A Short History of View-Master’s Woody Woodpecker Packets
A look at the changing nature of children's art and culture between 1951 and 1964 (and again in 1988).
One brief coda to my recent series of posts about the artist Montyne (including a brief bio I wrote about him) is that it made me look at all the View-Master packets I had related to Montyne, of course, but also, accidentally, all the ones I had that related to Woody Woodpecker.
When I looked through my resources, I discovered that the earliest Woody Woodpecker reel was produced in 1951, called “The Pony Express.” With scenes sculpted by Wah Chang (artist credits per the book View-Master Memories), the story and style are in line with what we’d expect from 1950s View-Master reels, including a fixation on the “Wild West” (it permeates nearly every entertainment packet of the 1950s) with a little cartoon-style violence.
In 1955, other Woody Woodpecker and friends reels followed. They were released both as single reels and as a three-reel set: No. 821, Woody Woodpecker in “The Bill Collector”; No. 822, Andy Panda in “Mystery Tracks”; and No. 823, Chilly Willy in “No Fishing.”
The three-reel set, released as “Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda and Chilly Willy” (as an early unnumbered packet and later with the factory number B510), was designed by Martha Armstrong and Blanding Sloan (Wah Chang, referenced above, was Sloan’s adopted son and they owned a production company together in the 1940s! I’m obsessed with learning more about that, too).
In the 1955 iteration, stressed-out uncle Woody Woodpecker is being hounded by a bill collector and uses his nephew’s roller skates to exact his slapstick revenge. It’s wholesome and decidedly 1950s in tone, including having oddly grown-up suburban adult problems in a kids’ entertainment product.
Montyne’s take on Woody Woodpecker debuted around 1964. And it was different!
In last week’s write-up, I noted that Montyne’s Woody Woodpecker View-Master reel was odd to me for several reasons. For one it was a new take on an existing packet, a total reworking and a bit of an odd choice by View-Master standards. They re-issued all the fairy tale reels in the 1950s with much higher quality scenes than they debuted with in the 1940s. But when quality wasn’t an issue, they re-packaged and re-issued the same reels for decades on end, sometimes swapping out photos but rarely reworking an entire sculpted set!
The art for Montyne’s Woody Woodpecker reel was done in a hand drawn-style with mostly paper elements placed in the frame to create a 3D effect (like a pop-up book) when photographed. Also? It was a bit more violent and also oddly sexy, especially for a Woody Woodpecker story:
For more on Montyne’s boundary-pushing View-Master art, see last week’s post.
Rumor has it (according to foremost View-Master historian Mary Ann Sell), the brass at View-Master didn’t really dig Montyne.
We know that Montyne worked for View-Master on contract jobs for about three years, and his last packet (Tarzan) came out around the time GAF Corporation bought View-Master from Sawyer’s Inc., in 1966. And we also know that Montyne and family moved to Las Vegas by 1968, and began to work on statuary for the Circus Circus casino. We don’t know when he secured that work or when he started on those statues.
But we do know that twenty years down the road, after the endless cost-cutting of the GAF years (culminating in putting out inferior film stock that quickly fades to pink around 1977), View-Master was sold to a group of investors in 1981 who reconstituted it as the View-Master International Group, which had a somewhat successful run in the 1980s.
And, in 1988, VMI re-released The Woody Woodpecker Show set in what’s known as a blisterpack (the introduction of the hanging packet meant that View-Master products could be hung on common pegboard hooks and no longer needed a specialty display at retail).
The weirdest thing about this re-release? It includes Montyne’s take on both Andy Panda and Chilly Willy (a truly delightful reel, I highly recommend), but it didn’t include Montyne’s version of Woody Woodpecker. Instead, VMI threw it all the way back to 1951 and the earliest Woody reel, The Pony Express.
You’d be surprised how many old school View-Master employees and artists stuck around through decades of tumult at the company. And that some of those folks chose to throw it back to the 1951 Woody Woodpecker reel is telling.
When it came down to Montyne and View-Master? I think the stuff he produced was simply a little too adult in tone for the kid-friendly brand.
Take this example from his Tarzan packet:
Based on the Instagram comments I got in 2022? I’d bet this scene caused a bit of a stir back in 1966!
I agree: I like variety and I also find it interesting to see that there are many approaches to the work. Thank you for sharing this history. I went on to look for and found entire cartoons of Woody Woodpecker on YouTube. Hadn’t seen one since the 60s! Brought back fun memories, especially Woody’s laughter! 😂
Yeah, not a fan of Montyne’s work. Too realistic and almost like looking at an anatomy textbook on human musculature. I prefer the happy, bright style of anything by Joe Liptak, among other View-Master artists. I appreciate Montyne’s artistry but find it more fitting for Las Vegas than for a peek into Woody Woodpecker’s adventures 😁