[1] Source: "The Love That Wasn’t: Breeding Giants in Captivity." Educational film, 1967.
[2] Submitted by: Drayven Fultch. Retrieved from a defunct television archive sold to a Sandwich factory in 1989.
[3] Uploaded to the archive: March 3, 2025. NotstalgiaArchive.org
Background
The educational film "The Love That Wasn’t: Breeding Giants in Captivity" (1967) is a dry and dull account of two boring pandas failing to mate. There is little to add beyond that.
Initially held by the British Zoological Society, the tape was misfiled in 1979 and ended up in a government warehouse, where it was briefly examined for potential Cold War intelligence.
After years of study, it was determined that the footage contained no actionable insights into Soviet breeding strategies, at which point MI6 offloaded it in a departmental raffle.
The winner was an Italian diplomat on an undercover visit, who transported it back to his residence in Rome.
Unfortunately, his involvement in a minor financial dispute with a local crime syndicate led to his belongings being seized as collateral. The mob, under the impression that the tape contained sensitive information, sent it to an associate in Eastern Europe, where a mistranslation led to the belief that it was a valuable commodity related to "pando" (a term mistaken for classified materials).
This resulted in a brief but intense bidding war, ultimately ending in Denmark, where the tape spent several years as a doorstop in a municipal office.
During a police raid in the early 2000s, the tape was mistakenly seized along with contraband and transferred to Iceland's narcotics investigations unit. There, it languished until it was included in a retirement gift for a long-serving officer who, coincidentally, relocated to Sandwich, UK, to run a bouncy ball factory.
When the factory faced bankruptcy, the owners opted to defraud customers by replacing shipments of bouncy balls with objects of similar weight.
Through this elaborate scheme, the tape found its way to the Notstalgia Archives, where it was finally catalogued on March 3, 2025.
The footage remains as unremarkable as ever.
Further reading
https://archive.org/details/zoosoftheworld/zoosoftheworldreel1.mov
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