MoviePaks are plastic cartridges holding Super 8mm film inside of it, spliced together in a loop to play continuously on a specially made rear projection machine. The MoviePaks we came across were manufactured by Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corporation as well as Dumont Instrumentation, Inc., had magnetic stripe soundtracks, and the color had seriously faded to red. We approximate that these date from the early to mid-1970s. These are also mostly duplicates of films and are not the only copy that we have in our holdings, although you may across something unique on a MoviePak (the only extant copy of an organization’s training film or something).

These cartridges are pretty awful and the film can get snagged, scratched, and the perforations scraped away very easily (despite the film being made from the more durable polyester plastic base). The only choice is to crack it open, cut the loop where its initial splice was made, and slowly and carefully reel it on an appropriately sized reel. Super 8 film is like a wily teenager and will do what it wants to do: just anticipate and be patient. And clear your calendar.

I hope you enjoy our video we made of how best to relieve the Movie from its Pak. Don’t forget the middle screw! Performing this feat is our new intern, Lauren O’Connor. Lauren is not wearing gloves, as suggested by her supervisor, since she thoroughly washed and dried her hands multiple times, and because the “gloves had to come off” for dealing with snot-nosed Super 8mm film. The music in the video was downloaded from the Internet Archive and is a 1922 recording of Ladd’s Black Aces playing “I’ve Got to Have My Daddy Blues” (because MoviePaks can certainly give you the blues).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxNzbvZZR5w&feature=youtu.be

<<Siobhan Hagan, AV Preservation Specialist