Sometimes it feels like a conspiracy.

Martin Johnson was the cook on Jack London’s Snark during the ship’s two-year cruise in the Pacific.
Johnson put together a sideshow with photos and stuff from that adventure, and made a living travelling through rural America.
In Kansas, he met a young woman called Osa Leighty.
They fell in love, got married, and became adventurers.
It was 1910.

In the following years, Martin and Osa Johnson were captured by cannibals on tropical islands in the Pacific, explored Africa, met European royalty and assorted savages, and made lots of documentaries, which were extremely popular.
Much of the material in the films – some of which were among the first talkie documentaries ever produced – was later remixed and restyled as a series of TV documentaries in the ’50s.

Meanwhile, in the thirties, the Johnsons equipped two seaplanes – including zebra-striped and jaguar-spotted body paint – and flew around and over Africa.
They were the first to fly over Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya.
More movies were shot.

Then, in 1937, the coupple was involved in the crash of a commercial flight in California.
Martin was killed, and Osa survived with severe injuries – which did not stop her from taking another tour of Africa that same year.

Three museums were founded to preserve their legacy – one in the United States and two in Africa.
And Disney licensed the Johnson intellectual property as the basis for their Animal Kingdom Lodge attraction.

I discovered this wonderful coupple thanks to the Kodansha International back catalogue, which includes a reprint of Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure – a joint biography of both the author and her husband.
Now, I Married Adventure is a famous book, among book collectors, because the original, zebra-striped hardback edition, is the subject of a ferocious collectionism.

Alas, the Kodansha reprint (which I was able to find second-hand at a reasonable price), does not have the zebra-striped cover of theoriginal, but is still a fun read about travels, adventures, and making movies.

And when I say there must be a conspiracy, it is because Martin and Osa Johnson were wonderful characters – and were not the only ones.
And yet – no movies, no magazine articles, no TV shows.
It feels like someone, somewhere in the early 60s, decided that stories of people seeking adventure instead of setting into a 9-to-5 routine, were not good for thegeneral public.
The same people, probably, that later decided that space and ocean exploration were not fit for prime time television.