In large part you can blame the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness for that. I know what you're thinking, "Can't be, I've never even heard of the movie." Apparently word gets around, because I hadn't heard of it either but always "knew" that lemmings jumped off cliffs to escape the traffic and road rage of urban lemming life. The nature documentary shows a scene with a supposedly real cliff-jumping mass lemming suicide. Disney said it was a real suicide scene taken place in their native Arctic home, so why should we believe any different? Well, in 1982 Bob McKeown determined that the lemming scene was not filmed in the Arctic, but rather at Bow River near downtown Calgary. He was also able to learn that the lemmings did not leap from the top of the cliff to
escape the long lines at Starbucks, but instead were propelled into the river by a rotating platform installed by the film crew.It makes you wonder why Mickey Mouse would do something so horrendous to a fellow rodent, doesn't it? Consider this, the film won an Academy Award.
*No animals were hurt during the writing of this blog-- except for two mosquitoes, but they don't count because they were asking for it.*
2 comments:
How do u find out all this cool stuff? I must admit that I'm sorrly disappointed in Disney. Do you know if the lemmings were rescued, or did they die?
I find out all of this "cool" stuff simply by questioning everything I know. Remembering back to when I was a kid, I admit my mom did have to ask me on occasion if I'd jump off a bridge just because everyone else did- and I replied, "No, I'm not a lemming!" So even then I "knew" that lemmings would commit mass suicide. It just didn't strike me until many years later that I didn't really know what a lemming was. So, I looked it up and BLAMMO- Disney conspiracy. I guess I can't say that the Disney company actually knew what was going on at the time. This was a documentary and you had a couple of guys in charge out there with a crew making all the calls. I hate to tell you, but as far as I can find, the lemmings were left to die as it made for more dramatic footage. On the plus side, there were far fewer lemmings used than what we saw. Fancy camera work was used to make it seem like more.
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