As UW Arboretum heads into the fall burn season, we rediscovered a piece sent to Isthmus by Thomas J. Straka, a forestry professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. While studying forestry at UW-Madison, Straka spent much time at the Arboretum and he wants our readers to know about the Arb’s role in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Vanishing Prairie (available at Amazon.com).
Conservationist Aldo Leopold, the author of A Sand County Almanac, and his UW-Madison colleagues were the pioneers of what today is called restoration ecology. Their outdoor laboratory was the UW Arboretum, where they were the first to restore prairies to their original glory. The best-known prairie, Curtis Prairie, played a role in an Oscar-winning Disney documentary.
Back in the early 1950s, Walt Disney moved beyond animated cartoons to nature films. In creating movies like Bambi the Disney Studios brought in live animals for the artists to study and even had natural science lectures to educate the artists. Walt Disney developed an interest in conservation and launched a series of 13 True-Life Adventure films.
A main focus of the series was the vanishing frontier, conservation and nature. If you want to trace nature films back to the source, you’d end up somewhere near this Disney series.
You can also trace environmental awareness, at least relative to film, back to the same series. The first film in the series was Seal Island (1948), set in the Alaskan frontier. Russia and Japan had just signed a treaty on seal hunting and that is likely what caught Disney’s attention. Seal Island ran for 27 minutes, too short for a feature and too long for a short. Theaters weren’t interested, but Disney managed to get it into a friend’s theater, qualifying it for Academy Award consideration. It won an Oscar for best documentary short subject. The series was off.
That brings us to back to Madison. One of the most acclaimed films in the series was The Vanishing Prairie, released in 1954. They needed a prairie for filming, one that reflected a prairie “before civilization left its mark upon the land.” The Curtis Prairie fit the bill and was used for much of the film, in particular the scenes of a prairie fire (filmed during a controlled burn).
Only portions of the documentary were filmed in Madison. I doubt the scene of a bison giving birth was filmed in Madison; the New York State Board of Censors banned it due to the scene (but later relented).
The Vanishing Prairie won an Oscar for best documentary feature in 1954. Disney’s clandestine nod to conservation ethos can be seen in the title changes: from The Grazing Story to The Prairie Story to finally The Vanishing Prairie. Walt Disney’s goal was that “the vanishing pageant of the past may become the enduring pageant of the future.”
The series was shown in public schools for decades and influenced many young people, like me, to choose careers in conservation and forestry.
