A Path Finding Effort: Situating the 'Willy Willy' Experiment in its Pride of Place in Nigerian Film History

Filmmaking in Nigeria is said to have peaked at a certain point after which it dwindled and eventually collapsed. It is also true that film became popular again in Nigeria with the production and box office success of the film Living in Boudage in the early 1990s. Yet, there was no period of interregnum between the periods of the dwindling of the fortunes of film and its re-emergence in the video film format because certain experimentations continued with the video format. Unfortunately, these experiments that laid the foundation for the emergence of the video film industry only get glossed over in some scholarly papers. Herein precisely lies the purpose of this paper- a detailed study of one of such experiments by Prof Innocent Chinyere Ohiri through his Hot Cash series. The aim is to determine the main contributions of that experiment to the development of the film industry in Nigeria and place same in its rightful perspective and pride of place. Hot Cash, which showed on NTA stations in the early 1980s, satirizes some of the societal ills with particular reference to ritual money and secret cultism. The work relies on the documentary materials and interview with Prof Innocent Ohiri for data. It concludes that Hot Cash made great contributions to the re-emergence of the Nigerian film industry. It is therefore recommended that such detailed studies be conducted on the other such experiments with the video format in various parts of Nigeria before the making of Living in Bondage.