Disney brings '50s 'True-Life Adventures' to DVD

Roy E. Disney — nephew of Walt and longtime behind-the-scenes Disney Co. mover and shaker — has been primarily associated with the animation department. At least in the public eye.

He was a driving force behind the company's quality animated-feature renaissance, which began with "The Little Mermaid" in 1989, and included "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."

More recently he was instrumental in the company's acquisition of Pixar — those computer-animation wizards who have provided the studio with some of its biggest recent hits, from the "Toy Story" films to "The Incredibles" to this year's "Cars."

It would be fair to call him the modern "conscience" of his uncle's thriving industry, which, as Walt used to say, all started with a mouse.

But during a brief telephone conversation from Roy E. Disney's Southern California office, it was all about documentaries. Not just any documentaries, but the memorable "True-Life Adventures" series, one of the first projects that the young Disney worked on back when he joined the family business in the mid-1950s.

For the uninitiated, the "True-Life Adventures" were feature documentary films that played theatrically (and later on the Disney TV shows) and chronicled critters and flora and fauna in various remote locations, including areas of Utah.

The films have been spiffed up and look glorious for their debut this week on DVD, released under the "Disney Legacy Collection" banner, to include new introductions by Disney and bonus features galore.

"They take me right back to my beginnings in the business," Disney said as he recalled his earliest days at the Mouse House.

There is also one film in the mix, which, despite being developed from documentary footage of a squirrel, is structured to tell a story. Titled "Perri" (1957) and billed as "a fantasy," it's a film of which Disney is especially proud, and it was filmed in Utah and Jackson Hole, Wyo.

"I lived up there for a year," Disney said, "pert near a year and a half — working on 'Perri.'

"That was the only one where the notion behind it was scripted. Of course, saying we were shooting from a script makes it sound like we were directing the animals or something — but we were trying to re-create or represent scenes from a script.

"The story came from a book written by Felix Salten, who also wrote 'Bambi,' and Walt had bought it when he bought the 'Bambi' book, and the notion came along to do it in live action. What we wound up making was nothing whatever like the book, but we did represent the life cycle of the squirrel."