THE motion picture industry, dealing an the business and the art of visual tale-telling, has more than a passing acquaintance with the greatest of all techniques in narrative conjunction, the phrase "and then...." The latest "and then..." in the continuing Walt Disney story is Buena Vista, or, to be historically accurate, Buena Vista Film Distribution Company, Inc., the subsidiary formed in 1952 to handle what some industry wits would have paraphrased as a "hot cactus, the first feature length True Life documentary, "The Living Desert."
Almost every new Disney venture, from his first feature length cartoon to his first half-hour True-Life documentary, had met with skepticism which was quickly dissolved when gross reports started coming in, but the boys in the back rooms thought they really had him on a 73-minute film whose cast was comprised of such creatures of the lower orders as kangaroo rats and square-dancing scorpions, all for real and not a cartoon. The bizarre would seem to have reached the margin of diminishing returns.
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