Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls | Hondo and the 777 Ranch — Two African Villages in the Texas Brush

In July 1995 the production moved to the brush country west of San Antonio and built both tribal villages — the gentle Wachati and the belligerent Wachootoo — on the 777 Ranch outside Hondo. The choice was practical rather than romantic. The 777 is an exotic game ranch of roughly 15,000 acres already stocked with the right animals: zebra, oryx, blackbuck, assorted antelope and gazelle grazing open Texas savanna. Keep the camera low, keep the mesquite out of frame, and Medina County reads as East Africa. The zebra-striped jeep did the rest.

The ranch is a working commercial operation and remains one, with hunts and stays booked in advance rather than walked into, so the village sites are not somewhere you can simply drive up to. Hondo is. The town sits on US-90 about forty miles west of San Antonio, and its own fame rests on a pair of roadside signs that have been arguing with drivers for generations: "This is God's Country. Please Don't Drive Through It Like Hell." Residents have rallied more than once to keep them standing.

Stop at the edge of town in July, when the heat comes off the caliche in sheets and the mesquite throws no useful shade at all, and the production's logic becomes obvious. Nobody flew a comedy unit to Africa. They found the animals already living in Texas and shot inside the fence lines.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.