Simba: The King of the Beasts | |
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Directed by | Martin & Osa Johnson |
Written by |
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Produced by | |
Starring | Martin & Osa Johnson |
Cinematography | Martin & Osa Johnson |
Edited by |
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Music by | |
Production company | Martin Johnson African Expedition Corporation |
Release date |
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Running time | 87 minutes |
Country | United States |
Languages | Sound (Synchronized) English Intertitles |
Simba: The King of the Beasts is a 1928 American black-and-white sound documentary film, directed by Martin and Osa Johnson, which features the couple's four-year expedition to track the lion across Kenyan veld to his lair. While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. The film, which went on nationwide general release on January 25, 1928 , was premiered at the Earl Carroll Theatre in New York on January 23, 1928 . [1] [2] The film entered the public domain on January 1, 2024.
The film featured a theme song entitled “Song of Safari” by Sam Stept (words and music). Frank Munn sang the theme song on the film's soundtrack. Frank Munn also recorded the song for Brunswick Records.
Footage for the film was shot from 1924 to 1927, during the couple's second and longest trip to Africa, when they spent much of their time in northern Kenya by a lake they dubbed Paradise, at Mount Marsabit. The film Martin's Safari (1928) was also made with footage of this trip and some was reused in later productions Congorilla (1932) and Osa's Four Years in Paradise (1941).
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Allmovie reviewer Hal Erickson writes that, despite being made, "under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History," and purporting, "to be an authentic filmed record of the Johnsons' most recent foray into Africa," the "expedition" documentary, "seldom lets facts get in the way of a good story." For example, "The film's highlight shows the intrepid Mrs. Osa Johnson bringing down a charging rhinoceros with one well-aimed shot. But the reusage of Simba footage in the Johnsons' 1932 documentary Congorilla reveals that the rhino was merely scared away by the gunfire — a classic example of how the truth can be 'adjusted with the help of a clever editor.'" [3]
The "groundbreaking travelogue," was, according to WildFilmHistory, "Filmed in an era when African wildlife was still relatively bountiful, the production shows how the landscape looked in the early twentieth century." "Evading stampeding elephants, employing scores of servants and gamefully shooting down a variety of species," "with the production including provoked behaviour, staged confrontations and animals shot to death on film. Relying heavily on cutting in kills from professional marksmen, numerous hunting scenes culminate in a heart stopping sequence where, with the use of clever editing, the adventurous Mrs Johnson appears to bring down a charging rhinoceros with one well-aimed shot," and "the film provides an intriguing glimpse not only into 1920s Africa but also into the Johnsons themselves, part of a 'gung-ho' breed that is, in itself, now largely extinct." "Responsible for introducing a whole generation of American movie-goers to the wonders of the African environment, Simba was a large-scale success, detailing wildlife and indigenous tribespeople that had seldom appeared on screen before." [2]
Trader Horn is a 1931 American Pre-Code adventure film directed by W.S. Van Dyke and starring Harry Carey and Edwina Booth. It is the first non-documentary film shot on location in Africa. The film is based on the book of the same name by trader and adventurer Alfred Aloysius Horn and tells of adventures on safari in Africa.
A safari is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an important part of the safari market, both for wildlife viewing and big-game hunting.
Martin Elmer Johnson and Osa Helen Johnson were married American adventurers and documentary filmmakers. In the first half of the 20th century the couple captured the public's imagination through their films and books of adventure in exotic, faraway lands. Photographers, explorers, marketers, naturalists and authors, Martin and Osa studied the wildlife and peoples of East and Central Africa, the South Pacific Islands and British North Borneo. They explored then-unknown lands and brought back film footage and photographs, offering many Americans their first understanding of these distant lands.
George Alexander Graham Adamson MBE, also known as the Baba ya Simba, was a British wildlife conservationist and author based in Kenya. His wife Joy Adamson related in her best-selling book Born Free (1960) the couple's life with Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lioness cub they raised and later released into the wild.
Walking with Beasts, marketed as Walking with Prehistoric Beasts in North America, is a 2001 six-part nature documentary television miniseries created by Impossible Pictures and produced by the BBC Science Unit, the Discovery Channel, ProSieben and TV Asahi. The sequel to the 1999 miniseries Walking with Dinosaurs, Walking with Beasts explores the life in the Cenozoic era, after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, particularly focusing on the rise of the mammals to dominance. The UK version of the series is narrated by Kenneth Branagh, who also narrated Walking with Dinosaurs, and the US version is narrated by Stockard Channing.
Simba is a fictional character who appears in Disney's The Lion King franchise.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
Zoo Quest is a series of multi-part nature documentaries broadcast on the BBC Television Service between 1954 and 1963. It was the first major programme to feature David Attenborough.
Ingagi is a 1930 pre-Code pseudo-documentary exploitation film directed by William S. Campbell. It purports to be a documentary about "Sir Hubert Winstead" of London on an expedition to the Belgian Congo, and depicts a tribe of gorilla-worshipping women encountered by the explorer. The film claims to show a ritual in which African women are given over to gorillas as sex slaves, but in actuality was mostly filmed in Los Angeles, using American actresses in place of natives. It was produced and distributed by Nat Spitzer's Congo Pictures, which had been formed expressly for this production. Although marketed under the pretense of being ethnographic, the premise was a fabrication, leading the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association to retract any involvement.
Roosevelt in Africa is a film by Cherry Kearton, released in 1910. It is a documentary about the Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition, featuring Theodore Roosevelt in Africa. It is shot in silent black and white.
There have been seven theme park live adaptations of The Lion King at Disney Parks since the Disney animated feature film The Lion King was released by Walt Disney Animation Studios in 1994. These have included a parade, two theater-in-the-round shows, and four stage shows.
Marsabit is a 6300 km2 basaltic shield volcano in Kenya, located 170 km east of the center of the East African Rift, in Marsabit County near the town of Marsabit. This was primarily built during the Miocene, but some lava flows and explosive maar-forming eruptions have occurred more recently. At least two of the maars host crater lakes.
"Hakuna Matata" is a song from Disney's 1994 animated feature film The Lion King. The music was written by Elton John with lyrics by Tim Rice. The song is based on Timon and Pumbaa's catchphrase in the movie, Hakuna matata, a Swahili phrase meaning "No worry(ies)".
Africa Addio is a 1966 Italian mondo documentary film co-directed, co-edited and co-written by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E. Prosperi with music by Riz Ortolani. Jacopetti and Prosperi had gained fame as the directors of Mondo Cane in 1962.
Ultime grida dalla savana, also known as by its English title Savage Man Savage Beast, is a 1975 Italian mondo documentary film co-produced, co-written, co-edited and co-directed by Antonio Climati and Mario Morra. Filmed all around the world, its central theme focuses on hunting and the interaction between man and animal. Like many mondo films, the filmmakers claim to document real, bizarre and violent behavior and customs, although some scenes were actually staged. It is narrated by the Italian actor and popular dubber Giuseppe Rinaldi and the text was written by Italian novelist Alberto Moravia.
Armand Georges Denis was a Belgian-born documentary filmmaker. After several decades of pioneering work in filming and presenting the ethnology and wildlife of remote parts of Africa and Asia, he became best known in Britain as the director and co-presenter of natural history programmes on television in the 1950s and 1960s, with his second wife Michaela.
Survival is one of television's longest-running and most successful nature documentary series. Originally produced by Anglia Television for ITV in the United Kingdom, it was created by Aubrey Buxton, a founder director of Anglia TV, and first broadcast in 1961. Survival films and film-makers won more than 250 awards worldwide, including four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA.
So This Is Africa is a 1933 American Pre-Code comedy film directed by Edward F. Cline and starring Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Raquel Torres, and Esther Muir. It was Wheeler and Woolsey's only film for Columbia Pictures.
Donald Ker was a famous Kenyan white hunter, safari guide and conservationist of British descent. As a young man he teamed up with Sydney Downey to create Ker and Downey Safaris Ltd., one of the first guide companies to transition from hunting to photographic safaris. He is also known for leading two long expeditions with Edgar Monsanto Queeny for the American Museum of Natural History which resulted in the production of several nature documentaries and in Ker's own dedication to conservation.