London Zoo Discovers Hundreds of Old Film Reels Featuring ‘Zoo Oddities’ and Animal Celebrities
Zoo officials are looking for experts to help preserve and digitize the decaying film canisters, which date to between the 1960s and 1990s
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Sonja_headshot.png)
The archives of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hold countless intriguing artifacts, including souvenir soaps shaped like polar bears, an ostrich egg from the 1930s and—as employees recently discovered—more than 200 mysterious film reels. Now, officials are looking for experts to help digitize the fragile rolls.
Employees of the wildlife conservation organization, which runs the London Zoo, have been sifting through storage rooms, searching for interesting items to mark its upcoming bicentennial. As Tina Campanella, ZSL’s bicentenary project manager, tells the Associated Press, “We have no idea what [is] on these incredible old canisters, which range from between the 1960s to the 1990s.”
“There are clues as to what could possibly be on them, but very cryptic clues,” Campanella adds. “One of them here, it just says, ‘zoo oddities.’ I have no idea what that could be. Then we have ‘giant panda mating.’ So, maybe [we] take a deep breath before we watch that one.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/cf/80/cf80afb3-cf5b-40f5-8977-8ad8b5f65424/494116578_1102555191918416_5248738739747281705_n.jpeg)
As ZSL archivist Natasha Wakely tells the AP, the archive is “vast and fascinating, as you can expect for an organization that’s been running for 200 years. But one thing we were really missing was footage. And that’s why this project to digitize our film reels is really exciting.”
In 1826, British colonial official Stamford Raffles founded ZSL, which opened the London Zoo a few years later. The zoo established the world’s first reptile house and aquarium in the mid-1800s. In 1962, ZSL lent an endangered Arabian oryx named Caroline to a herd in Phoenix, Arizona, marking the first international cooperative breeding program.
The zoological society also has a rich broadcasting history. In the 1950s, the BBC was filming two ZSL zoologists in Sierra Leone for the channel’s “Zoo Quest” program when the team hit a snag: One of the zoologists had fallen ill. That’s when a producer named David Attenborough stepped in as presenter. The program marked the first television appearance of the world-renowned naturalist.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d5/ca/d5caf3d1-a0cb-4e98-a36b-0f072780c7b8/494538463_1102555175251751_3455495973912162881_n.jpeg)
The newly discovered film reels were likely shot around the same time that ZSL was collaborating with major broadcasters to make a program called “Zoo Time,” writes Miles Kempton, a zoology historian at the University of Cambridge, in a blog post for ZSL.
“We think most of these reels come from the 1950s and ’60s, the decades that saw the birth of natural history television, spearheaded by the Zoological Society of London’s groundbreaking work with the BBC and ITV,” Kempton says in a statement.
Some of the reels may have been broadcast, while others may have been used as educational tools, as Campanella says in a video. Without the “skill or the expertise or the kits” to digitize them, the ZSL team is looking for experts to help.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/49/9e/499e0686-3492-46d6-b252-d60a5bd8c73b/494604535_1102555151918420_3322219973499042936_n.jpeg)
The reels’ labels include “underexposed bat film” and references to animal celebrities such as Chi Chi the giant panda and Congo the chimpanzee. Chi Chi was captured as a cub in China and became a permanent resident of the London Zoo in 1958. After dying of natural causes in 1972, she was taxidermied and donated to London’s Natural History Museum.
“Chi Chi is such a rare and iconic specimen in the museum’s collections,” museum conservator Claire Kelly said in 2019. “I remember hearing about her as a child.”
Meanwhile, Congo was a prolific artist. In the 1950s, “Zoo Time” host Desmond Morris provided the London Zoo chimp with art supplies. Within a few years, Congo produced some 400 images with pencil and paint. As Smithsonian magazine’s Jason Daley wrote in 2019, Congo didn’t create any “representational art,” but he did “appear to have some chops when it came to abstract work, favoring a radiating fan pattern.”
Time is of the essence to digitize ZSL’s newly discovered collection of film reels. Per the statement, some of the film has already been affected by a type of decay called vinegar syndrome, which is characterized by brittleness, shrinkage and a sour odor.
“These reels could hold some exciting snippets from the early days of wildlife broadcasting,” says Kempton in the statement. “If they are not digitized soon, their contents may be lost forever.”
