Johnny Lingo

Yesterday, Stella and I went to a filming of The Legend of Johnny Lingo; it was a private screening organised by Tahitian Noni International (with whom Mareike Bellersen works), who had also partly funded the production of the film. (I suppose it was a kind of promotion because noni and noni juice and mentioned and shown a couple of times in the film.)

It was a pleasant film, I thought; the story and the emphasis was different from Johnny Lingo which I had seen as little boy in church as a Stehbildfilm[1], but it was noticeably the same underlying story (both based on the book Johnny Lingo's Eight-Cow Wife by Patricia McGerr).

Afterwards, Bellersens were kind enough to drive us home.

An interesting point was the name that the elder gave to the little baby who had been washed ashore in a canoe and who was considered a gift from the gods (but which god?): it sounded like "Tamaliki 'o Tangaloa" to me. Going by Niuean cognates, that sounds to me like "child of [the god] Tangaroa".

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[1] Not sure what these are called in English—film strips? A strip of film that's threaded into a projector that shows one still frame at a time, a bit like connected slides; along with it, there's a compact audio cassette you put in a cassette recorder and which contains the music and narration, interspersed with beeps that indicate that the film strip has to be turned one frame forward (and occasionally, the person operating the projector would get out of synch and would miss a beep or go two forward by mistake).

At any rate, they were a staple of my early Church life; quite a few films were only available (to us) in this format. Whether it was because VHS wasn't widespread or because this format was easier to dub or what, I don't know. But church videocassettes came only a bit later.

I wonder whether kids in 10 years' time will be watching church DVDs instead. Or maybe 20; I'm not sure how quickly the Church is going to replace its equipment in the meeting houses :p