Polaroid redux. I’m serious.

An Austrian entrepreneur and Dutch engineering manager walk into a bar…

I know the cleverer of you in the crowd are looking for some sort of fabulous punch line to chase away the midmorning muffin sugar crash yawns. But there is none. Unless, of course, you see the revival of Polaroid film as a joke. Which I’m sure is hilarious to those of you of the digerati class old enough to feel uncomfortable owning the Vanity Fair with Miley Cyrus on the cover.

Florian Kaps, an Austrian entrepreneur and the man behind the Polanoid.Net, and Andre’ Bosman, an engineering manager at the Enschede Polaroid plant in the Netherlands, hatched a plan to revive the instant film institution when they met over beers at the Enschede plant closing party. I would have loved to have been there for that conversation.

Mr. Kaps: “So now that the Polaroid is out if business, what do you think you’re going to do.”

Mr. Bosman after a long sip of beer: “I’ve decided to not get upset about no longer being a Polaroid employee and reinvent myself as a Polaroid employee. You want in?”Apparently the $130 million of machinery to manufacture film cassettes for the SX-70 land camera was set to be cleared out of the Enschede plant a few days after its closing. If Mr. Kaps wanted in, he was going to have to move fast. So he raised 2.6 million dollars and peppered Polaroid with requests to release the equipment to him.

Under normal circumstances Polaroid would have had a board room belly laugh. But, Tom Petters, head of the Petters Group Worldwide, a private equity firm, that had bought Polaroid’s name and assets in 2005, was getting hauled off to prison by the American feds for running a Ponzi scheme and owning a copy of the Vanity Fair with Miley Cyrus on the cover.

So with passion and tenacity Mr. Kaps, Mr. Bosman and about eleven other Dutch scientists are out to reinvent the instant film processing formula that was somehow misplaced at a golf tournament after Polaroid closed their US plants. As absurd as this all sounds I think these guys have a hit on their hands. There is certainly no market for the traditional consumers of Polaroid, namely the entertainment and advertising industry. But Polaroids have a unique, difficult to duplicate look, and there’s money to be made in having a global monopoly over a niche market. I wish them well.

Special thanks to @JSturr on twitter who suggested this weeks column topic.