Hollywood Dog (found animated television pilot; 1990)

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Hollywood Dog.png

The pilot's opening title.

Status: Found

Date found: 03 Dec 2016

Found by: TServo2049

Hollywood Dog was a proposed pilot for a half-animated/live-action comedy in 1990. Based on the comic strip by the late R.P. Overmyer, the pilot aired on Fox as a TV movie on July 25th, 1990 at 9:30 PM (with a mere 4.6 million viewers tuning in). It is unknown if a repeat showing was ever aired.

Plot

The story of the pilot is about Hollywood Dog (voiced by Hank Azaria), an animated anthropomorphic dog who is a musician manager and struggles to pay the rent. Dog is in trouble when a performer he manages cancels an appearance. In an act of desperation, he quickly signs in a new client, fresh off-the-country Bodine Frank, but their relationship go sour. The two eventually reconcile, playing simultaneously country and rock music on stage, thus laying out the setup for what the rest of the series would have been like.[1]

Availability

While the pilot aired at least once, a full series was never picked up. For years, information about this pilot was very scarce on the internet. The only knowledge most had about it was database listings, descriptions from an archived newspaper, and an old interview with Hank Azaria. However, in September 2015, the YouTube channel Rewind Eats the Tape uploaded a brief promo for the special that aired on the WUTV Buffalo Fox affiliate.

On August of 2016, the YouTube user Channel 6 uploaded a set of commercials that included the same promo as previous, but on a different affiliate, WOIO Cleveland. The voice-over at the end also suggests that this may have been recorded off a taping of the actual special, but nothing else related to Hollywood Dog has been uploaded by Channel 6.

Aside from these promos, no known taping of the special, or any other clips from it, was found until December 3rd, 2016, when LMW contributor TServo2049 uploaded a high-quality DVD-R rip of the pilot as it aired on WOIO (which he received in 2010 and first claimed to have in 2014) onto file-sharing website MEGA. On December 17th of the same year, YouTube user Benjamin MacHale uploaded the full pilot, with commercials, converted from the DVD-R upload.

Since it is also from WOIO, the uploaded version of Hollywood Dog may have originated from the same recording as the promos uploaded by Channel 6, which came from the pilot broadcast of Molloy that aired immediately before. However, the rip of Hollywood Dog has higher picture/sound quality than the Channel 6 clips, so if they were originally one taping, Hollywood Dog likely comes from an earlier-generation copy, if not directly from the original recording itself.

Gallery

The complete pilot (with commercials).

External Links

References