Taku (1937)

"Taku" is primarily a Wild Life and Eskimo-life film shot in Alaska padded out with a story built around mining in Alaska. The actors were all locals. Most of the film revolves around the playful antics of two bear cubs, a skunk encounter, salmon swimming up river and jumping the rapids and various other Alaskan wild life, plus the breaking up of the glaciers. At that, it is still padded with silent footage from earlier Norman Dawn films. The "people' story revolves around a miner, "Bedrock" Brown (Bob Webster), constantly searching for a rich strike, and finally finding it; but in trying to rescue a lost child, Joy (Ann Henning), and return her to her village, Taku, he dies on the ice. This version died on the shelf in various states rights film exchanges around the U.S. Two years later, schlock producers Fred McConnell and George Merrick added about 15 more minutes of archive footage from previous Norman Dawn films, retitled the result "Orphans of the North", and got a little distribution through some of the Monogram Pictures film exchanges. At no point in time, despite being shown in the always error-prone American Film Institutes catalog as such, did Monogram Pictures have anything at all to do with the original production "Taku" nor the retitled "Orphans of the North" reissue version.