My Magic Cards

written for the stereosite by Katya Neklyudova, Canada

What kind of enter­tain­ment would you have as a Sovi­et kid grow­ing up in the 1980s? A cou­ple of dolls, clothes, and rags for the dolls’ dress­es; metal­lic con­struc­tor sets, the vinyl record­ings of children’s sto­ries; some cas­settes with pop­u­lar Russ­ian songs, and a bunch of film­strips (a 35 mm film with still images and cap­tions to be pro­ject­ed on a wall – no move­ment or sound!). These things were in almost everyone’s pos­ses­sion – at least, that’s how I remem­ber my friend’s toys. How­ev­er, I had some­thing very spe­cial – a set of stereo cards, along with a sim­ple stere­o­scope that looked like binoculars. 

Of course, back then I knew noth­ing about stere­oscopy, as well as the sto­ry behind those slides, oth­er than the fact that they were pro­duced in East Ger­many.  Each card fea­tured six stereo pairs, and to view them, you had to slide it into a view­er, and go from bot­tom to top – from the begin­ning to the end of a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry. In my ear­ly years I had only two cards. How­ev­er lat­er my lit­tle col­lec­tion grew, and even­tu­al­ly I end­ed up hav­ing 14 sets of stereo slide cards. Many of them were Broth­ers Grimm tales (Snow White, Rumpel­stilt­skin, Hansel and Gre­tel, Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood, etc.); I also had a series fea­tur­ing Ted­dy Bears and their adven­tures – how they go to school, hike, exer­cise, climb moun­tains, or even go to space! Out of the whole col­lec­tion, I loved the Ted­dies slides most of all, and in a way, they influ­enced my own tastes and likes. Space Ted­dies made me fall in love with the sci-fi sto­ries; the card show­ing them climb­ing moun­tains made me dream about the dis­tant places I have nev­er seen. And in gen­er­al, these cards broad­ened my imag­i­na­tion. We all know that many chi­dren cre­at­ed their own imag­i­nary worlds. Thanks to these stereo images, mine were almost tangible. 

For many years, these cards remained my only expo­sure to stere­oscopy. I had no idea that it exist­ed beyond this for­mat. Of course, after I start­ed tak­ing my own stere­os, I real­ized that these slides were pop­u­lar around the world, as a part of more glob­al process. I learned that peo­ple from out­side of the Sovi­et Union (and the East­ern Bloc coun­tries) are rarely aware of these East Ger­man stereo slides.

In the rest of the world every­one knows the View-Mas­ter Reels. After doing some research on my cards, I found out that my stereo view­er, named Stere­o­mat, was pro­duced in Kamenz (East Ger­many) in the 1970s. Orga­nized into the­mat­ic series, each of the cards had a code mark­ing a cer­tain sub­ject (for exam­ple, TS ‘Ted­die Serie’ for Ted­dy Bears stere­os, ZS ‘Zoo Serie’ for the stereo pho­tos of ani­mals, MS ‘Märchen Serie’ for the fairy tales, etc.). 

Accord­ing to one of Russ­ian col­lec­tors (https://cccp.livejournal.com/24777.html), TS and MS series cir­cu­lat­ed wide­ly in the Sovi­et Union, while oth­ers were less well-known. My col­lec­tion con­sist­ed almost entire­ly of these series, with the excep­tion of one ZS card. This was actu­al­ly one of the first cards I had ever had, with the stereo images of ani­mals from the Berlin Zoo. You can see that these slides were viewed (and han­dled) by a lit­tle kid, and there­fore, their qual­i­ty is not the best. 

Anoth­er card from my ini­tial set fea­tured a sto­ry of a naughty mouse, who, after steal­ing a piece of ham, is chased, and even­tu­al­ly cap­tured by his bud­dy. This exam­ple demon­strates how elab­o­rate these stere­os were! Now, as a stereo enthu­si­ast, I can see how well the sense of depth was used, and how inter­est­ing and orig­i­nal the set­tings of this sto­ry were. 

Inter­est­ing­ly, when I got more stereo slides as a gift sev­er­al years lat­er, I found anoth­er card that evi­dent­ly told the same sto­ry, only this time, the lit­tle thief man­ages to escape. How­ev­er, his greed­i­ness is pun­ished by an upset stom­ach, and the sto­ry cul­mi­nates in more didac­tic ending. 

The Broth­ers Grimm tales were extreme­ly pop­u­lar among Russ­ian kids, and there­fore, imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able.  No won­der that this series was exten­sive­ly rep­re­sent­ed in my per­son­al col­lec­tion! I would like to share a cou­ple of stereo pairs from Rumpel­stilt­skin, the sto­ry of a miller’s daugh­ter that became a queen, a vicious gnome whose name nobody can guess, and an evil deal.

I also have a card that does not real­ly match any of the cat­e­gories. It is about a day in the life of a dri­ving school’s stu­dents and instruc­tors, start­ing from the moment that they come to the class, to the moment when they pass their tests. My guess is that, since this card is from the MS series, it is prob­a­bly based on a children’s sto­ry or an ani­ma­tion film. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I could not find the source of these slides. 

Final­ly, here are my most favorite cards, fea­tur­ing the adven­tures of Ted­dy Bears (the TS series). Again, I do not know if this series was writ­ten and staged specif­i­cal­ly for the stereo slides, or the cre­ators based it on some exist­ing sto­ries. I think that these are breath­tak­ing exam­ples of how mas­ter­ful the Stere­o­mat team was. From the care­ful­ly designed set­tings to the use of depth, from the cute and lov­able ted­dies to the amaz­ing light­ing. Back then, when I was a kid, I firm­ly believed that these beau­ti­ful scenes indeed exist­ed some­where across the sea, and my dream was to climb these moun­tains, and maybe even go into space one day.