We have been thinking for 50 years that lemmings are rodents that commit suicide. The guilt of everything has Disney
If they mention the lemmings we will immediately think of The legendary action video game and puzzles of Psychnosis of 1991. The mechanics of that game, in which the herd of creatures obeyed us blindly, even opting for sacrifice, have a specific origin: a Disney documentary. But … what if everything he told were not only false, but orchestrated by the filming team itself to obtain images of the lemmings suicide? What is a lemming (really). A Lemming It is a small rodent that usually lives in areas near the Arctic or in Biomas de Tundra. They are similar to field mice and musk rats. They measure between 13 and 18 cm in length, they have very short tail, chubonch and hairy snout, short legs and small ears. With a garrita on the front legs they dig into the snow. They are herbivores and live in large tunnel systems. And no, against what is said, they do not have a docile attitude and a flock behavior: although they move in a group by the very high demographic explosions they experience, they are aggressive even with the predators. What was believed to be a lemming. That demographic explosion (which actually obeys mere survival: The reproduction cycles are short and the very fertile females to compensate for the attack of predators and the shortage of food at certain times) is precisely what the 1958 documentary ‘white hell’ was inspired. Produced by Disney, this production talked about how, due to the multitude of offspring that they have since there are not enough resources to maintain them, the lemmings are sacrificed for the good of the population and threw themselves by cliffs, committing suicide. The film even offered images of the moment. The origin of the myth. Long before the filming of ‘Blanco Hell’, Rumorology around Lemmings was abundant: In the 16th century, the Bavarian geographer Jacob Ziegler defended that these rodents fell from heaven when there was a storm and died when the grass grew in spring. This thundered statement was based on local folklore: being the Arctic fauna, the native populations of Inuits or Yupiks had their legends around the lemmings, similar to those of the geographer. Little by little, science was denialing this almost celestial origin of rodents, although for centuries it was believed that the herds were traveling transported by the wind. In pop culture. Science fiction and fantasy was the one that possibly grabbed this idea of the lemmings that moved by air and transmuted it into bugs that commit suicide throwing themselves into the void. Since the fifties we find precipitating Lemming in works such as the story ‘The march of the fools’ of Cyril M. Kornbluth, of 1951, where the lemmings with space travelers who march to Venus to die in a collective suicide are compared. A legend of Disney comics, CARK BANKShe drew in an adventure of the ducks to Lemmings jumping through Norwegian cliffs. And nothing less than Arthur C. Clarkein his story ‘the possessed’ explains with a case of alien group possession the behavior of rodents. What really happened in the documentary. The director of ‘Blanco Hell’, James Algar, I intended to record an authentic sacrifice of the Lemmingsbut he did not look like. So the photo director came up with a group of local children to hunt Lemmings, 25 cents the piece. Once they had enough, they were cleared them. A cruel resolution (nothing strange in Documentaries about animals of the time), but today is somewhat uncomfortable to see: ‘Blanco Hell’ went on to accompany other Disney films to which time has not treated very well, and was withdrawn from Disney+ together with classic cases such as The racist ‘Song of the South’. In pop culture. And thus the myth was founded, which gave us an extraordinary video game and a wrong belief in the popular culture that persists until today, as the same Begoña Villacís demonstrated, which in 2017 signed in the confidential an article entitled ‘Catalonia, an army of lemmings‘. Although few stories as fun around the nice rodents as an article of ‘Popular Science Monthly’ that, in 1877, said that suicide lemming what they want is to throw themselves into the Atlantic to immerse themselves in search of the lost continent of Lemuria. Damn rodents. Header | Wikipedia, Psygnosys In Xataka | The amazing video that shows an octopus by changing color while you think is dreaming
