Here come the Yanks!

April 12, 2010 5:27 AM

American soldiers wounded in the Pacific War recuperate in New Zealand (and check out the women). American Marines mop up in Guadalcanal. US Marine baseball players put on an exhibition game for New Zealanders, to everyone's apparent bemusement. WWII propaganda films made by the New Zealand Film Unit, curated and digitized by Archives New Zealand.

These films were part of the Weekly Review series of newsreels, shown in New Zealand cinemas towards the end of the war. Archives New Zealand will be steadily adding to the corpus this year. Warning: contains racism, dodgy humour, cringe-worthily "British" accents (believe me, no-one speaks like that anymore), terrible incidental music, and baseball hatred.

posted by Sonny Jim (6 comments total)

This goes well with the current running of HBO's The Pacific (which isn't as good as Band of Brothers, but is still pretty good).
posted by grubi at 5:38 AM on April 12, 2010

Looks interesting, but way slow to load.

I love old propaganda films. I don't know if it's the oh-so-earnest narration, the self-conscious acting or what. Just fun.
posted by madajb at 8:50 AM on April 12, 2010

This goes well with the current running of HBO's The Pacific (which isn't as good as Band of Brothers, but is still pretty good).

Well spotted, Sir! It looks as though the first clip at least went to the front of the digitization queue because of The Pacific's current TV screening in New Zealand. Oh, and I guess I should have said: [via].
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:02 AM on April 12, 2010

It's interesting how distasteful I found the episode of The Pacific where the troops party in Melbourne considering that my family was still in Europe getting killed by Nazi's and weren't Australian yet when it happened. Although they only paid it lip service in the episode I could really see how emasculating it was for the local men to have an "invasion" of well paid soldiers come and impress all the women and how incidents like The Battle of Brisbane came to happen.
posted by Silentgoldfish at 12:39 PM on April 12, 2010

Man, constantly moving and shifting sidegrounds on that site is incredibly distracting and laggy.
posted by Evilspork at 12:11 AM on April 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Well Auckland never had a good fire or earthquake to help it along"

Maybe we'd have better broadband had we had more fires? If you're outside NZ you might find the youtube site easier to use: http://www.youtube.com/user/ZilnTV
If you're in NZ and using Telstra, Ziln downloads are not metered BTW.

I'll pass on the lag ciritcism, the govt is builing some tubes to fix thi.The focus of Archives New Zealand and the National Library into the future is the digital challenge of getting more information available online. The government is going to provide the pipeline, with the rollout of ultrafast broadband across the country..

"It's interesting how distasteful I found the episode of The Pacific where the troops party in Melbourne considering that my family was still in Europe getting killed by Nazi's and weren't Australian yet when it happened."

Yeah, I agree, especially when you consider the relative trauma the world wars caused to our country, in light of what some say is our nation's inability to let it go.
posted by BAKERSFIELD! at 6:22 PM on April 28, 2010