Amazingly good condition 1920s International Mutascope featuring a rudimentarily animated "movie" of Babe Ruth taking his famous swing. Today these things are used mainly for "peep shows" but the Mutascope was a major technological advance when discovered by William Dickson of the Edison Company in 1895. Similar to Edison's Kinetoscope, it used individual frames of film printed on pieces of cardboard and mounted consecutively on a wheel. The machines quickly caught on, but by the '20s it had already become the vehicle for cheap thrills in penny arcades such as in episodic features like "What the Butler Saw", but also to convey moving images of ballplayers few people ever saw outside of a ballpark. Ruth, of course, was the perfect star subject, since he was larger than life. This Mutascope's header card titillatingly reads, "See Babe Ruth's Home Run Secrets" in red and black lettering on the yellow header card, above a grainy frame from the movie showing Babe in mid-swing in his Yankee uniform, in front of an empty grandstand with a shaving cream ad on it. The movie, which one could see through a viewer after dropping a penny in the slot, was the full 5-second version of the swing, which one could speed up or slow down at will (a function we imagine was put to better use while watching "What the Butler Saw"). Mutascope is all original except for the header card which has been faithfully reproduced and the electrical cord which has been updated. Machine is in working order. Metallic drum-like chassis, as the header card, is painted yellow with red borders, with blue metal side bars near the base. Main frame is 14" tall, 13" wide and 8" across the top. Header card is 9 x 16". Viewer is blue, coin slot and turn handle slightly rusted gold. There are pennies that can still be heard rattling around inside the machine. Condition is remarkably EX with a few nicks and scratches and paint at near 100%. We're waiting for "What the Babe Saw" to come out.