Dog Figurines

The Air Bud movies are consider by many critics and scholars to be the greatest movies ever made about a dog that plays sports. There have been five movies in the series so far; two were theatrical releases and three were created specifically for video.

A young boy and a talented stray dog with an amazing basketball playing ability become instant friends. Rebounding from his father’s accidental death, 12-year-old Josh Framm moves with his family to the small town of Fernfield, Washington. The new kid in town, Josh has no friends and is too shy to try out for the school basketball team. Instead he prefers to practice alone on an abandoned court, where he befriends a runaway golden retriever named Buddy. Josh is amazed when he realizes that Buddy loves playing basketball and he is good! Josh eventually makes the school team and Buddy is named the Team Mascot. Josh and Buddy become the stars of halftime. Buddy’s half-time talent draws media attention. Unfortunately, when Buddy’s mean former owner, Norm Snively, comes along with a scheme to cash in on the pup’s celebrity, it looks like they are going to be separated.

Let’s backtrack a bit: Back in the 1990s, Buddy the Wonder Dog was a dog who could actually shoot basketballs into the hoop. He had a tape on how to teach your dog how to play sports and eventually became the subject of a Disney movie, Air Bud, in 1997.

Here was the shocker: Air Bud was actually pretty good, about the best possible dog-playing-basketball movie one could make. Roger Ebert sums it up well: “By the end of the film I was quietly amazed: Not only could Buddy play basketball, but I actually cared how the game turned out.”

Earning $24 million on a $3 million budget, Disney naturally released Air Bud: Golden Receiver in 1998. The original dog had died, so the movie dipped a bit in quality, but it was still a theatrically-released Disney movie. It was passable enough.

Asta is the cute little wire-haired terrier that delighted movie audiences in such films as “Bringing Up Baby”, “The Awful Truth”, and, of course, the popular “Thin Man” movies. Asta wasn’t merely a furry prop in the films he starred in, he was a central part of the action and a star in his own right.

Asta was immensely popular with audiences in the thirties and forties – so popular in fact, that many smitten fans wanted a clever little companion like Asta to call their own. Unfortunately, this surge of interest then led to an over breeding problem for Asta-like terriers. Asta’s charm still holds strong with dog lovers, and the name “Asta” remains a popular name for dogs to this day.

Asta is sometimes referred to as “Skippy,” and was credited as Skippy in the 1939 film “Topper Takes A Trip”. Asta’s birth name was Skippy, but it was changed to Asta after the first Thin Man film was released. Some fans feel strongly that Skippy is the “real” name, and therefore the proper name to use, while others prefer Asta, which is the name he is best known by. From all accounts, the canine star was comfortable answering to both.

As a character in the movie The Thin Man, Asta was the playful pet dog of Nick and Nora Charles, tugging them around town on his walks, hiding from danger, and sniffing out corpses. (“Asta, you’re not a terrier, you’re a police dog,” Nick tells him.) The character later appeared in the sequels After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home, Song of the Thin Man, as well as the 1950s television show The Thin Man.

The original character of Asta in Dashiell Hammett’s book of the The Thin Man was not a male Wire-Haired Fox Terrier, but a female Schnauzer. Due to the enormous popularity of the Asta character as played by Skippy, interest in pet terriers skyrocketed. Asta’s enduring fame is such that the name is a frequent answer in The New York Times crossword puzzles (crosswordese), in response to clues such as “Thin Man dog” or “Dog star.”

Although Skippy played Asta in the first two Thin Man films, other terriers, trained by the Weatherwax family and by Frank Inn, took on the role subsequent films in the series, and in the television show.

His owner is Mrs. Gale Henry East, once a prominent movie comedienne. … “When Skippy has to drink water in a scene, the first time he does it he really drinks. If there are retakes and he’s had all the water he can drink, he’ll go through the scene just as enthusiastically as though his throat were parched, but he’ll fake it. If you watch closely you’ll see he’s just going through the motions of lapping and isn’t really picking up water at all. And, because he has a sense of humor, he loves it when you laugh and tell him you’ve caught him faking but that it’s all right with you.

“Treat a dog kindly and he’ll do anything in the world for you

The Doberman Gang – 1972

Everybody knows that dogs are man’s best friend. But what happens when the dog is a lean, mean Doberman? Most people shiver in fright. Put six of them together and people will be shaking in their shoes. That’s how the idea for the perfect bank robbery came up. The actual thieves, the dog’s trainers, are lurking nearby. but who are they? Where are they? And can it work?

The Doberman Gang is a 1972 film about a talented animal trainer who uses a pack of Dobermans to commit a bank robbery. The six dogs were all named after famous bank robbers. Their names were Dillinger (John Dillinger), Bonnie (Bonnie Parker), Clyde (Clyde Barrow), Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Ma Barker.

Zoinks! It’s Scooby Doo on the front page! Epic win!

How did a cartoon about a nerd, a cheerleader, a jock and two stoners (one being a talking dog), ever get on the air? We don’t know, but someday we’d love to shake the hand of the guy who originally greenlighted Scooby Doo.

Scooby Doo first aired on CBS and can be traced back to Fred Silverman in 1969 who was the head of Daytime Programming for CBS. Silverman was looking for a show that would lead the network away from the superhero cycle and take them into an area of comedy and adventure.

Scooby-Doo was the title star of a long-running Saturday-morning cartoon of the 1970s and ’80s. A comically nervous Great Dane, Scooby spent each episode hunting ghosts with four human teenagers, including the always-hungry hippie boy Shaggy, the brainy Velma, the buff Fred and the beautiful Daphne. (The group drove around in a van called the Mystery Machine.) In the 1990s Scooby-Doo returned as a nostalgic pop icon for Generation X. A Scooby-Doo feature film was released in 2002, with a computer-generated Scooby cavorting with a live-action cast including Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred and Matthew Lillard as Shaggy. The film was a hit, and a sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, followed in 2004. To This Day the Scooby doo dog figure is one of the most popular.

The voice of Scooby’s human pal Shaggy was provided by “American Top 40″ radio personality Casey Kasem… Scrappy-Doo, a puppyish nephew of Scooby-Doo, appeared in some episodes of the cartoon; Scrappy is famously disliked by many devoted Scooby fans.

The show was first known as Mysteries Five and later changed to Who’s Scared? The show was then presented to the top CBS management and president Frank Stanton as a new Saturday morning cartoon for the fall of 1969.

There was one problem: the artwork was very frightening which led Stanton to reject the show. Silverman immediately flew back to Los Angeles that night. While listening on the earphones on the flight back, Silverman was relaxing to Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night. The phrase ‘Scooby-Dooby-Doo’ struck Silverman so much that he went back and said ‘We’ll call the show Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and we’ll make the dog the star of the show.’ And with those words Scooby-Doo was created with the other characters supporting him.