Hound Town (1989)

In my review of Hollywood Dog, I lumped Hound Town in with a list of failed animated pilots looking to capitalise upon Fox's unexpected runaway success with The Simpsons.  I realise that was probably a mite unfair of me, given that IMDb has Hound Town's air date listed as 1st September 1989, well ahead of the initial airing of the debut Simpsons episode, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", on 17th December 1989.  So it's probably safe to say that this wasn't a reaction to the Simpsons' success so much as a coincidental attempt from around the same time to restart the prime-time animated sitcom.  Hound Town was directed by indie animation whizz Ralph Bakshi, most famous for the feature films Fritz The Cat (1972) and The Lord of the Rings (1978), the former of which was a landmark in the history of adult animation, it being the very first cartoon to be rated X (time has not been especially kind to it, though if you ask me it still holds up infinitely better after 45 years than Sausage Party does after less than one).  In the late 1980s, he'd found success (and a share of controversy) in children's television with the series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, and Hound Town was an attempt to expand that craft into the prime-time adult market that had eluded animation for so long.  A pilot was created for NBC, although it failed to impress the powers-that-be, who reportedly aired it only once before canning it forever.  As a result, Hound Town is another of those obscure animated projects that's proved devilishly hard to find over the years.  The recording making the rounds on YouTube right now is of very poor quality, which is tolerable enough if you're really determined to see this thing, but not at all ideal for image sourcing - meaning that, aside from the above title card, this is going to be an all-text review.

Update April 2017: A better quality version of the pilot has since surfaced, so I've added in a few images.

Hound Town wasn't the only discarded Bakshi series from the same era to live on as a solitary pilot - the 1988 special Christmas In Tattertown was originally intended as the launching pad for a series called Junktown on Nickelodeon, which didn't happen, though we'll get to that one at a later date.  Unlike Christmas In Tattertown, Bakshi did not write Hound Town, with scripting credits going to Prudence Fraser and Robert Sternin, who also wrote for the fairy tale-inspired sitcom The Charmings.  Bakshi also apparently wasn't very fond of the finished product - in fact, he went so far as to denounce it as an "embarrassing piece of shit."  Harsh words, but certainly, compared to the offbeat sharpness of The Simpsons, there's something distinctly naive and outmoded about Hound Town's efforts to appear hip and daring (it uses a laugh track, for eff's sake). We can tell that they were courting an adult audience because the characters drop a shit-ton of sexual innuendo throughout, but the script lacks bite, and the resulting cartoon feels like a weird hybrid of a somewhat off-kilter children's show and the hoariest sitcom imaginable.  It's not helped along by the presence of that infernal laugh track, which goes off at numerous points where I frankly don't even see what the joke was supposed be.

Hound Town's premise is essentially very similar to that of Illumination's recent merchandise spinner, The Secret Life of Pets, in that it follows the exploits of an assorted group of domestic mutts, here living in an ostensibly pristine suburban neighbourhood, and what they get up to when their owners aren't around.  Our main trio of dogs are the timid, pint-sized Rusty (Michael Manasseri), cocksure womaniser Napoleon (Christopher Rich) and a despairing bulldog named Patton (Charlie Alder, doing a telltale Harvey Fierstein impersonation), whose chaotic household is a hotbed of psychological torture in ways that make Family Dog's life seem luxurious by comparison.  In the pilot, Rusty's life is turned upside down by the arrival of Sasha (Miriam Flynn), an alluring and mysterious saluki whose uptight family have recently moved in up the street.  Napoleon offers to play matchmaker between the two, but is secretly looking to score with Sasha himself (via an elaborate scheme which involves throwing a wild party at Rusty's house while his owners are out of town), all while having to fend off the advances of Muffin (Jennifer Darling) a morbidly obese basset hound who fancies herself and Napoleon as a couple.

Hound Town has a barrage of issues that make much of it unappealing - first and foremost being that Napoleon is a thoroughly despicable character (why does a nice dog like Rusty even choose to hang around with such a manipulative and self-serving creep?), and the whole business between him and Muffin is pretty fucking obnoxious.  The viewer is blatantly intended to sympathise with Napoleon in being repulsed by Muffin because she's fat, ungainly and everything that Sasha isn't, which as a dynamic is odious enough, but it gets even more problematic toward the end when Napoleon gets liquored up and Muffin is heavily implied to have taken advantage of him in his severely drunken state - as in, she carried him off and fucked him in the bushes.  Yikes, that's seriously uncool.

Secondly, there's the utterly tone-deaf manner in which Patton's miserable home life is played for laughs.  I gave Family Dog quite the roasting for its casual depiction of a dysfunctional household in which the dog suffers constant ill-treatment at the hands of a family we're expected to believe are ultimately good for him, but Hound Town takes it up a whole extra level of unbearable by making Patton's family much more flagrantly abusive to one another.  In addition to being harassed by a pair of eight year old psychopaths, Patton has to contend with being caught in the crossfires of constant screaming matches between the mismatched mom and pop of the household, who each have very different ideas about how to treat their dog.  We don't see that much of the humans in this story, but for what little we do they seem to do an awful lot of screeching at one another - there's a scene where we see Rusty's family drive by in a car and they're likewise going at each other's throats.  Like Family Dog, Hound Town appears to fatally misjudge what viewers will find hilariously relatable about the chaos of everyday family life and what just looks like a bunch of humans being incredibly obnoxious.

Is there anything that Hound Town does right, then?  Yes - once you get past her fanboy-baiting character design and her somewhat ridiculous backstory (she's an ex-show dog who harpooned her showing career because she once ate a hot dog), Sasha the saluki is actually fairly likeable, and her interactions with Rusty in the latter half of the story do offer one or two genuinely heartfelt moments amid the inanity.  Outcast from the show dog circuit, Sasha fears that she's nothing more than a "bad investment" to her humans, but Rusty convinces her that being a faithful family pet is a worthy occupation.  Sasha's home life is troubled in a way that's sadder and more understated than Patton's, and she's able to convey a air of vulnerability lurking beneath her aloof exterior that's rather affecting.  Rusty makes for a fairly bland hero, but up against an insufferable jerk like Napoleon it's nevertheless gratifying to see him come out on top.


Scatological/Gross-out Factor:

Scatological gags are few and far between, the rude humour being more heavily focused upon the dogs' reproductive urges, but obviously in a show revolving around the finer points of day-to-day canine existence, it's going to figure somewhere.  So, Napoleon sticks his nose (albeit inadvertently) up Muffin's butt crack, Patton takes a leak over his owners' carpet (off-screen, but we hear the noises plainly enough) and Napoleon threatens to shit in a flower bed.


Disturbing/Inappropriate Humour Factor:

As noted, Napoleon is a lecherous womaniser, and he doesn't just restrict this to his own species.  There are a couple of scenes in which he's implied to get sexually aroused by the sight of his human mistress in a bikini and by staring at her butt while she's doing aerobics. Sorry, but that's all just a little too weird and creepy for my tastes.  I know that cartoon bestiality was in in 1989, what with the "Opposites Attract" video and all, but then MC Skat Kat didn't also happen to be Paula Abdul's house pet.

There's also a painfully misjudged gag where Patton's human mistress asks him if her children were scaring him and he thinks in response, "They should be taken to the pediatrician and put to sleep."  The kids in question may be utter sociopaths, and I certainly pity that poor cockroach they're last seen racing after, but DUDE!


Random Observations:

• The pilot doesn't make a huge deal of it, but Patton is blatantly intended to be gay.  His voice being modeled upon that of Harvey Fierstein (one of the few openly gay celebrities of the time) is a big enough hint, but the dead giveaway occurs during a scene where Sasha walks into the party and the guys all Tex Avery over her, while Patton can be glimpsed sitting nonchalantly with the unimpressed females.
• The script may be lowbrow as sin, but it does throw in a Mephistopheles reference to appease any literary boffins who may be watching.
• Somewhat dodgy scripting...as Sasha tries to leave the party, Rusty mutters to himself, "Oh great, Rusty, you blew it already."  Sasha overhears this, then immediately asks Rusty for his name.
• There are a couple of cats who show up in the latter half of the episode and look for a fleeting moment like they're going to become the villains of this scenario (there is an air about them that's vaguely reminiscent of Si and Am from Lady and The Tramp), but nope, turns out that, as characters, they're pretty incidental.  We never learn their names or where the heck they even stand in this particular dynamic; they're just a pair of random cats thrown in as a plot device to send Rusty's party off the rails.  Oh, and speaking of Lady and The Tramp, there's a scene where Rusty and Sasha are dining at the back of a Mexican restaurant that's so reminiscent of that film's most famous scene that it has to be deliberate.

Laugh Track Bafflers:

The inclusion of a laugh track was one of Hound Town's biggest technical misjudgements, making it reminiscent of the old Hanna-Barbera sitcoms in a way that no cutting-edge cartoon at the dawn of the 90s ever wanted to be.  It also makes watching it a greatly more confusing experience.  The laugh track is plastered all over the shop, to the extent that the characters can't seem to do or say anything without the damned thing erupting, irrespective of whether it actually makes sense or not.  Below are some of the most baffling moments where the laugh track indicates that there should be a real knee-slapper here but I just don't see it:


(As Napoleon leads Rusty and Patton across the road, having just caused a pile-up with his carelessness.)
Patton: "Oh, I'm going to be road pizza."
"Pizza" is a quirkier term than "kill", I suppose.


(At the party, as Patton begins to suspect that Napoleon is planning something underhanded.)
Patton: "How long have you known Napoleon?"
Rusty: "People years or dog years?"
Dogs age at a different rate to humans, of course...but what's the joke here, exactly?


(As Rusty tells Sasha that he shares her love of junk food, including hot dogs, cheeseburgers and tacos.)
Sasha: "Tacos?  Qu'est-ce que c'est...tacos?"
This one in particular vexes me.  Is the joke really that Sasha doesn't know what tacos are, or is there something more to it than that?


(As Rusty explains to Sasha why being a family dog isn't so bad.)
Rusty: "Don't get me wrong, now, as a species, humans have their problems.  I think it all stems from too little hair."
And the joke here is that humans have less hair than dogs, and from a dog's perspective that looks weird?


(As Rusty shows Sasha around the neighbourhood.)
Rusty: "Hey, see this maple over here? That's where I tree'd my first mailman."
Yes, I know that dogs have this thing about postal workers.  Maybe I'm being nitpicky but, as with a lot of these gags revolving around canine behaviour and impulses, I don't get what's automatically so damned funny about it.

The Verdict:

If not for one or two genuinely sweet moments between Sasha and Rusty and the agreeable quality of the animation, I'd be inclined to dismiss Hound Town, much as Bakshi did himself, as an all-out disaster.  The characters are largely unlikeable, the humour is crass and unfunny and the story hinges upon one of the most hackneyed sitcom plots of all-time, with the narrative thread involving the party at Rusty's house playing out note-for-note as you would expect it to (of course the house will get trashed, and of course Rusty will clear it up in a madcap frenzy right before his humans return, and of course he'll overlook one tiny incriminating detail which will have him in the doghouse).  In the end, I would recommend Hound Town only if you're a Bakshi completist, a hardcore animation buff or simply pathologically obsessed with failure.

All the same, I would sooner subject myself to this again than Sausage Party.  At least Hound Town doesn't waste half as much of your time with its tedious sexual fixations.