'Disney's Biggest Lie' about lemmings for a late Norther

I know I told my readers "stay tuned to see if I start covering Oscar nominees next" to close 'Joker: Folie a Deux' leads Razzies with seven nominations as the Golden Raspberry Awards' poor math skills strike again! Since yesterday, I realized that I had forgotten to celebrate something Sunday: "The next day inspired by Wester is Norther, which will occur on Sunday, January 19, 2025." Instead, I composed Celebrating diversity in acting winners at the 2025 Golden Globes for MLK Day weekend. Oops.

So how do I blog about both Norther, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Winter Solstice, and the Oscars? Blog about an Oscar winner that features lemmings, the mascot for Norther! Watch Disney's Biggest Lie by Odd Animal Specimens about White Wilderness, which won Best Documentary Feature in 1959.

Let's talk about White Wilderness, one of Disney's award-winning nature documentaries from the series "True Life Adventures". There's a specific story in the doc about lemmings. It is entirely fake. In this video, we explain the truth.

This is the same story debunked in the SciShow video I embedded in Facts and fancy about feisty lemmings for the first Norther of 2017! It's also the subject of two notes in the film's IMDB page.

Trivia
This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures. It was this film that perpetuated the myth in popular culture of lemming suicide, something that's never been reported to have occurred in real life.

Goofs
Contrary to popular belief repeated in this film, lemmings do not commit suicide en masse by jumping off cliffs into the sea. However cyclical population explosions do induce lemmings to migrate to unfamiliar territory where they are crowded and prone to accidents such as falling off cliffs or drowning but these are not considered suicide in any sense.

While I already knew that lemmings don't intentionally jump off cliffs and drown themselves, I did learn more details about how the photographers filmed the sequence, so that counts as learning something new, making today a good day. I hope my readers learned something new, too.

This concludes today's late celebration of a fake holiday created by Archdruid John Michael Greer. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature to see if I blog about this year's Oscar nominees.