Confessions of a Family Dog Viewer: "Doggone Girl Is Mine"

Original air date: 30 June 1993 

If you really want to establish that your animated situation comedy is intended primarily for adult consumption and not for children - despite, you know, being a cartoon and therefore automatically at risk of being pigeonholed as innocuous entertainment for the under 10s - then the obvious route is to include a scene in which you make it blatantly obvious (at least to anyone over the age of 10) that two of your characters are having sex.  Hence, we have a whole episode dedicated to the family dog losing his virginity, with something else going on in the background involving Skip and Bev trying to jump start their own sex life.  It's nothing too edgy, but it is as risque as Family Dog gets.

"Doggone Girl Is Mine" (named for the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney collaboration on the former's 1982 album Thriller) is one of the better episodes of Family Dog, which makes for a welcome change of pace given how much difficulty I've had obscuring my boredom and frustration in reviewing the two episodes which came before it.  It never succeeds in being laugh-out-loud funny (as this show rarely ever does), but the story, which involves our dog falling for the dog of a recently-divorced neighbour, is surprisingly sweet in tone and moves at a much gentler pace than either of its predecessors.  It also works better as a cohesive whole, with less of the disjointed filler which made "Show Dog" and "Hot Dog at the Zoo" such a slog - whereas those episodes clearly struggled to fill out their respective scenarios to a full twenty-two minutes, "Doggone Girl Is Mine" flows quite smoothly from begging to end.  It also helps that the Binfords themselves are fairly sidelined this time around, meaning that there are fewer opportunities for them to behave idiotically and that the casual pet abuse is kept to a minimum.  There's a parallel story with Skip and Bev that does occasionally intersect with the main story, but on the whole they're not too heavily involved with the dog's antics here.  That Billy and Buffy are hardly in it is also a plus point - in fact, they stop appearing completely past the eleven minute mark, which is an absolute blessing.

The episode opens with the dog working his predatory skills upon a rubber ball while pop psychologist Dr. Friendly plays on the television (which none of the humans are watching, incidentally, since they're later revealed to all be in the kitchen).  He's here "to heal and to coddle" as he states, and while taking a call from Vina, who's recently divorced and relieved to be free of her ex, he drowns her out in some self-indulgent spiel about the remedial power of love.  Family Dog's attempts at media satire were certainly never as sharp as those of The Simpsons, but the trite hollowness of Dr. Friendly's words is underscored effectively enough by making it mere background noise to the utterly indifferent dog as he indulges in his own preoccupations, first with the rubber ball and then with the female, in-heat chihuahua passing by the house.

I do enjoy the realism in how the doggy romance between the titular character and Katie gets started, with the attraction at first being purely chemical - Katie gives off a long trail of pink pheromonal whiff which snakes its way into the Binfords' home and up our dog's nostrils, at which point he goes absolutely berserk and needs to escape the house.  After failing to get past the garden fence, the dog races to the kitchen to beg the humans to take him out for walk.  Billy and Buffy are being their usual unbearable selves, with Buffy believing that the raisins in her oatmeal are prizes and Billy reveling in any semblance of disorder.  Correctly deducing that the dog needs to answer a call of nature but wrongly deducing the nature of that call, Bev instructs Skip to take him outside, a task which he accepts very grudgingly.  We get further evidence that Skip would be one heck of an unpleasant guy to have to share your neighbourhood with - he instructs the dog to "hold it in until we get to someone else's yard".

The dog's first instinct is to bolt straight in the direction of the female chihuahua - much to the chagrin of Skip, who has little patience for the chihuahua's owner, Al, a recently-divorced bore who'll shortly be moving to start a doughnut shop in South Dakota.  Al is certainly one of the show's least appealing creations visually, with his gangling design and wide mouth translating particularly awkwardly into the crude animation.  Like most of the humans in this show, he's also fairly one-dimensional, his sole defining character trait being that he's clearly reeling from his divorce (he name-checks his ex as "Vina", so it's a pretty safe bet that she's supposed to be the same Vina who called into Dr. Friendly earlier) and hides what an all-out emotional wreck he is behind a thin facade of incessant cheerfulness.  His comments about taking Vina for granted are enough to sow the seeds of fear in Skip, who realises that he's been treating Bev in a similar manner, right down to complaining to her about having to walk the dog.  Meanwhile, both humans are totally oblivious to the tender display canine courtship unfolding at their ankles.  Our dog and Katie have hit it off straight away, and are none too happy when their owners proceed to abruptly drag them away in opposite directions.  Once they get back to the house, our dog is compelled to sit and wait at the window for hours on end in the hope that Katie will pass by once again, while Skip attempts to appease Bev by suddenly being as nice and considerate to her as possible, which automatically makes Bev suspicious that Skip must being trying to cover up for some misdeed. 

Essentially, the subplot with Skip fearing that Bev might divorce him after watching a neighbour's marriage fall apart is very similar to a story The Simpsons would eventually tackle in the Season 8 episode "A Milhouse Divided", where Homer fears that Marge's thoughts might be turning toward divorce after watching the Van Houten's marriage fall apart.  In both cases the fear is probably irrational, although Bev does apparently harbour a grudge against Skip for what she perceives as past flirtations with Vina, and gives him a cold shoulder that evening as the two of them retire to the bedroom.  The dog's tactic of assuming a sedentary position and waiting for his love to return likewise does not pay off, with only the unwelcome sights of a skunk and a savage-looking bull terrier passing by before the day is through.

The next morning proves a lot more prosperous, with Al and Katie passing by again and the dog managing to escape through a gap in the garden fence.  He comes nose to nose with Katie shortly before being retrieved and dragged back into the house by Skip.  This sequence is kind of short, its purpose presumably being to establish the gap in the fence so that the dog can move freely in and out of the house later on.  The second breakfast scene is also the last we see of Billy and Buffy for this episode, so I'm happy about that.

Cut to the following night, where Bev is in a better mood and Skip is even more determined to prove to her what a magnificent catch he is.  We briefly catch the beginnings of an implied sex scene between the two humans (Bev has weakness for farming allusions, it seems), as the dog wanders outside, to be greeted by a very Disney-esque sequence in which various animal couples are seen cosying up together - the joke being, I guess, that these animals are fundamentally quite gross in that the males are wooing the females with dead mice, discarded fishbones and...whatever it is that the male ladybug gives the female.  This initially has the dog feeling all the more miserable and alone, but it also inspires him to retrieve a bone which he has buried in the backyard and carry it to Katie's house, which he's able to locate by tracking Katie's scent through the street.

He finds Katie resting amid a heap of moving boxes, and it's here that we get our implied doggy sex scene.  It plays out as airy fantasy sequence, but we know what the dogs are really up to because of all the tell-tale visual metaphors we're suddenly bombarded with.  The look on our dog's face as Katie begins licking away at the bone is suggestive enough in itself, but then the sequence completely explodes into a surreal array of phallic/orgasmic imagery, complete with the arrow on one of the moving boxes assuming the role of a rocket ship blasting off into the atmosphere, and the two dogs whizzing through space upon a giant bone which erupts into fireworks, before hurtling giddily back down to earth.  Canine reproductive biology never looked so astronomical.

As our dog and Katie part ways in the early hours of the morning, it's clear that they plan upon spending a lot more time with one another in the days to come.  Unfortunately, this doesn't fit in with Al's plan of throwing Katie in the backseat of his car and heading to the airport to fly off to South Dakota that very morning, which is exactly what happens.  Meanwhile, our dog heads into the kitchen with a self-satisfied spring in his step; mannerisms mirrored by Skip, who's come downstairs for a post-intercourse snack.  Both are so exhausted from their respective nights of action that they pass out almost immediately (noteworthy is that as Skip slams down upon the table the animation momentarily looks a lot better than usual), but the dog's peace is abruptly shattered by the sounds of Katie wailing.  He rushes outside to find her gone, her house cleared of all its contents, the sole remaining item being the bone they shared the night before (which Katie had dropped as Al was putting her in the car).  Determined not to lose Katie forever, our dog picks up the bone and once again calls upon his superior tracking skills to find her.  Naturally, it's a bit of a stretch to think that he'd be able to trail her all the way to the airport, but by an extraordinary stroke of luck he winds up inside the handbag of a woman boarding an airport shuttle bus, so everything works out.

At the airport, we get a quaint gag about airport security which unmistakably hails from a pre-9/11 world.  Al complains about the procedures being too stringent, then finds himself surrounded by zealous security officers when he sets off a metal detector with a framed picture of himself and Vina which he has concealed within his shirt.  The intended gag seems to be that the officers come on ridiculously strongly with Al (to the extent that one of them even calls him "Saddam"), and yet from a modern perspective they seem almost too lax in how readily they ease off once he produces the picture (if this episode were made today then I'm sure that Al would at least be subjected to some humiliating frisking before they let him go).  Then again, competence does not exactly seem to be these officers' strong point - they allow the dog to get past them and all the way onto the plane (once again, the writers go to the scatology well in enabling the dog to escape the officers, in using his weak bladder as a defensive weapon, but it's pulled off super-tamely), where he shares a tender reunion with Katie and it's only thanks to an air hostess that he's thwarted.  She thinks that the dogs make an adorable couple but proceeds to throw our dog off on the grounds that the flight's already overbooked.

He manages to escape the arms of the security guards one last time (apparently he still had a little more liquid to spare in that bladder of his), and races down the runway to see the plane taking off and Katie jetting out of his life, seemingly forever.

Dejected, our dog trudges all the way back home, the only remnant of his brief relationship with Katie being their bone, which he still clings to in his mouth.  Given that it's already nightfall by the time he makes it back the house, I am left with some lingering questions about how the Binfords reacted to their dog being absent all day, and if they even noticed that he was gone at all?  Bev is heard calling to her "Old MacDonald" through the bedroom window, but it's clear that Skip is much too exhausted from the previous night to be up for anything tonight - that, or his fear that Bev might up and divorce him has evaporated as quickly as it came.  "Doggone Girl Is Mine" ends with the last word going to Bev, who muses that, "It was fun while it lasted."  Our dog suddenly seems a little more uplifted at this point, as if the very same thought has occurred to him.

Obviously, fate has not been kind to our dog or Katie (at least in the short-term - mild spoilers ahead, but this isn't the last that we'll be seeing of Katie or Al in the series), but I appreciate that this episode manages to wrap things up on a gentle, bittersweet note, with our dog seeking solace in his memories of Katie and finding a renewed ability to face another day.  Certainly, it's head and shoulders above the muddled, if not outright mean-spirited vibes of its two predecessors, the lesson appearing to be that life isn't perfect and nothing lasts forever, but we need to appreciate the good things for the fact that they happen at all.  This conclusion perhaps comes off as slightly less sweet when applied to Bev, who seems resigned to the likelihood that the sudden, self-serving wealth of attention lavished upon her by her oafish and unappreciative husband was but a five minute wonder.  Or maybe we're meant to read Bev as being so secure in her relationship with Skip, despite her earlier grumblings, that from her perspective that one night of tender passion was never anything more than a delightful bonus anyway.  Regardless, the human relations in this episode certainly come across as being considerably more messy and superficial when compared to the sweet sincerity of our dog's bond with Katie, which is possibly the whole point.  "Doggone Girl is Mine" might not be perfect, but structurally and tonally it's a marked improvement over the two episodes prior, and it is the first episode of Family Dog where I think the overall likeability factor is more than enough to override whatever faults it has.  So kudos to that.

Be warned, though, that this sudden turn of amiability is not destined to last.  The NEXT episode...well, we'll certainly have a fun time pouring over that.  Let's just say it's where the series' depiction of the horrors, bitterness and ugliness of suburban living really kicked into full gear.  A pretty sight it isn't.