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Disney Ruined Our Childhood With Lemming Lies
I don’t know how many of you guys have heard this before, but for a very long time, I was under the impression that lemmings had an annual tradition of hurling themselves off a cliff into the ocean to their deaths.
Apparently, this is a very widely-circulated myth, created by none other than Disney.
Yep.
Apparently it’s an urban legend that got blown way out of proportion because of the Disney documentary “White Wilderness,” released in the ’50s, causing many people to believe that lemmings orchestrated annual mass suicides to prevent overpopulation.
In the lemming segment, the little rodents assemble for a mass migration, scamper across the tundra and ford a tiny stream as narrator Winston Hibbler explains that, “A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”
That destiny is to jump into the ocean. As they approach the “sea,” (actually a river -more tight cropping) Hibbler continues, “They’ve become victims of an obsession — a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!”
The “pack of lemmings” reaches the final precipice. “This is the last chance to turn back,” Hibbler states. “Yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space.”
Lemmings are seen flying into the water. The final shot shows the sea awash with dying…
