Saturday, December 23, 2017

#13 Frank Buck!


3 comments:

Eric said...

This cover illustration shows a Rube Goldberg device for capturing tigers by stunning them using electricity. (In an age before tranquilizer darts, the standard procedure was to dig a pit for the tiger to fall into.)

Roger Smith said...

Clips of the tiger-python battle are found on YouTube, as are the lion-and-tiger fights from THE BIG CAGE (Universal - 1933). Personally, I find no sport in scenes of animals actually harming one another, but the relentless brutality of nature cannot be denied, and such clips are endless.

Eric said...

Even in 1932, the Tiger-Python fight was thought to have been staged since it was filmed from three different vantage points using three different cameras. In one of his books, Buck even mentioned that, to obtain some of the animal scenes in his movies, a large stockade was built that enclosed a substantial section of jungle and that animals were put into this stockade for the benefit of the cameraman. (This might explain how some of the various animal fights were staged.) Years later, it came out that one of the popular PBS animal shows staged similar animal “encounters.”