Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Show And Tell


A curious EP on the Mono Gram label via Pickwick International back in the 60's . One assumes you bought the combined record player TV/slide show thingy and then bought the records which include a plastic strip with tiny transparencies embedded into it to play on your machine. One side is the story of How The Whale Got It's Throat - part of the Just-So stories by Rudyard Kipling and the other side is an excerpt from Saint Saens "Carnival Of The Animals".

Wikipedia says -

"The Show 'n Tell was a toy combination record player and filmstrip viewer manufactured by General Electric from the 1950s to the 1970s.
It resembled a television set, but had a record player on the top. Records and slides were sold for it in combination. The slide strip, which was a flat plastic key 8 inches long containing a strip of 16mm color film, was inserted into the top of the device. As the record played (typically telling a story), the slide strip, through which the images were projected on the screen, would automatically advance to illustrate it. The mechanism by which the slide advanced was purely mechanical, and was based on the rotation of the turntable, so proper operation required manually spinning it a few revolutions before beginning the presentation.
It also functioned as a standard record player, able to play 16, 33⅓, 45, and 78 RPM records through its built-in speaker.
The Show 'n Tell was also sold as the Show 'n Tell Phono-Viewer by CBS Toys, in the early 1980s, under the brand name "Child Guidance." These devices, which were drastically redesigned from their earlier version, only had two speeds (33⅓ and 45), and could not play full 12" LPs. However, the Phono-Viewer could optionally move the projected image off the built-in screen and onto an outside surface (such as a wall or screen).
Licensed film strip and record packages were produced for many different children's properties, including Disney and Sesame Street."



Show & Tell - How The Whale Got His Throat

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