Walt Disney Legacy Collection - True Life Adventures, Vol. 2

Product Description Experience the wonder of Walt Disney's groundbreaking nature series for the first time on DVD! These acclaimed stories, fully restored to their original beauty, offer previously unseen looks into the magical world of our animal friends. Enjoy a collection of Disney's award-winning TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES, including "The Living Desert," and the very first film, "Seal Island." It's a classic collection of animal adventures your whole family will treasure. Amazon.com There was a time when Walt Disney produced mesmerizing nature films for family audiences. Walt Disney Legacy Collection: True Life Adventures, Vol. 2 reaches deep into the studio's vaults to pull together a selection of those remarkable little movies, a television staple for baby boomers who watched Disney's variously-titled series in the late 1950s and '60s. Listen to our interviewwith director emeritusRoy E. Disney. Basically, teams of roving cinematographers and other technicians were sent into the field, working under the general guidance of a well-researched script, a director, production group, etc. Ingenious editing, creative uses of music, and even touches of animation resulted in marvelous pieces such as the ones in this collection. Among the six titles here are "Living Desert," set in the American southwest; "Vanishing Prairie," an overview of what were once endless grasslands between the mountainous west and the full forests east of the Mississippi; and "Seal Island," shot on a remote Alaskan island. Nature programs are, of course, plentiful on contemporary television. But the Disney shows were unique at the time for applying high cinematic standards (the Technicolor on "Islands of the Sea," set in the Galapagos, is something to see) to the task of filming lizards, road runners, sandstorms, and exotic flowers. These programs are also tailor-made for young audiences. The more harrowing sequences of predators stalking their lunch, say, or seal pups getting separated from their mothers aren't censored, but they are softened in the editor's room and via anthropomorphic narration. True Life Adventures stands up today as good family viewing, though they are also fodder for nostalgia for viewers of a certain age. --Tom Keogh