Unless you instruct them otherwise, the lemmings will blindly march forward, turning around if they bump into a wall or a Blocker lemming, and keep going until they reach the exit for the stage, fall off a too-tall cliff, drown in water, or blunder into a booby trap.
The narration notes that they "look just like little lemmings, marching over that cliff" and the cutscene of snails falling to their doom is a pretty obvious Shout-Out to Lemmings.
Deadly Rooms of Death: The Second Sky features Lemmings as enemies in the level Lemming Beach, some of which have teeth as sharp as Beethro's sword.Not to be confused with Gullible Lemmings - an entirely different trope about naivety - though it is the Trope Namer for it. Will double as Suicide as Comedy if the trope is played for dark laughs. Subtrope to Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying. This originally entered the pop-culture consciousness due to the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness, during the filming of which filmmakers purposely drove lemmings off cliffs to record footage of their demise. That doesn't stop writers from milking the Urban Legend for all it's worth, if for no other reason than that it's amusing. Falls also happen by accident when a thick crowd runs alongside a cliff. It is not the mass suicide that the media claims it to be the Square-Cube Law is on their side and even massive falls usually won't harm them.
#Lemmings jumping off cliffs disney license#
These depictions often also incorporate An Aesop about herd mentality, the idea being that the lemmings mindlessly do what the rest of the swarm is doing, even when this will lead them to throw themselves to their deaths.Ī good deal of Artistic License – Biology is at play here: while it is true that real life lemmings jump off some cliffs, it's done for the purpose of migration. Some works omit the reasons behind the migration entirely, depicting lemmings as simply possessing innate urges to throw themselves off of high places. One rodent, the lemming, has a special role: killing themselves.įictional lemmings tend to be based almost exclusively around urban legends according to which food shortages lead the rodents to engage in millions-strong mass migrations, where the masses of rodents wander purposefully but aimlessly and inevitably perish when they run headlong into great danger - including, most iconically, seaside cliffs. The mouse steals food (especially cheese) while avoiding cats and other predators, the rat is like a food-stealing mouse that also spreads disease and is much more unpleasant, the beaver busily builds dams, the squirrel acts nutty ( pun not intended), and the hamster and guinea pig act as adorable house pets.
Rodents in fiction tend to have specialized and clichéd roles.
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