Disney's White Wilderness
The lemming 'suicide' was staged by filmmakers
Disney's documentary showed lemmings hurling themselves into the sea, and it won an Oscar in 1959. It later emerged that the animals were filmed in landlocked Alberta, where they do not live, and were pushed off the cliff by the crew.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. The famous scene was staged in 1958 for Disney's White Wilderness: the animals were brought to Alberta and pushed off a cliff by the crew. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 19 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 11 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 10 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 9 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 22 years later
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 25 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 22 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 17 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 5 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 17 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 16 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 13 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 1 year earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 10 years earlier
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 10 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 5 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 20 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 21 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 2 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — same year
- 1960 Year of Africa — 2 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 5 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 9 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 13 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 5 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — same year
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 8 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 17 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 22 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 17 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 16 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 4 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 1 year later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 84)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 77)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 69)
- Mao Zedong (aged 65)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 40)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 29)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 28)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 24)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 74)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 69)