30 October 2008

The Lemming Suicides

Oh, holy hell. I'm sick of learning things I'd just rather not know. I really need to learn to pay less attention to everything around me (which, actually, might take some work because I'm pretty spaced-out as it is).

So, today I learned about the seedy world of wildlife documentary fakery. How so many classic scenes in famous wildlife documentaries are completely fabricated and do not reflect reality. The worst offender is Disney. (This is hardly breaking news, but I still want to comment on it).

Aside: I remember the first summer Cricket & I worked together, she would occasionally talk about how much she disliked Disney, because they perpetrated lies about nature. The example she gave was about how lemmings will commit mass suicide. She said Disney made this up. I knew next to nothing about terrestrial mammals, but I thought to myself, "How can they just make something up? Wouldn't people call foul? Could Disney be so bold?" Little did I know.

My point is that Cricket was right, and Disney faked the lemming suicides by flinging the little lemmings off a cliff! This baffles me to no end. I mean, if it was a real phenomena in the first place, then faking it would at least make sense (albeit a cruel and evil sense). But if it's something they made up to begin with, then had to devise a way to fake it to make it look real...WTF? I mean, what went on in those pre-production meetings? "Nature is so boring! It needs more death! But not regular circle-of-life shit, I'm talking something more senseless...suicide! This film needs more suicide!"

So, for those of you, like me, that hadn't actually seen it, I give you the infamous footage of Disney's lemming slaughter, filmed on location in Alberta. Because Alberta has lots of lemmings and ocean access (again, WTF Disney?)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, obviously they didn't have Animal Care permits to obtain back in the '60s. I can't imagine how their permit application would look -- "Erm, we need to throw about a thousand live lemmings off a cliff and then film them while they panic and eventually drown. Why? Oh, we need to popularize a myth that has no basis in fact."

-Oz

Anonymous said...

There's also a famous scene of a "cute" polar bear sliding down a hill in one of the documentaries. It turns out that Disney brought the bear to the top of the hill and pushed it down. And after the cute part on video, the bear smashes into some rocks. Awwwwwww!