Desert Living in The Living Desert

Fifty four years ago today, Walt Disney released the first True-Life Adventure feature film The Living Desert. With its cactus-perched bobcat and square-dancing scorpions, the film launched yet another successful chapter in the history of the Disney Studios. Especially notable is the fact that RKO, Disney's distributor up until that point, balked at releasing The Living Desert, asserting that there was no market for longer form nature documentaries. Walt and Roy Disney were quick to show RKO the door and Buena Vista, an in-house distribution division was subsequently born. The Disney brothers were quickly validated in their decision; the film would gross over five million dollars on a budget of approximately $500,000, and would also win that year's Oscar for feature length documentary.

True-Life Adventures veteran writer and director James Algar explained the genesis of The Living Desert in a 1968 interview:

"Living Desert came about in this way. A young man from UCLA came in and showed us about 10 minutes of film that he had made as a thesis. Because it had to do with nature and we were then making nature stories, he brought it here. This was a boy named Paul Kenworthy. And this was one moment when Walt spotted a thing instantaneously; it sounded very exciting. Kenworthy's sequence was the story of the wasp and the tarantula. It was a very-well-covered, very-well-photographed, thorough going account of how this wasp stings the tarantula to a state of paralysis and lays its eggs inside the body of the tarantula. The tarantula is in a state of preservation, and when the wasp's young hatch, they then feed on the tarantula and become new wasps and fly off. This was a little complete short story right out of nature, and the boy had done it well. And Walt said, "Let's get hold of this young man and set him up out there and see if we can't find out more such stories about the desert and build a thing about the desert." And this is what happened."

Kenworthy would become one of two principal photographers on The Living Desert and ultimately go on to contribute his skills to subsequent True-Life films, most notably The Vanishing Prarie in 1955.

The Living Desert has any number of memorable moments, but a few stand out and those have become burned into the collective subconscious of the baby boomer generation. Dramatic confrontations--among them a red tailed hawk versus a rattlesnake, the aforementioned tarantula-wasp showdown, and two male tortoises jousting for the same potential mate. This harsher side of nature is offset throughout the film by lighter moments, most notably the comical, and occasionally criticized, scorpion square dance. Of that particular sequence, Algar noted:

"In Living Desert we had the material of the scorpions in their little mating ritual where they walk back and forth and circle. And the more we looked at that, the more it obviously felt rhythmic and the more we saw the chance of creating something interesting. This is one time where we actually created the music, and we set it to a square-dance routine. Now people tend to marvel, "Gee, how do you get those animals to perform to music?" where in truth you get the musician to perform to the animals. It's not quite as mysterious as it might seem."

One specific scene in the film would become legendary and in many ways iconic. When a peccary, an American cousin of the wild boar, chases a bobcat up a very tall cactus, the resultant image of the perched bobcat subsequently became representative of Disney's once and future nature themed efforts. It was displayed in marketing materials, on merchandise, and included in the opening montage of the Wonderful World of Disney. It was even recreated as part of the Nature's Wonderland attraction that was a Frontierland mainstay for many years at Disneyland.

Despite its recent DVD release, The Living Desert remains largely unseen except by the most devout of Disney enthusiasts. It is quick becoming lost in an age of high definition Imax productions and 24 hour nature-themed cable channels. It is regrettable as the film still retains a timeless charm and remains both entertaining and often compelling some five decades after its inital debut.

Retro-Review: A Perfect Summer Movie

Ah, what is the perfect summer movie? Spiderman? Pirates of the Caribbean? Cars?

Solid arguments could be made for any of these and countless others as well. Ever since Jaws and Star Wars were released in the mid-1970s, summer has become the season for high energy popcorn-filled trips to the local multiplexes. But my candidate for a perfect summer movie predates those two films by nearly a decade and a half, and while it was certainly a special effects powerhouse in its day, it is best remembered for its undeniable charm and the engaging performances of its cast.

The Parent Trap makes me wish I had been a kid back in the summer of 1961. Released ever so appropriately in June of that year, the film remains timeless on many levels despite being so firmly grounded in the post-war, early baby boom popular culture. From the very funny shenanigans and heartwarming discoveries at Camp Inch to the fateful camping trip where gold digger Vickie gets “submarined,” The Parent Trap just oozes summer in nearly every frame of film.

There are so many points of merit to this wonderful movie; it’s hard to know just where to start.

Well, how about the opening credits? This captivating sequence of stop-motion animation was created by T. Hee, Bill Justice and X. Atencio and echoed their earlier efforts on Noah’s Ark and foreshadowed 1962’s Symposium of Popular Songs. Accompanied by Annette Funicello’s and Tommy Sands’ bubblegum rendition of the title song, the clever vignette immediately sets a tone of fun and romance that the entire movie ultimately embodies.

The screenplay and direction of David Swift mix equal parts melodrama, romance and comedy for very satisfying results. Some reviewers, including Disney scholar Leonard Maltin, felt the film uneven in its comedy and ultimately average, a criticism I personally have to disagree with. However, nearly all critics of the time were universal in their praise of the film’s cast. Accolades were deservedly given to romantic leads Brian Keith and the always beautiful Maureen O’Hara, but the film is also notable for its equaling engaging supporting players; among them Nancy Kulp, Frank DeVol, Una Merkel, Joanna Barnes, Charlie Ruggles, Ruth McDevitt and Leo G. Carroll.

But let’s face it; from beginning to end, The Parent Trap belongs to Haley Mills. Her remarkable performances as both Sharon and Susan are every bit as convincing as the special effects that allow her two characters to share the screen. Studio veteran Ub Iwerks supervised the processes that brought together the two distinctly different twins; it proved an amazing marriage of technical achievement with the exceptional acting of the very talented Mills.

My favorite detail from the film? When Sharon and Susan are placed in isolation at Camp Inch, their discovery of sisterhood appropriately happens within the walls of a cabin named Serendipity. But you’ve got to squint to see the sign by the cabin’s front door.

As I said near the beginning, The Parent Trap is pure summer, in atmosphere as well as setting. Filled with summer camp antics, poolside pratfalls and treks through the wilderness, it is a shining example of family entertainment made the old fashioned way. While I’ll likely be visiting places such as Far Far Away, World’s End and Spiderman’s Manhattan in the coming weeks, I will also be doing some R&R at Camp Inch and Mitch Ever’s southern California ranch.

One minor postscript: While the 1998 Lindsay Lohan remake was not a bad movie, it was certainly unnecessary. It was one of the less than remarkable results of Walt Disney Pictures “recycling” phase of the late 1990s that begat the likes of Flubber, and the live action 101 Dalmatians among others.

Postscript #2: The two-disc Vault Disney edition of The Parent Trap is an exceptional DVD set. You can still scare up a copy of this out-of-print edition on Amazon and other various online retailers.