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The Living Desert was the initial feature-length film in Disney's True-Life Adventures series of docudramas focusing on zoological researches; the previous films in the collection, including the Academy Prize-winning Seal Island, were short topics. The documentary was filmed at the Westward Look Wyndham Grand Resort and Health Spa in Tucson, Arizona. Most of the wild animals displayed in the film was donated to what would certainly soon become the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The movie was influenced by 10 mins of video footage fired by N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., a doctoral student at the College of California at Los Angeles. Kenworthy's video of a fight in between a tarantula and a wasp interested Disney, who funded a feature-length production complying with the lives of diverse desert types. Disney was highly helpful of Kenworthy's job and also its impact on nonfiction filmmaking, stating, "This is where we can tell a genuine, sustained story for the first time in these nature images."