Well let me state my bias upfront, which incidentally forms the topic of the post :--). I am not a very great fan of some of the modern CGI animals, being it King Kong or one of the creatures in LOFTR or Star Wars or for that matter any other creation. I am not trashing the new movies, they are just not my cup of tea. That is all. The clash/fighting in the modern movies do not pull me to the edge of the seat like when the Rhino or Buffaloes banged the jeeps in Hatari.
Yeah the movie is kind of little long and boring. Sometimes I felt that there was no story...just some chasing/capturing scenes interspesed with some humor/scenes. And of course we get the usual John Wayne stuff ordering people around. But my parents, wife and son all enjoyed the movie. And I really liked the humor that was intertwined in the movie.
This movie could never be made today because of the restrictions of the Humane Society re treatment of animals. While this is not a bad thing I think they sometimes go a bit far, for example in the Lord of the Rings trilogy they were not allowed to show a worm being put on a hook.
What was done with the animals in Hatari! was at the time the method used for capturing zoo animals, and therefore met the requirements of the Humane Society at the time.
But CGI would ruin any attempt at a remake. Just look at the CGI animals in Jumanji...
Actually at the time Hatari was made, Hollywood was very, very careful about animals... more so in some ways than today. It was a different era, but in all honesty, from the mid 1940's to the 80's animals had very, very strong protection in hollywood, then in the 80's a lot of the protections were lifted. Now things are swinging back to protections for the animals, but look at the new movie Flicka, two horses died in the making of the movie. Take the time to look up things like the Patsy and the Craven awards, they were issues during the heydey of animals in movies. It was a time when animals were trained, the people riding and working with them were trained... it was a different time, but it is the method that zoo animals were brought in in that period of time, hence it would have been considered humane
This conversation is kind of ironic, considering John Wayne killed an elephant while on location.
But to get back to the subject, CGI takes away the genuine edginess. Today we can pretty much tell clearly when things are faked. You *knew* that there was no possible way to fake what they did "back then," and as a result Claude Rains removing the bandages in The Invisible Man is more thrilling and mind-boggling than watching the tri-pods in Spielberg's War of the Worlds.
Another Howard Hawks film to use a real and dangerous animal was in Bringing Up Baby; there are times that were obvious trick photography (cutting from Cary Grant's face to a body double's legs while Baby paws at them), but there were some shots of Katharine Hepburn alone on the set with the leopard, and there were some close calls on the set.
I was born when she kissed me I died when she left me I lived a few weeks while she loved me
while i certainly do not condone the killing of animals for sport, at the time that this occurred, elephants could be legally taken for sport. 50 years later this is not acceptable, yet at the time it was.
Big game hunters took a lot of big game ( lions, elephants, lots of things) for 100 or so years, part of what caused the decline, although certainly not all of it All you have to do is look at American history, some American Indian tribes were almost wiped out when the buffalo that they lived on were virtually wiped out because hunters just wanted to see if they could shoot one or a hundred at a time.
what is accepted at the time, is often seen as horrific twenty or fifty or one hundred years down the line. nicole
If John Wayne had killed an elephant while he was in Africa making "Hatari!" it would have been legal. Hunting elephants legally was also socially acceptable at that time. However, he did not kill an elephant. The story is a myth.