The Vanishing Prairie (1954)

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The second of Walt Disney's feature-length "True Life Adventures", The Vanishing Prairie concentrates on that portion of the United States bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. After a brief tableux of extinct animal species, the film shows us several "endangered" types: The… More The second of Walt Disney's feature-length "True Life Adventures", The Vanishing Prairie concentrates on that portion of the United States bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. After a brief tableux of extinct animal species, the film shows us several "endangered" types: The Whooping Crane, the Buffalo, the Prong-horn Antelope, the Big-horn Sheep, the Prairie Dog, etc. While mankind is clearly to blame for much of the "vanishing" alluded to in the title, the film demonstrates how the various species themselves enact a process of natural selection. Incidentally, this was the first Disney film to be (briefly) banned in New York, thanks to a superbly photographed--and utterly harmless--scene of a buffalo giving birth to a calf ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi