NZ Film ArchiveThis lunch­time, I popped down­stairs & around the corner from the Wel­ling­tonista Towers, to the NZ Film Archive & spent a fas­cin­at­ing wee while brows­ing their cata­logue of VCRs & DVDs.

I tried pick­ing the brain of the tech­ni­cian on duty in the Media Lib­rary, but he was just reliev­ing & had sketchy inform­a­tion at best to impart.

But the cata­logue is user friendly, and there were lots of ter­min­als avail­able.

So after spend­ing 10 minutes brows­ing through all man­ner of old list­ings, com­mer­cials, TV pro­grammes, fea­ture & short films, cor­por­ate pro­mo­tions and home movies…

I settled on a small col­lec­tion of old TV com­mer­cials, includ­ing the ori­gin­al Fruju ad, the Moro Man, Give Fluffy to Me (I was at school with that guy & I tell you, if a flight attend­ant that looked like that, had said “meeow” to me like that… well… ahem… prob­ably very little would have happened), and some start­lingly homo­erot­ic ads for some­thing or oth­er fea­tur­ing a lot of well known (in their day) rugby play­ers & well known (in his day) Wel­ling­ton pub­lic­an Tre­vor Snowden…

I really need to take a month or so off & go through the lot & get back to you with the high­lights…

Any­way, well worth a look if you’re wan­der­ing past that way.

In the exhib­i­tion rooms, they had some old com­puters & some archiv­al foot­age of the Rain­bow War­ri­or affair. Fas­cin­at­ing!

The New Zea­l­and Film Archive