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The truth about lemmings
Telling a story is hard. Filming nature is even harder.
That may be why, in the 1940s, Walt Disney productions leaned on movie magic to develop its True-Life Adventures nature documentary series. It built sets, shipped in animals from distant locales, and even made up facts.
One lie looms larger than them all. It's haunted the film genre for generations with a question: From classics narrated by Sir David Attenborough to today's fast-paced animal content on YouTube, is what we're seeing real or fake?
Prompted by a Reddit post, Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell go down the rabbit hole — lemming hole? — of deception in nature documentaries.
Show notes:
- The lemmings scene in Disney's White Wilderness (1958)
- "The Nature You See in Documentaries Is Beautiful and False" (The Atlantic)
- "The tricks that nature documentaries use to keep you watching" (Vox)
- Brave Wilderness (YouTube)
- Coyote Peterson's bullet ant sting (YouTube)
Guests:
- Alenda Y. Chang, associate professor in film and media studies, UC Santa Barbara
- Coyote Peterson, host of Brave Wilderness
This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.
