The Great Lemming Lie

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Telling a story is hard. Filming nature is even harder.

That may be why, in the 1940s, Walt Disney productions leaned on movie magic to develop its True-Life Adventures nature documentary series. It built sets, shipped in animals from distant locales, and even made up facts.

One lie looms larger than them all. It's haunted the film genre for generations with a question: From classics narrated by Sir David Attenborough to today's fast-paced animal content on YouTube, is what we're seeing real or fake?

Prompted by a Reddit post, Endless Thread's Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell go down the rabbit hole — lemming hole? — of deception in nature documentaries.

*****

Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The co-hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast comes from Math Works, a company accelerating the pace of engineering and science.
0:06.4	Stick around until the end of this episode for a special segment about how one company is using Mathworks Software
0:12.9	to revolutionize outer space navigation.
0:16.9	W-B-U-R Podcasts, Boston. Dean Russell, Ben Brock Johnson.
0:31.0	Have you ever played the video game lemmings?
0:34.4	Not unlike Amory.
0:36.8	I think my answer to like any question that begins,
0:39.4	have you played the video game is almost always no. I'm surrounded by noobs surrounded by noobs.
0:48.0	Uh, yeah. But I came to play so, so let's play. All right so let's play.
0:53.0	All right let's play you got it up on your screen.
0:55.8	So you sent me a link to what looks like a website from 1999. Yep and it says click to start.
1:05.0	Yeah.
1:06.0	I'm looking at a screen that's very pink.
1:10.0	Uh-huh.
1:11.0	It looks like we're in a cave.
1:12.0	Yeah, we're underground. And then under or from some like weird
1:16.9	contraption these little trapdoor. Yeah. Yeah. What I assume are lemmings but they actually look like oo-lumpas are just like walking back and forth.
1:27.0	And they all basically go in the same direction.
1:30.0	So they all basically follow each other.
1:33.4	Whoa! Can you hear that?
1:36.4	Yeah.
1:37.4	Boop, boop, boop, boop.
	...

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