Thursday, April 19, 2012

Fake or Real?


... So do lemmings really commit suicide? This has been a question sometimes heard in conversations about wild life in the last fifty years... Well, the answer is no, lemmings do not commit suicide. Where does that myth come from? In 1958 Walt Disney produced White Wilderness, part of the studio's True Life Adventure series. This documentary featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide. But this was all fake. In fact, it was staged: The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off the cliff by Disney filmmakers! The epic "lemming migration" was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on a snow covered turntable.
As Karl S. Kruszelnicki puts it in his article, considering a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty, it's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming...

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