Susan Swanberg grew up fascinated by a certain Disney documentary that was shot mostly in the Tucson area, called "The Living Desert."
It won the 1954 Oscar for best documentary and it depicted life in the desert, including scorpion courtship, tortoise fights and — one scene Swanberg remembers particularly well — between a tarantula and a wasp.
The film sparked her interest in the natural world and she grew up to be a scientist, a geneticist, biologist and science journalist.
Swanberg teaches in the journalism school at the University of Arizona, where she used to show excerpts of "The Living Desert" in her classes for her students. But, they started to question how accurate it might actually be. It’s the subject of her latest paper, published in the International Journal of Disney Studies.
Full conversation
SUSAN SWANBERG: Because my students would show me things that or point out things that they thought were interesting, like the creatures all were named, and they behaved like human beings, and there were some cultural things. They kind of portrayed a '50s era cultural values.
GILGER: In a film that was credited and won the Oscar right for a documentary.
SWANBERG: Yes, yes, but it was more personality driven. As a matter of fact, the narrator for the film, Winston Hibler, said it was Walt Disney's way to look on animals as personalities and struggling, striving little creatures facing problems not unlike our own. And that's what Disney often did with both his cartoons and also his true-life adventures.
GILGER: So there's plenty of anthropomorphism in here, right? Tell us about some of the inaccuracies you have discovered here in the course of writing this paper. It sounds like they're pretty numerous, like they used pets.
SWANBERG: Yes. And one of the fun things that I did with this was when I figured out that it had been shot largely, or a lot of it had been shot in Tucson or the larger Tucson area, I thought, I'm going to check our local newspaper archives and see if I can find any reference. And I found all sorts of references to where it was filmed and to, for example, in the case of pets, one of the Tucsonins pet tortoises became main characters in one of the vignettes where these tortoises were roommates, and they lived in the same home and one of them was a cantankerous oldster who would battle the other tortoises, and he was notorious for flipping them over on their back. Well, in the Disney movie, these three tortoises, a female and two males, the two males were fighting over the female, and it was shown as a natural courtship ritual, but the cantankerous oldster flipped over the younger guy.
SWANBERG: And then there was a lot of drama over whether he would reorient himself in time to avoid dying from the heat. So it was made into a real traumatic interlude.
GILGER: Oh wow, interesting. And there's the infamous sort of scorpion dance that seems to have been a little bit altered.
SWANBERG: Oh, yes. ... Yes, the scorpion dance. Scorpions, there are some elements of that dance that are real and accurate representations of the natural world, because the male and the female do clasp claws in their courtship ritual. However, in Disney's movie, he made it into a real dance sequence with reverse action, stop and reverse action, and he set it to music with a mouth harp, I think it was. So it sounded like a square dance.
GILGER: So you start to sort of dig into this after your students ask these questions and find some of these real kind of inaccuracies, things that are not exactly the way things are in nature. How did you feel about it? Like, as, as somebody who grew up watching this, it sounds like it was a big kind of part of your childhood. Did you feel betrayed?
SWANBERG: Well, I wouldn't say I felt betrayed, but I was puzzled because, you know, I turned into a real scientist. I actually got a Ph.D. in genetics. And, you know, I was puzzled. Why did Disney do these things? Why did he alter nature? Because nature is really interesting in and of itself, in its natural state. But I had several different feelings at the same time because his movies did inspire people. It inspired my father or helped inspire him to want to move west. It inspired me as far as an interest in the doings of the natural world, and it actually inspired at least one biologist who became a herpetologist, and he had watched "The Living Desert" as a child. So, you know, there were some good things about it. It's just that it portrayed nature in a way that nature didn't need us to protect it. And I wonder if, you know, my generation, the baby boom generation was impacted by these movies that didn't accurately portray the interactions of creatures in their natural habitats. You know, they were portrayed as creatures who could do for themselves, and that's not really true.
GILGER: Do you think it impacted you in the way that you looked at the natural world for a lot of your life?
SWANBERG: Well, probably not, because it merely piqued my interest like the tarantula and wasp battle where the wasp stings the tarantula, paralyzes it and then drags it down to its burrow. It sounds pretty horrific actually. But it drags the paralyzed tarantula down to its burrow and then lays a single egg in it. The egg hatches and eats the fresh meat as it develops.
GILGER: Wow.
SWANBERG: So it, it actually piqued my interest in some of the interesting relationships in nature, and some of them are a little grim and gruesome, but, you know, that's the way nature is.
GILGER: Yeah, that is the way nature is.
SWANBERG: A lot of it is beautiful and exciting and fascinating. But there are these elements, you know, and Disney didn't whitewash this incident with the tarantula and the wasp.
GILGER: So, I mean, there's this idea of like "edutainment" you get at here. You tried to prove even right, that Disney himself, Walt Disney himself actually invented that term. Is that the case?
SWANBERG: I'm not sure actually. You know, I did a lot of research. I searched and searched high and low to find any articles that definitively proved that he coined that word, but I couldn't find that. There were lots of people who wrote that he did, but I didn't find the actual proof. But he did in fact say in a different interview that it wasn't his goal to educate, it was his goal to entertain. So while he might not have coined the word "edutainment," he really did want to entertain people with his movies, and I was certainly entertained as a child.
GILGER: And you use the film now to kind of teach your students about this, this reality, right? To teach them about vetting information, which is an important thing for all of us to learn.
SWANBERG: Yes, exactly. And that's a subtopic of my other research is misinformation, how it's handled, how it arises. And so, yes, I teach my students to do what I call and other people have called lateral reading, where you read a multiple of sources and from a multiple multitude of experts so that you don't just get one image of things. One of the things I wonder about is because it's still available on Disney Plus and still shown in classrooms. How does it impact people's view of the natural world now?
