Studio: Famous Studios
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Sam Buchwald
Short Synopsis
Dog Face, a scruffy, slow-talking mongrel, is taken in by a rich man and set to work as his household servant, and the cartoon follows his efforts to rise from stray to gentleman's gentleman. He is dressed in livery, taught his duties and set loose on the mansion, where every task, answering the door, serving dinner, running the bath, walking the master's pedigree dog, turns into a disaster of the mongrel's own making, with the butler's dignity collapsing a little further each time. By the end the house is in ruins and Dog Face is back on the street, no worse off than before and considerably more experienced. Plot documentation is thin beyond the series filmography, and the account above is drawn from the cartoon itself.
Why It Matters
- It is the first appearance of Dog Face, one of Famous Studios' short-lived attempts at a Noveltoon star, and the last of two Noveltoons directed by Dan Gordon, the former Fleischer story man who had directed Superman cartoons and then left for Hanna-Barbera, where he became a mainstay; his direction is uncredited on screen.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the pre-1950 Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it is a representative example of the studio's mid-1940s output between the Fleischer inheritance and the Casper years.
Notes and Trivia
- Dog Face appeared again in Spree for All's year, in Famous's 1946 Noveltoons, before being dropped.
- John Walworth, co-animator, had worked uncredited on Popeye's Me Musical Nephews.
- See also: A Lamb in a Jam (1945), Sheep Shape (1946), Me Musical Nephews (1942).