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The Living Desert was the first feature-length film in Disney's True-Life Adventures collection of documentaries focusing on zoological studies; the previous movies in the series, including the Academy Acclaimed Seal Island, were short topics. The documentary was recorded at the Westward Look Wyndham Grand Hotel and Health Spa in Tucson, Arizona. A lot of the wildlife shown in the movie was given away to what would soon come to be the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The movie was influenced by 10 minutes of video shot by N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., a doctoral pupil at the University of The Golden State at Los Angeles. Kenworthy's video footage of a fight in between an arachnid as well as a wasp intrigued Disney, who funded a feature-length production complying with the lives of varied desert types. Disney was highly encouraging of Kenworthy's work and its effect on nonfiction filmmaking, stating, "This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the very first time in these nature photos."