The Living Desert
The Living Desert was the initial feature-length film in Disney's True-Life Adventures collection of documentaries concentrating on zoological research studies; the previous films in the series, including the Academy Prize-winning Seal Island, were short topics. The documentary was shot at the Westward Look Wyndham Grand Resort and Health Club in Tucson, Arizona. Most of the wild animals received the film was given away to what would quickly come to be the Arizona-Sonora Desert Gallery. The movie was inspired by 10 mins of video fired by N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., a doctoral student at the University of The Golden State at Los Angeles. Kenworthy's footage of a fight in between an arachnid and a wasp intrigued Disney, who funded a feature-length production complying with the lives of varied desert types. Disney was highly supportive of Kenworthy's job and its effect on nonfiction filmmaking, stating, "This is where we can inform a real, continual tale for the first time in these nature pictures."