Dog Gone

"Dog Gone" is an installment of Bud Fisher's very popular "Mutt & Jeff" cartoon series. I've seen quite a few of these films and this one is about average...however the content is anything but average!

When the story begins, Mutt has been appointed judge of a local dog show. He convinces Jeff to dress up like a dog and the plan is that Mutt will give his buddy the prize. However, when this happens, the dogs in the show lose it and chase Jeff from the building. Outside is a sausage man who is eagerly scooping up the pooches in order to turn them into sausages!! Can Jeff manage to escape or is he destined for the grinder as well?

While this is a very sadistic and strange cartoon short, it's NOT without precedent. 1904's "Dog Factory" is a live-action film with a similar theme. Both are weird and well worth seeing...particularly "Dog Factory".

Mutt has been appointed the judge at a dog show. He persuades Jeff to dress in a dog costume and they will split the prize money.

This Mutt & Jeff cartoon spends a lot of budget on some good backgrounding and compensates for the expense by a lot of cheating -- cyclical or repetitive action that is cheaper than in-betweening a new sequence. Notice the crowd of dogs in pursuit of Jeff; a short sequence of different dogs repeats several times, as does the motion of that old stand-by of the vaudeville stage, the Automatic Sausage Machine, which had first appeared in the movies thirty years earlier.

There are also some good gags, including a Limburger gag. The best involves what happens to Mutt when he is pursuing the runaway dogs.