Word: fauna
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Where the book called up images of lovely backwoods flora and fauna, the film has the artsy-craftsy exotica of Trader Vic's. The book's Anna Vorontosov was an interestingly unbalanced woman whose salvation came from the joyous dangers she found in teaching; the movie's Anna alternates between being cute and fighting for her virtue. One moment she plods through a witless musical routine about Pogo, the next she is braining Hero Harvey for ripping open her blouse (with cretinous whinnies of "Open sesame!"). And where it was right for the hero to blow...
Islands of the Sea (Buena Vista), the most recent of Walt Disney's ain't-nature-grand operas, is a scrappy but fascinating "featurette" (28 minutes) that observes in full color the recondite fauna of several seldom-visited islands-the Galápagos, the Falklands and Guadalupe. Best shots: a hideous six-foot iguana leaps into the sea and instantly seems transmogrified into a silly wriggling pollywog in a milk bottle; an elephant seal, a 20-ft. blob of blubber, lies snoring into its floppy, built-in nosebag, looking from the neck up like none other than...
...tract intended to teach children "how blessed are the results of patient continuance in well-doing." What he actually wrote was a sort of sissified, Swissified Tarzan story, describing a number of innocently improbable adventures that took place on an amusingly improbable tropical island populated with an absolutely absurd fauna of Asiatic tigers, African lions, Australian kangaroos, Amazonian anacondas, North American grouse, Mongolian asses and Swiss prigs...
Delinquency in Lions. Mrs. Adamson called her prodigious pet Elsa because it reminded her of a friend (not presumably Elsa Maxwell, the social lion tamer), and is quite formidable in her own way-one of those dauntless dames of the British Empire able to treat the fauna of 120,000 square miles of African semidesert with the regal confidence of a Scarsdale matron patting into place the play patterns of her daughter's age group. Only such a woman would speak of the gruesome noises outside the camp at night as the "chuckles" of a hyena...
...fort, skindive for wrecks, and test the effects of a four-man jazz combo on African ears. "Also," says Expedition Leader Anthony Churchill (no kin), "we may try distilling gin from seaweed." Oxford's Exploration Club is sending out a group which will exhaustively classify the flora and fauna in a mountain-locked Tanganyika valley...