Entertaiment

Shaggy Dogs
By Orson Scott Card

The Shaggy Dog is really two movies.  One is a genuinely funny story of a busy, neglectful father (Tim Allen) who discovers what he’s been doing to his family when he is transformed into a dog.

The other is a lame, tedious, sometimes offensive courtroom drama centered on an evil corporation that is creating chimeras — animals blended between two species — in pursuit of a longevity serum.

Both storylines have great performances: Tim Allen is superb is a doglike man (and the dog ain’t too bad as a manlike dog).  And Robert Downey, Jr., manfully pays his penance for previous career-wrecking misbehaviors by giving an outstanding performance as the villainous corporate greedhead in a dumb comedy.

Both storylines have major stupidities.  The evil-corporation story is a bizarre mish-mash of scientifically “explained” magic, in which the science is so outrageously stupid that kids who see this film may take years to recover from it.

And in the man-becomes-dog storyline, they didn’t pay attention to obvious details that were truly irritating.  When Tim Allen turns into a dog, he leaves his human clothing behind, once in a back alley, once in front of corporate headquarters while a homeless man looks on, and once in a dog pound.

Why the homeless man didn’t steal the clothes, I don’t know.  And why didn’t the guy at the dog pound check the i.d. in the suit and call the wife and say, “Your husband came in here and he must have left naked and on foot because I have all his clothes and wallet and car keys.”

The wallet and car keys were the biggest problem.  He kept leaving them behind in dog form, and yet never missed them when he was restored to human form.  He always seemed to be able to drive his car.  He never seemed to have trouble finding his money and credit cards.

I can hear the filmmakers impatiently saying, “If you buy that a man turns into a dog, you’re going to quibble about wallets?”

But that’s precisely why they should have attended to these details.  When you’re trying to win the delight and laughter of an audience through a completely unbelievable fantasy concept (man becomes dog), you need to surround it with a wealth of correct details to continually buttress believability.  It’s harder and harder to laugh, the dumber and dumber the storyline becomes.

The other completely unbelievable moment is when the son, who has previously been described as the best musical-comedy talent in his middle school, bursts into a song from Grease and can’t hold the pitch.  The kid is awful.  American Idol-level awful.  And yet everybody still pretends to think he would be anything other than disastrous in a musical comedy.

Then, at the end, they put the dog on a surfboard in Hawaii in a special effects sequence so badly done that both at a distance and in closeup it doesn’t look as good as the now-cheesy special effects in The Ten Commandments.  Most people could have done better with their home computer.  If you don’t have the money to do the special effect right, then don’t put it in the movie.

This movie is worth seeing for Tim Allen-as-dog — and for nothing else.  It was a pleasant-enough way to pass a couple of hours with my family.

But it mostly made me want to see the originals again — 1959’s Fred MacMurray/Tommy Kirk/Tim Considine/Annette Funicello/Kevin Corcoran The Shaggy Dog, and 1976’s The Shaggy D.A., with Dean Jones, Tim Conway, Suzanne Pleshette, Dick Van Patten, and Keenan Wynn — a virtual roll-call of Disney’s stable of charmingly inoffensive actors.

So the very next night, we invited over some friends and we all watched the black-and-white Fred MacMurray Shaggy Dog together.  Some had seen the new one; some had not.

It was a different kind of humor, from a different time.  No jokes about waking up naked — the clothes apparently migrated with the dog-man transformations.  And the pace was slower, with more empty set-up between gags.

Which meant it wasn’t trying so hard to be funny — but it was successful at humor a higher percentage of the time.

The plot was built around spies coming into the neighborhood, and there was an interrogation scene (of an American citizen) that is a reminder that nobody back then even thought we had the rights that the Patriot Act is supposedly taking away.

But it was just about as lame a plot as the new movie’s.  And without today’s special effects, all the transformation we got was tufts of hair sticking out every which way, a paw sticking out of a sleeve, and then poof, he was a dog.  Even back in 1959, when I was about eight years old, I knew that the transformations were fakey — a crossfade just isn’t a morph.  But nobody cared — we went along with the fantasy.

In fact, what feels truly fantasy-like now is the social order.  Since the person actually being turned from human to dog and back again was Wilby, the teenage boy played by Tommy Kirk, the story focused on teen life.  Admittedly, even then this was a rather cleaned-up version of teen life.  Kids in those days thought about sex just as much as in any other era.  But they didn’t expect to be able to do as much about it.

And, more importantly, the social order was centered around not encouraging kids to be in situations where they could have sex.  There were chaperones, of course, but there were also higher expectations.  Plus, kids were not expected to start dating as young as they do now, or to date anyone exclusively — the “wild” boy played by Tim Considine had to take two girls on the same date before he crossed the line; these days, teenagers seem to think they’re “going together” after one date.

Look, I don’t know whether the first movie is better than the new one.  The movie arts have vastly improved.  But the writing hasn’t.  Neither, to tell the truth, has the acting.  Those were pretty good actors in most of the roles back then — and pretty good actors in most of the roles now.

So why did the older movie seem less smarmy, artificial, and smug than the new one?  It was officially the fifties that had a corner on those “virtues.”

But not really.  It’s in the nature of the smug establishment to condemn in other eras the very things that it is most guilty of itself.  The absolute certainty of moral rectitude has not changed — only the list of good guys and bad guys.