“Nature’s Strangest Creatures”

The True-Life Adventure, official or unofficial, is shockingly unappreciated. All anyone ever talks about is White Wilderness. And not even the cute bits of wolf cubs, just the bits with, you know, gratuitous lemming death. But the series is for the most part considerably better than that. Not completely, but mostly. There’s some good information to be had, even if you have to filter it through the lens of the era in which it was made.

To the surprise of no one, the one titled “Nature’s Strangest Creatures” is about Australia. Where else? It’s a decent overview, too. It starts with how the continent was separated from the rest of the world millions of years ago, leaving its animal population to evolve differently. We see a bit of what’s there—the giant bat. The lungfish. The frilled neck lizard. Eventually, the discussion turns to two prominent groups. The marsupials, primarily located in Australia with only a few species outside it, and the monotremes, exclusively located in Australia.

The monotremes are the echidna and the duck-billed platypus. A little time is spent on the echidna, but the platypus is definitely one of the strangest animals on Earth no matter your standards. It has biofluorescent waterproof fur, webbed paws, and a bill. It lays eggs but provides milk. This is also where we get to see that Disney has a hard time discussing nursing, because that’s another place they’re a weird animal. So Disney has to figure out how to discuss an animal that produces milk without having nipples, which is a lot to expect from them.

There are a lot of marsupials, of course. The bushy-tailed possum, which is an Australian species distinct from the various American ones. The Tasmanian devil. The koala. And, at great length, the kangaroo. This is where we get our most in-depth discussion of what distinguishes marsupials, learning about their pouches and how the joeys are born. You can learn a lot about the infraclass from this short, especially for how little actual time is spent on it.

After all, the whole thing is eighteen minutes long. Presumably its theatrical release would’ve been along with a feature—Sleeping Beauty or The Shaggy Dog, maybe. These days, you can track it down on YouTube. You certainly can’t watch it on Disney+. Surely you’d rather be watching America’s Funniest Home Videos or something instead. You definitely can’t see the Ludwig Von Drake version, though that’s on YouTube, too.