Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This is "Cruise of the Zaca", an American documentary short film directed by and starring Errol Flynn, who is mostly known today for his Robin Hood film and was a big star back in the day. This film here is from the last decade of his life and the writer is Owen Crump, an Oscar nominee. Here Flynn tells us about an expedition by sea and all he encountered during the journey, be it humans, animals or just the nature in general. But I must say this film, which is a bit shorter than 20 minutes, had little to offer in terms of nature documentary value and this is the only area of the film I was somewhat interested in. It may be a good watch for Flynn fans to see one of his rare works behind the camera, but everybody else can definitely skip it. Nothing memorable to see here and I give it a thumbs down. Actually the scene where they were jumping around the animal on one occasions was pretty embarrassing.

This is kind of fascinating to watch if you are an old time movie fan (like me) but at the same time it's soooo fake and in the actual real scenes with the animals it is torturous to watch. Someone else reviewing this said it was made in the late 1940's and I could believe that but I will say that helicopter looks very advanced for the 40's, not that 1952 is all that much later, maybe the helicopter scenes (very staged) were added later to the ship footage? So why do I say it's fake? Errol starts the show saying I had a banana and an apple not expecting what was in store for me, (oh brother). Then he gets in a helicopter and goes whale spotting and him and the pilot(!) are all leaning out to get a "close up" of the whales, yeah whatever. Errol falls into the ocean and the pilot almost falls in with him, I mean this is kids TV folks. Most of the animal scenes are stock footage spliced in with close ups of the crew, you rarely see the animals in the same frame with the actors. The times they are together is when you probably will cringe because things like putting a rope around a large sea lion's neck looks very brutal. One can just imagine Flynn scheming, "now how can I recoup this yacht's expenses?" "Oh yeah I'll tell Mr Warner I've got some great color footage and splice in some garbage with a helicopter in!" Maybe for Flynn fans late at night, otherwise stay clear, it's boring, fake, and unpleasant.

Like contemporaries Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, Errol Flynn did have a real love of the sea. I'm sure this was a project of love for him when he did Cruise Of The Zaca the schooner that he owned and kept primarily at his Jamaica home.Although this is a compilation of film of many voyages, Flynn got to work with his father a noted marine biologist. And the work showing some of the strange marine life on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was very interesting.One thing that was really interesting was the fact that the cameras went off as the Zaca went through the Panama Canal. Reasons of national security, this was the early Fifties. I wonder if those same regulations are still in place.I'm thinking this chance to share his father's work was something Flynn could not pass up. Especially after the rape trial, Flynn's image as the eternal debaucher was fixed in the public mind. I'm sure he welcomed a chance to show a serious side to him.Incidentally the Zaca which Flynn may have loved more than anything else in the world was sold to pay Errol's many debts incurred after his debacle with the financing of his planned William Tell film that never was completed. An ironic end indeed.

Filmed in 1946-47 with more than one "cruise", this two-reeler's great Pacific and Caribbean scenery apes anything seen in other contemporary travelogues. Errol Flynn and marine biologist Pop obviously enjoyed all of this traveling and critter-collecting, highlighted with Flynn splashing with the California gray whales. Humorously, the love 'em & leave 'em Errol was separated from Nora Eddington by the time this short was released, so she appears on screen mostly as a "friend", with the study of smelly fish and crabs preventing any on-screen "romance" and a Garden Of Eden tour very chaste.There's little question that Warner Bros. put more gusto into their docu-shorts than most other studios. (Quick history lesson: Since about 1935, the popular success of MGM's Traveltalks and Paramount's Popular Science launched a boom in Hollywood "educational shorts". These were SO much cheaper to crank out than even the jazz band musicals, the only "entertainment" shorts Universal and Fox were making by this time, and could be shot in any color process for practically peanuts.) Warner's "Sports Parades" were often less "sports" and more National Geographic sight-seeing; this studio also made plenty of animal titles like "Smart As A Fox". Fittingly, after the "live-action short subjects" were phased out in 1957, this same studio took over four installments of the ever popular Bell Science series with Dr. Frank Baxter. Unfortunately, little was done with the print shown on THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD DVD. Hopefully, Warner Home Video is gradually working on its impressive short subject collection and a "restored" Zaca will be made available, along with other hard-to-see travelogue curios like "Jungle Terror" and "Charlie McCarthy And Mortimer Snerd In Sweden".