It started with grunge and ended with Spice Girls; Di died, Clinton didn't inhale and the All Blacks were poisoned. On screen, Ice TV and Havoc were for the kids and a grown-up Kiwi cinema delivered a powerful triple punch. Tua's linguistic jab proved just as memorable, Tem got a geography lesson and Thingee's eye popped and reverberated around our living rooms.

NZ On Screen's Car Collection is loaded with vehicles of every make and vintage, as a line-up of legendary Kiwis get behind the wheel — some acting the part. The talent includes Bruce McLaren, Scott Dixon, Bruno Lawrence, a clever canine, and a great many bent fenders. Onetime car show host Danny Mulheron tells tales, and picks out some personal favourites here. 

This early short from The Most Fun You Can Have Dying director Kirstin Marcon follows a driver (Sophia Hawthorne) in the aftermath of a car crash. She — almost — pulls a badly-injured victim from wreckage in rugged bush and tends to him, but behaves strangely when another motorist arrives. The film presents shards of the relationship between victim and 'rescuer', but never enough to undercut the effectively mysterious tone; metallic blues and greens flavour the film’s unexpected moral code. She's Racing won a Silver Plaque at Chicago Film Festival (2000).

Kōrero Mai used a soap opera (Ākina) as a platform to teach conversational te reo Māori. In this fifth season opening episode, Tini (Stephanie Martin) and Quinn (Kawariki Morgan) deal with the aftermath of the previous season's climactic car crash. Presenter Piripi Taylor introduces phrases like 'Ana e tā' (yeah man!). This season of the award-winning Māori TV show had 120 episodes, screening from Monday to Wednesday, then repeated. The directors are actors Rawiri Paratene (Whale Rider) and Rachel House (Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and cinematographer Simon Raby.

This documentary uses archive footage and interviews to tell the story of motor-racing legends Bruce McLaren, Denny Hulme, and Chris Amon. The trio topped podiums in the sport's 'golden age' — one of those eras when unlikely Kiwi talent managed to dominate a truly global sport. The Team McLaren racing team that four times Grand Prix winner Bruce McLaren founded in 1966, has been the most successful in Formula One. That same year McLaren and Amon teamed up to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in 1967 Hulme was Formula One world champion. 

New Zealand’s first CGI short film gives “eyes on the road” a new meaning as a pair of eyeballs drive to a mind-bending purgatory. A collaboration between visual effects man John Sheils and his brother Michael, Scream was shot in early 1991; finally 25 minutes of footage was “brutally” edited down to three, and fulsomely scored by John Gibson. The sly ‘based on true events’ title-card nods to the makers’ ambitions to “treat animation like live action.” In 1994 it screened in NZ cinemas as opener to the ILM wizardry of Jim Carrey hit The Mask, followed by a number of overseas festivals.

This long-running reality series, made for TVNZ, follows the lives of dogs and their handlers: "fighting crime, saving lives", and helping protect New Zealand’s streets and borders. The very first episode sees the dog squad diffuse a street brawl in Manurewa, nab a runner from a crashed stolen car, and bust a visitor trying to smuggle contraband into Waikeria Prison in the Waikato. Plus avalanche rescue dogs are trained at Mt Hutt ski resort. This first Dog Squad series was produced by Cream Media (the company was taken over by Greenstone TV in 2010).

Colin Broadley was part of the Kiwi soundtrack during a decade of dramatic change. A DJ on NZ's first pirate radio station, he was also hunky star of Runaway, the first local movie in 12 years. In 1986 'whatever happened to' style series Then Again found him in the Coromandel, where he was tending bees and living back to the basics. Broadley talks exciting times on the Radio Hauraki boat, and inside a cell; the perils of kissing Bond girl Nadja Regin in the Opononi mud; a near-fatal crash; visits to China, and his belief that modern day economics and land use are unsustainable.

In this 2013 short, a possum-trapping nature boy is challenged when a woman moves into a house on the edge of the bush, looking for a fresh start. Cinematographer Ginny Loane captures the wintry central plateau landscape where the fable of life and death plays out. Director Leo Woodhead co-wrote the script with Paul Stanley Ward; the result followed Woodhead’s short Cargo (2007) to the Venice Film Festival, and won the Jury Prize at the 2014 Hong Kong Film Festival. Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) called it “a well structured, beautifully shot narrative.” 

This award-winning telefilm imagines the effects of a major earthquake on New Zealand’s capital city, and how its citizens react to chaos, death, isolation and tsunami. It was completed in 2008 — before Christchurch took Wellington’s mantle as NZ's shakiest city, and made Aftershock's imagined scenes a reality. Aftershock was produced for TV3 by The Gibson Group, and written by veteran screenwriter Graeme Tetley (Out of the Blue, Vigil). The following week saw the debut of Aftershock - Would You Survive?, which put a real-life family through a three-day survival test.