Walt Disney’s Legacy Collection, which packs its archival desiderata in stately tin boxes with hours of celebratory extras, has collected all 14 of the True-Life Adventures released to theaters (and later televised) between 1948 and 1960. Also included are a few nature films that fell outside the True-Life rubric, relevant episodes of the show “Disneyland,” tributes to the men and women responsible, advertisements for theme parks, and, best of all, “Filmmaker’s Journals” that, among other things, merrily fess up to much but not all of the series’ fakery — as if we knew it all the time. Hurrah with reservations.

These are among the most controversial items in Disney’s canon, and time has not unraveled the agony from the ecstasy. The True-Life series was supposedly inspired when Disney looked at wildlife footage commissioned to aid the artists drawing “Bambi” (1942), and figured nature documentaries might make for inexpensive entertainment: reels and reels of raw footage shaped by thematic storylines — prairie, desert, arctic, ocean, jungle, and so on — and dramatic musical scores.

Distributors thought he was mad, but audiences flocked to see them, and multiple Academy Awards fell into his lap. Much of the footage is riveting: gorgeous, suspenseful, violent, amusing, illuminating. Disney recognized the power of wonder as well as the thriftiness in shooting nonunionized animals, and I doubt if anyone (grumpy naturalists aside) can remain entirely unmoved by these Technicolor zoological templates for “The Lion King” and “Finding Nemo.”

On the other hand, it isn’t nice to fool with Mother Nature or exploit the credulity of children, and Disney’s ventures into the wild did plenty of both. Mother can take care of herself (except where theme parks blight the ecosystem), but children can handle only so much prevarication. Grownups lied about the tooth fariy, Santa, Indians, and then — et tu, Uncle Walt? — they lied about the lemmings.

Millions of people believe those endearing arctic rodents are genetically suicidal, taking to the sea, like Ishmael, as a substitute for falling Cato-like on, let us say, pointy twigs. Disney didn’t invent that myth, but he dramatized it in “White Wilderness” (1958), with narrator Winston Hibler’s voice of scientific rectitude explaining that lemmings jump over cliffs because they think the sea is just another rivulet to cross in their endless quest for Lebensraum.

Trouble is, there are no lemmings in the part of Canada where the picture was shot, so they were imported and photographed on a turntable to create the illusion of large numbers. When the lemmings refused to leap from the parapet, helpful naturalists tossed them over and filmed their lifeless floating bodies. Beyond first-degree lemming murder, the main crime here is that it was done for a series that, from the first short subject, “Seal Island” (1948), claimed to be “completely authentic, unstaged, and unrehearsed,” “straight from the realm of fact,” or, as Walt put it: “Nature is the dramatist. There are no fictitious situations or characters.”

The illusion took root. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest usage of “lemming” as a “person bent on a headlong rush,”stems from 1959, a year after “White Wilderness.” The upside is that disillusioned naturalists in the 1980s were stirred to do serious lemming research that disproved the myth. In that spirit, it would have been nice if Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew and the godfather of these DVDs, had provided commentaries with a true-life scientist on what is and isn’t kosher in these films.

As it is, Mr. Disney does offer welcome candor in the “Filmmaker’s Journals,” showing, for example, that many animal noises were made with inanimate appliances, not unlike sound effects on old radio, and much of “The Living Desert” (1953), the hugely successful first True-Life feature, was shot on a sound stage. The films aimed for something new: They combined genuinely innovative close-quarters nature photography with plot lines similar to those of Disney cartoons. The dexterous editing in some instances — for example, the infamous hoedown by two scorpions — recalls the talking-dogs shorts of the 1930s, except that few of us had ever seen a scorpion, square dancing or not.

In fairness, a certain amount of creative latitude is telegraphed in the title of True-Life Adventures, and it is impossible to look at them through mature eyes and not see the editing tricks, the endless tracking shots (as if the cameraman knew exactly where that snake was headed), the underground visits with gophers, the relentless anthropomorphism. Did you know that otters are “carefree vagabonds” and “merry madcaps” for whom “life is a continuous, carefree water ballet”? It’s a True-Life Adventure fact!

James Algar, the director and cowriter of the series, spoke frankly not only about imposing narrative situations on the miles of footage (some of it freelanced), but of employing filmschool techniques, like point-of-view and over-the-shoulder shots. He set out to follow the Disney mandate of educational entertainment, and succeeded so well that he created the entire field of nature films in which humans are never glimpsed. Such recent box-office bonanzas as “Winged Migration” and “March of the Penguins” are not far removed from the Disney prototype. When Morgan Freeman intones in the latter film that a penguin’s loss of an egg is “unbearable,” we are having yet another True-Life Adventure.

In two respects, at least, Algar’s science is insistently, if somewhat coyly, accurate. The narrator never mentions evolution or Darwin, but the word “develop” is used constantly to explain why one creature has blubber or fins or a wooly hide. Indeed, evolution is the theme that unites the series, perhaps to a fault. It is used to justify the destruction of the “unfit” while underscoring humanistic qualities. Practically every courtship, regardless of species, is described in the same terms: The female is a “damsel” or “fair lady,” and the male has to endure violent combat to win her. The second respect is conservation — another word that isn’t used, though the point is unmistakable: The wonders of nature will prevail “as long as man shall leave her work untouched.”

The most hoked up of these films, such as “The Vanishing Prairie” (1954) or “Perri” (1957), may still engross very young children. The footage is often dazzling even when the narration is turgid: “It seems like a coyote can’t make a move these days without someone giving the alarm” — that someone would be a member of the “Beaver Vigilance Committee” in “Beaver Valley” (1950). The best of them are enthralling without apology. These include “The African Lion”(1955),which, despite a makeshift conceit about the lion ruling its domain, is a robust catalog of jungle creatures visited with astounding intimacy, though the specific geography is finessed (Kilimanjaro is and is not on the horizon); and “Secrets of Life” (1956), which, according to Roy Disney, was inspired by the volcanic “Rites of Spring” animation in “Fantasia.” The secrets include a ravishing six-minute sequence, without narration, of botanical timelapse photography.

Many scenes are as remarkable for their cinematic as their natural power. A comparison of backstage photography of alligators in the Everglades, where they are shown to be benign, with their appearances in “Prowlers of the Everglades” (1953), where Wagnerian music and canny cutting transform them into vampiric nightmares, shows how spurious True-Life dramatization could be. That doesn’t mean it isn’t effective: The battle between the wasp and the spider in “The Living Desert” (1953) is as tense as, say, King Kong versus the dinosaur, doubly so for being real — even if it was instigated in a tabletop cage.

Some of the natural monuments and wide-open vistas are captured as magnificently as anything byAnsel Adams (who apparently shot some of the same landscapes). At such moments, when the heavy musical cues and pandering narration are merely intrusive, you may want to cut the volume and slip into an iPod. All in all, the True-Life Adventures justify these spruced-up DVD restorations. They suggest the incredible diversity, beauty, horror, and endless ingenuity of the natural world, which, lemmings and hoedowns notwithstanding, is no lie.

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book,”Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.