Thursday, October 02, 2008

08: Family Dog


Family Dog Part 1
Family Dog Part 2
Family Dog Part 3
Brad Bird, 1987

Its amazing how motivated you get to watching something when you can just feel it about to get ripped into.

It's also no suprise how I know about this when in retrospect it seems pretty obscure- but I've never been very motivated to watch it because...well, I guess I'm lazy. Theres a quote floating around that Family Dog was done around the same time The Simpsons came out, and the reason it flopped was because of the gaining popularity of everyones favourite long running family.

The original short however came out as apart of a series called "Amazing Stories" in 1987, and thats what I'm going to talk about.

With it's quirky design and lovely character animation, not to mention very interesting voice direction, Family Dog would proberbly be just as big a cult hit even if it wasn't attatched to Tim Burton's name (Who apparently produced and helped design the characters- which I believe. If you watch Vincent, the dog looks just the same- in fact he draws all his dogs like that. And the Mother has lips like all his female characters- in his drawings at least).

And, because I can do what I please- I very much enjoy the quaint little soundtrack as well, done by a very young (at the time)and talented man by the name of Danny Elfman.

Oh yes.

I went there.

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