This slide advertised  'Frosty Jack' ice cream- a Wellington brand which was sold from 1924 to 1967. Like many local companies it had a limited distribution- 'Frosty Jack' didn't even get to the South Island until the 1960s. However, this effort may have caused the company to lose money and they sold to a larger firm who then stopped making ice cream a few years later.

As early as the 1930s 'Frosty Jack' trays were being used in cinemas during the weekend matinee screenings which were popular with children.  This slide asks the patrons to 'call the boy'- with carrying the ice-cream tray a popular first job for many schoolchildren.

Many of these cinemas would have been independent ones- Kerridge-Odeon ended up owning its own ice cream brand for its theatres.

Take a look at the boy on the slide- it looks as though the ice cream is giving him some brain freeze! 

MAVtech has a 'Frosty Jack' ice cream tray in its collection and you can see it on Kete. Just search for 'Frosty Jack'.

This is not the slide you would want to see projected on the screen before your film started! The sound track of analogue films ran beside the images (asides from a few very early, very seldom used systems) so if the sound track was damaged there was little which could be done. Luckily it only impacted a few minutes of footage in this case!

In some cinemas this was more likely to happen. In very early New Zealand cinemas a reel of  short films would move from one operator to the next and if you were the last cinema on the line the images would be worn from all the previous screenings. Some First World War newsreels were played into oblivion and no longer survive (although these did not have sound...)

In the United States of America some theatres host 'second run' screenings of films which have already been used by regular cinemas. These 'discount cinemas' often have films with slight imperfections due to their age (Titanic was screening in these budget theatres six months after its release date!)

These boxes were sent to the managers of local theatres decades (in one case even around a century) ago! In them were slides promoting upcoming films which were projected onscreen during the intermission.

From the 1910s big cinema chains began appearing in New Zealand and they competed for the rights to show overseas releases. At a time when a town Foxton's size had two cinemas this differentiation was important for business. 

Some of these boxes bear the names of Aotearoa's big cinema names like 'Kerridge'. The 'Pacer-Kerridge' alliance was founded in 1987 making the upper left box the newest of the assortment seen here. By contrast, the Paramount logo seen here was phased out in 1967!