KING KONG vs GODZILLA BATTLE OF THE BEASTS (Movie Viewer Cassette A008, Fascinations, 1988)

 

A few years ago, a random auction turned up on Ebay that included several loose cartridges for a movie viewer of some kind.  It included this KING KONG vs GODZILLA one, which was really strange.  I tried my best to research it, but very little information could be found at the time, and it appeared this item was never sold in the United States...which has turned out to be false!  Here is the history I have pieced together since then:  at some point in the late 1970's, a movie-viewer toy appeared. It was battery-powered, and was the descendant of the old hand-cranked kind from the earlier 1970's (such as famously made Fisher-Price, and fondly remembered by many a former tyke).  This first powered product was called "Mini Movi," and was made by a company called Apollo and sold around Europe.  Apollo's cartridges included cartoons, animation of Marvel superheroes, and, somehow, this KING KONG vs GODZILLA BATTLE OF THE BEASTS title.  Packaged photos of Apollo's Godzilla title are nowhere to be found, unfortunately, but here is what their product looked like, below.

Next, Galoob steps in, and buys the product outright, to offer in the United States as "SNEAK PREVIEWS" (terrible name) in 1983-84:

Apologies, but you will note the front and back examples don't match, and are from different cartridges! But you get the point.

It does NOT appear that the Godzilla cartridge was part of the Galoob line, which is interesting.  This toy came and went, and the product next appeared as the "Micro Movie Viewer," made by a company called Fascinations, from Seattle, Washington, in 1988.  This, too was offered in the United States, but now the Godzilla cassette was back in the lineup! And finally, a carded example has surfaced at last, which I was fortunate enough to pounce upon like a rabid lioness!  For completeness, here is what the Fascinations viewer looked like (which came in several colors):

Fascinations continued to make the product for several years, but eventually, of course, it would no longer be cool for kids to carry around a bunch of short films to watch on a pocket viewer that burned up AA batteries, and the idea seems to have finally died out.

As you can see from Fascination's list of other titles available, the makers intended to have more than public-domain cartoon clips (badly misspelling "Popeye"), and even included some "educational" titles such as a bridge collapsing (wait, what?).  

One thing I should point out is, these things are much smaller in person than you would think! The backing card for this is 3x5 inches!

Getting back to our subject at hand, what was the contents of this Kong and Godzilla cassette, exactly? A logical guess would be, perhaps, the American trailer for the film? Let's see, the U.S. release would've been 25 years old by that time.  Movie trailers always seem to fall through the cracks when it comes to public domain, but I guess that would be a question for Universal.  Or, it could be that the makers of the original cassette (which I guess goes back to the first manufacturers, according to a list of titles I found) just didn't care.  

What probably needs to happen is, a trustworthy blog with a historical bent needs to get hold of a lot of these cartridges that includes a loose Godzilla one, and make it available somehow for posterity!  Kenner's Star Wars viewer (that was based on the Fisher-Price hand-cranked one) turned out to use 8mm film inside their cartridges, which made those films possible to convert...so who knows.  I will add that project to my list, because that one may take a while!