Why the 6 years between the short and the series?

That's a great history of the production, Vinnie. I was an animator on the CBS series (from about September 1990 to May 1991 (my first real gig) and watched all the problems unfold from the inside, and your post matches my memory pretty well. The show was finally put into full production in mid-1990. According to my perception, this was done mostly in response to the early success of "The Simpsons" as a prime-time series. Ultimately, "The Simpsons" gave us a pointed tip of the hat on a tombstone in one of their Halloween episodes, alongside such similar prime-time animated triumphs as "Capitol Critters" and Hanna-Barbera's "Fish Police".

The message: we sleep with the fish police.

It's hard for me to believe that all this stuff was just getting started exactly twenty years go. And "The Simpsons" rolls on...

The Grammy spot you mentioned was animated by our beleaguered but extremely talented show-runner Chris Buck, who later went on to co-direct "Tarzan" for Disney. Chris, who had taught a lot of us at Cal Arts, was about the nicest guy I ever worked for, and the best boss or teacher you could ever want. He deserved a lot better than he got from this mess.

What I would add to your account is that the "production problems" reported here and elsewhere never really existed, for the most part. The pilot was ready in plenty of time, as were other episodes. I saw 'em. They just sucked.

The problem centered around weak, repetitive scripts, and there was just no joy in the thing. The result was a show called "The Family Dog" that had no understanding of families or dogs. In pretty much every episode, the dog escaped or was lost. In pretty much every episode, there was an extended and rather pointless time-filler dream sequence. The completely unsympathetic and unlikable Binford family had been really funny in the "Amazing Stories" episode, but they weren't here. They were just shrill and off-putting and a little mean-spirited. The Binfords plainly didn't care about the poor, nameless dog, which was kind of poignant...but much more importantly, we couldn't make an audience care either. And we tried pretty hard.

The directors and storyboard department tried improving ("plussing") the scripts. They were promptly un-improved ("minussed") back to their original form at a higher level of management (with long, pointless dream sequences always reinstated). They brought in the great Martin Mull to re-voice the dad character, and he helped some. We had lost Brad Bird pretty much before we even started, before I even got there in the Fall. Spielberg was preoccupied with "Hook" and we couldn't really get his attention until things got pretty well unfixable. Tim Burton wasn't available much either, with "Edward Scissorhands" going, or whatever it was back then.

The low point was a script that had the dog encountering an Asian family that ate dogs. No one wanted to touch that tasteless and dispiriting material, but we just couldn't seem to get the attention we needed from above.

Remember that everything I say here is just one guy's very biased perspective, long after the fact. But it is straight from the horse's mouth- or, more accurately, one of the many horses- or, at the very least, some unspecified end of one of the lesser horses. You make the call.

When we couldn't come up with an airable pilot, they picked a few of us to contribute animation for newly re-written scenes for one episode ("Show Dog"), led by Chris, and we did o.k. The idea was to choose a small crew to make revisions to each episode the same way. Instead, the show was sent to Canada for more expensive "fixing", and from what I could tell later a lot of effort seemingly went into messing "Show Dog" back up while other shows were left pretty much in their original messy state. I don't know, I'm not sure I saw all of 'em in their final forms.

In the trades, of course, the problems were publicly blamed on animators. But we just animated what we were given.

It was a lost opportunity on many levels. There was the young but talented crew, many of us straight out of Cal Arts, but Chris was already a star of the business, and Dave Cutler, our art director, was a great talent on the rise. The design department was great- I still have my model book somewhere. There were some good veterans mixed in, too. Chris was a great teacher to us, and did the best he could in a completely untenable situation. I'll be grateful to him forever, and will always be his biggest fan. He was one of the few who truly got nothing out of it- for the rest of us it was a learning experience and a great way to break in, as well as a paycheck.

Having a brilliant comic talent like Martin Mull on hand is another opportunity that shouldn't have been squandered.

Most interestingly, though, I firmly believe that this was the last TV show to date to be (traditionally) animated in Los Angeles. That's right, we were actually animators, not just character layout artists, with a scary quota of fifty feet a week, which we sometimes made- like I said, unbeatable training.

The overseas follow-up work was a genuine production problem, and that's another story. We had really hoped to show our stuff, such as our stuff was at that formative stage, but our stuff got butchered along with everything else in this epic cluster-bump.*

Eventually, about eight or nine Family Dogs -(?)- down from eleven- down from thirteen- limped off to Canada to be exorcised, faith-healed, bled by leeches, and chanted over. They limped back a few years later with heart-worm.

Thankfully, most of the original crew saw their names removed from the eventual credits of the completed debacle and replaced by those of the Canadian animators who did the "fixing", and most of the L.A. crew went on to animate a Christmas special based on the "Bloom County"/"Outland"/Opus and Bill comic strip called "A Wish For Wings That Work", also for Spielberg, and then did a little piecework for a long forgotten dinosaur feature called "We're Back" before the little studio in Glendale folded in late 1991. I had opted out of the dino-flick and quit because I arrogantly didn't want to be demoted to a mere assistant after all my lofty accomplishments to that point.

Years later someone told me he had spotted our old desks, covered with our just-out-of-school doodles, long-forgotten phone messages, our disregarded names, and a thick layer of dust in a storage basement over at Universal, or somewhere.

Thus ended a short but interesting chapter of my youth...



* Basically, we animated the show in Los Angeles, and it was supposed to be assisted in Taiwan. In Taiwan, this had either not been made clear or was simply not accepted- Taiwanese animators have artistic egos just like L.A. guys do- and a lot of our work was just discarded and re-animated, almost always poorly, because they were working without our directors, or (presumably, in many cases) comprehension of the language the show was done in, English. We only had one guy to oversee all this, and he was over-matched.