Watched this for the first time last night, really well done. I'd heard of it but somehow never gotten around to checking it out for whatever reason, even though like most of us here, I went through a phase where I had to see everything that Peter Jackson's name was attached to.
I think if I hadn't known going in that it was all bullshit I might have been fooled by it. The 'period footage' is pretty convincing even if it's presented in widescreen (which would have been a giveaway). The fact that they got Leonard Maltin and Sam Neill go on camera and play along is a nice touch too. The humor is there though - and they take things to pretty ridiculous extremes, what with 'Colin McKenzie' having built the city-sized set and captured the first person to fly months before the Wright Bros. did it in the USA.
The AB DVD has a featurette on in wherein Jackson and some of the others involved in the project talk about how it came to be and in there they note that there was a backlash when it was first shown on TV in NZ simply because people did fall for it.
I think if I hadn't known going in that it was all bullshit I might have been fooled by it. The 'period footage' is pretty convincing even if it's presented in widescreen (which would have been a giveaway). The fact that they got Leonard Maltin and Sam Neill go on camera and play along is a nice touch too. The humor is there though - and they take things to pretty ridiculous extremes, what with 'Colin McKenzie' having built the city-sized set and captured the first person to fly months before the Wright Bros. did it in the USA.
The AB DVD has a featurette on in wherein Jackson and some of the others involved in the project talk about how it came to be and in there they note that there was a backlash when it was first shown on TV in NZ simply because people did fall for it.
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