The Shaggy Dog

Release Date: March 19, 1959

Watch Date: July 3 – July 5, 2023

“After years of on-the-job clashes with cranky canines, mail carrier Wilson Daniels sees man’s best friend as his worst enemy. This makes for one hairy situation when a magical ring accidentally transforms his teenage son Wilby into a lumbering sheepdog. As if switching from a human to a dog and back again isn’t awkward enough for a teenager, Wilby uncovers a plot by international spies who plan to steal government secrets in order to sabotage a missile operation.”

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    ‘The Shaggy Dog’ is kind of like an ‘Old Yeller’ reunion with both our, now, dog loving boys reappearing in another fun dog themed adventure – luckily man’s best friend makes it out alive. Mostly because half of the time man’s best friend is actually a man. Kind of counter Disney’s happy-go-lucky image if we go around killing teenage boys that somehow magically got turned into a dog.

    Look, this movie is…it’s very lame. And despite there being a colourized screenshot, leading me to believe that it has been colourized at some point, Disney+ only has it in black and white which, at this point, makes a film immediately lose points in Bob’s eyes.

    There’s not much to say about this film really, I think it’s supposed to be about a man who doesn’t like dogs and has a difficult relationship with his sons, and then when one son turns into a dog that only makes the relationship worse. Kind of like ‘Brave’ before ‘Brave’ was a thing? Only, Wilson is rarely in the film, and he’s definitely not a main character as he is marketed. This film is about Wilby who, you’d think after his role as the main character in “Old Yeller” would be able to have brought in audiences on the weight of his name alone.

    It’s kind of a romantic comedy, and kind of not. It’s kind of about a father-son relationship, and kind of not. It’s kind of a spy-thriller, and kind of not. Wilby and his younger brother have the only real “relationship” that gets explored in the whole film, and it’s mostly just about the younger brother wanting to keep his older brother as a dog. We don’t know why Wilby is somehow smart enough to build a rocket interceptor in his basement, but is treated like a good for nothing idiot by his “friend”, and I use the term loosely, Buzz and his father. Why is there magic in this world, why is the Borgia family involved?

    This movie’s inability to be any one thing, and to do all the various things it’s trying to be poorly means that it’s also incredibly boring. Seriously, Bob fell asleep during it. Possibly he was resting up for his favourite holiday – July 4th, needing to take an afternoon to celebrate a country he no longer lives in is the main reason this film took so long to watch – but it doesn’t matter because he did. And it takes a lot for Bob to be so un-invested in a film that he actually manages to fall asleep.

    We are actually both really dreading this film, and I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it’s the fact that with this film, so goes the 1950s, the first real decade of Disney movies we watched – since the films from the 40s were few and far between and the 30s are only included in the list by the skin of their teeth. Maybe it’s because we both had an innate feeling that this film would be bad, hey we’re not paid professionals, we’re allowed to be biased. But whatever it was, we just weren’t feeling this one; and while sometimes a film you’re dreading can surprise you and end up being the highlight of your day, this was not one of them.

    Also Wilby was gay, and fired by Walt Disney personally after an affair he was having with a fifteen-year-old boy, Tommy Kirk was twenty-one at the time. This has nothing to do with the film, or him as a person. Being gay was incredibly taboo when he was growing up, he had no safe space to explore his sexuality. It’s tragic that he felt he needed to hide and pursue unsafe options in order to feel like himself. He still shouldn’t have had sex with a fifteen-year-old. I wonder if Walt is still just as charming when he’s firing you.