Studio: Paramount Cartoon Studios (formerly Famous Studios)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Short Synopsis
No detailed plot summary of this late Noveltoon has been published that this book could find, so this account is based on the surviving television print. The hero is a shaggy, long-eared terrier with a big nose and a jaunty manner. In one scene he sits up at a kitchen counter, eyes a thick sandwich and wolfs it down in one bite. In another, dressed like a man about town in a brown jacket and a little hat, he lounges on the grass of a city park beside a stone birdbath, under autumn trees. And in a smart restaurant with pink tablecloths and framed pictures on the walls, he sits at a table like a human customer, while a moustached waiter in a tailcoat brings him a dish under a silver cover. The film appears to follow the dog through a day in which he lives like a person, and the comedy comes from a dog behaving like a gentleman about town. How the day ends is not described in any source this book could check.
Why It Matters
- The design is pure late-1950s modern: flat fields of pastel colour, minimal backgrounds, stylised autumn trees and a sketchy, angular dog whose look owes much to UPA and to the magazine illustration of the period. It shows how completely the old Famous Studios style had been replaced by the end of the decade.
- It comes from the last years of the Noveltoons series, when Paramount's cartoon studio was producing one-shot films with new characters on tight budgets, competing with television. These films are rarely seen today, and many survive only in television prints.
Notes and Trivia
- The writers, Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer, had worked on Paramount cartoons since the Fleischer era; Mercer was also the voice of Popeye.
- By 1959 the old Famous Studios had been renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios, though many of its veterans, including Kneitel, were still in charge.
- See also: News Hound (1955), Swab the Duck (1956).