For more than a decade, passengers at New Zealand ’s Wellington International Airport have boarded flights below the figures of two giant, hovering eagles from the Hobbit films, one bearing a bellowing wizard Gandalf.
With 15m wingspans and weighing 1.2 tonnes, the sculptures that hover in the terminal have delighted tourists and scared children since 2013. Their tenure was eventful — one became unmoored from its fixings during a severe earthquake in 2016, and plummeted onto the terminal floor below. No one was hurt.
However, this month the majestic creatures, which underscore the city’s connection to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, are to depart the terminal for good, Wellington airport announced yesterday.
Photo: AP
“It’s been quite a Lord of the Rings-heavy storytelling theme in here,” airport chief executive Matt Clarke said. “Now we’re looking to change that to something new.”
“It breaks my heart,” said one traveler, Verity Johnson, who sat beneath a grasping eagle claw in the food court yesterday.
The sculptures had impressed her since she was young.
Photo: AP
“Please, please reconsider,” she said.
“Taking them away is un-New Zealand,” joked another airport visitor, Michael Parks.
The eagles were crafted by the film props and effects company Weta Workshop, which created tens of thousands of props for the Oscar-winning fantasy films directed by Jackson. The movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novels generated billions of dollars in tourism revenue for New Zealand and employed thousands of people in Wellington over the 15 years of the movies’ production.
However, during the years the eagles have hovered in the terminal, Tolkien tourism has waned in Wellington — although the city will perhaps always be synonymous with Jackson’s films. Guided tours still convey fans to the settings of famous scenes from the films and to visit production companies such as Weta, which will create a new display for the airport, to be unveiled later this year, Clarke said.
Travelers have until Friday to admire the birds, which will then be put into storage, Clarke said. He hopes the creatures — which each feature 1,000 3D printed feathers — would find a home at a museum.
“It’s a spectacular thing for little kids to see,” Clarke said. “Even your old, grizzled businessmen, they still pull out their phones and take a quick cheeky photo, too.”
Wellington Airport is not losing its quirky side. An enormous sculpture of The Hobbit’s gold-hoarding dragon, Smaug, is to remain overlooking the check-in counters.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS