this to tape it together. Um, which brings us to an interesting thing because the problems with these other ones uh arose from [sighs] I suspect when I look into them, I'm going to find out they rose from friction on the sides down those narrow pathways coming right down here and through a tight sprocket path. um that's going to be hard on the tape and it's going to pull at it. So, there's film glue, there's film cement, it's called. Look at this film cement you could use instead of uh tape. Why wouldn't you? Well, because I live in Canada and I can't get it shipped to Canada and I can't find any. This crap was for celluloid. So you could This is This is again old stock and oh it's turning milky and probably isn't any good anyways. So you can see that it's it's sitting kind of loose around the middle. That's good. That's what you want. But you want it to you want to wind it a little tighter than it's going to ultimately be so that the uh so that you can let out a little slack while you're feeding it through the mechanisms. You need to tape it. And you need to let out enough slack before you tape it. With the uh other end of the loop safely put through the sprocket, I then put this one through. You have to really come at it on a diagonal to get it to get it to come down in there. align the sprockets so that it's caught and everything should stay in place from that point. You'll notice I brought out just enough film to get around the the splicing block. And uh I have to actually invert the film, put it upside down in order to get it on the block. You want a minim the minimum amount of slack that you can have to do this operation because you then have to walk the slack back to uh recreate your uh appropriate size loop at the gate. And you chop. Press that tape down with a blunt end of something. Then I'm going to take out the outside loop and walk it back enough to get the uh film sitting properly in the gate. There you have it. It's back in place. the uh the loop is consistently good. Um and the loop down here as well. So now when I put it together, like I discussed before, you use the flap part to push out the uh outer loop that guides it. And then the peg on the inside sits in between the inner loop feed and the larger loop. And it seems to be sitting. And I give it a run. seems very loose. What did I do wrong? So, I I had to do some trial and error stuff since this one I was not getting the registration properly and I was trying to figure out if it was in the loop up here, if that was too tight or too loose, if it was the loop down here, if that was the wrong shape. tried these two others. Got them running great. You want to hear that click sound forward and backwards when it's in. I wasn't getting it on this one. I was getting it backwards, but I wasn't getting it forwards. And then I decided to take out the gate and inspect it. And I think what has happened here, you have two tiny little plastic dots on either side of the gate that are you that that go up into the sprockets and provide the registration. I think what I have here is a little uh that one of the one of the uh pokées has uh been broken off here some way or another. So, I'm going to have to poach one from a different cartridge. Uh again, these things are not expensive. Uh they're not rare. They're easy to find. So, if you're lacking a part, hopefully you can accumulate enough of these things that you can pull one from another and get her going. It works. In fact, I'm touring it uh this summer out in Eastern Canada. So anyone from uh Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia, or Newfoundland uh for that matter, Sierra Michel Magdalins, if you want to book a show, uh let me know. Uh we'll be we'll be touring this around as shown in the uh the pictures from its uh first two showings at the Mighty Niagara Film Festival and the 8Fest in Toronto, both in November of last year. And what I am also going to do with the film that I took out of these in order to stuff them with the uh burn footage uh is uh I ganged all of the uh original films onto a uh Super Eight reel and I'm going to be digitizing those and sharing them on this channel at a uh future date. I am sure there are aspects of this that I did not cover in their entirety in my spiel. So, uh, chime in on the comments if you have any questions or, uh, ideas. And again, don't forget to like and subscribe. And of course, [ __ ] Ice.