The New Zealand Film Archive

This 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