Original air date: 14th July 1993
"Call of The Mild" is an unusual episode of Family Dog, in that the family themselves are largely absent throughout, and instead the dog spends most of the episode running around with a pack of feral dogs who have taken up residence in a vacant lot close to the Binfords' house. He gets to experience what life would be like if he wasn't such a family-friendly mutt, in other words. I've routinely stated that the Binfords are by fair the weakest aspect of the show, so how does this episode fare by keeping them predominantly on the sidelines? Well...I'd be lying if I said that "Call of The Mild" was automatically a better episode for the lack of Binford-brand unpleasantness. Oh sure, it's nice to have a solid eleven minutes in which we don't have to tolerate their ugly antics, but "Call of The Mild" still suffers from tedious, directionless plotting which fails to do anything particularly interesting with the change of setting. Our dog simply runs away to live on the streets for a bit, the only really significant outcome being that, once we've compiled enough footage to fill up an episode, he inevitably has to go back home.
"Call of The Mild" opens with the Binfords finishing off their evening meal, which apparently has not been too easygoing an experience. Skip and Billy are complaining because Bev has served them a dinner of homemade cream corn souffle instead of allowing them to eat take-out pizza (yep, it's that old "health food is weird" chestnut again) which then moves onto a lively debate as to whether bodily gas is "better out than in". It's a typically tiresome bit of Binford banter, the only vaguely intriguing bit being when Skip references a TV show in which "they made the kid bring the cow back" and had pictures of it "all spread open like that" - intriguing, because I'm left wondering if this is a genuine cultural reference which the viewer is expected to pick up on. Skip then moves onto complaining about a nearby vacant lot, which is currently home to a pack of feral dogs who keep raiding their trash and disturbing them with their incessant barking. Our dog seems a lot happier about having them around, however, as they appear to be awakening some of his more deeply-suppressed primal urges. Lulled to sleep by their barking (and by Billy's incessant yapping about beasts of the night ripping guts out), he enjoys a wish fulfillment fantasy in which he's a wild beast living in prehistoric times. Despite his looking more like a sabre-toothed rat than any kind of plausible ancestor to the modern dog, the local canids all look up to him as their alpha, thanks to the impossible tenacity with which he can bark down a couple of raging T-Rex. Dream on, little pipsqueak.
The dog's dream is suddenly interrupted by the nightmarish sight of a Godzilla-sized Buffy rising out of a canyon. Sure enough, the repugnant little brat is standing beside his basket, and has woken him up purely so that she can drag him off to play some obnoxious game called "TV Time", which involves sticking a paper bag over the dog's head and parading him around inside a cardboard box before an audience of dolls and stuffed rabbits. Billy then walks in, shoves Buffy over and laughs that he can see her underpants and...ugh, this is just another hunk of pointless filler which serves no real purpose other than to reaffirm why the Binford children should both be muzzled and sterilised. The dog flees outside, where he hears the sounds of the feral dogs howling and tries to respond to them. Skip figures out that the dog is taking an unusual interest in the local strays and tries to steer him back toward the path of domestication, assuring the children that the last thing their dog wants is to get mixed up in the lifestyle of the kind of dogs you see sniffing around streets and car washes. That night, however, the dog becomes restless yet again, and heads back into the garden in order to howl with the feral dogs. Skip and Bev observe him from their bedroom window, and we then get another gag about their troubled sex lives, because obviously we need to squeeze in at least one saucy sex gag in order to maintain the interest of the adult demographic.
Finding the urge to rough it with his feral brethren too strong, the dog escapes the garden (in a slick sight gag, he's shown to leap onto his kennel and then over the fence, apparently forgetting that there's a convenient hole a little further along the fence big enough for him to have crawled through). He then makes his way to the vacant lot comes nose-to-nose with the feral dogs, but fails to impress their alpha, a scruffy saluki who pointedly rejects him. Our dog then learns that there is one thing which even the biggest and most hardened of feral canines live in fear of - the local dogcatcher, who in the absence of the Binfords is going to be our main speaking character for the next eleven minutes. He shows up, ranting and raving about how much he wants to impound the dogs, and if he comes across as a little too manic and emotionally invested in his line work, it's because he does, in fact, have an axe to grind - a stray dog bit him in the nose, leaving it all mangled and swollen, and now he harbours a personal grudge against all of the local strays. The saluki's gang flee the lot and to the city and, finding himself unable to go back the way he came, our dog follows on after them.
Weaving his way through a labyrinth of streets and alleys while trying to stay out of the dogcatcher's sight, our dog finds the ferals feeding out a dumpster and attempts to join them, but they still won't accept him as one of them and send him packing. Confusingly, in the next sequence we see the dogs preparing to cross a freeway, and suddenly they appear to be fine with our dog, because he's standing right beside them and no one's objecting.
Now seems like as good a time as any to comment upon the soundtrack to "Call of The Mild", which is jazzier than usual and fits the tone of this particular sequence rather well. It's appropriately frenzied and it helps to emphasise the feeling that the dog has stepped into another world entirely and is now well beyond his comfort zone. Also effective are some of the perspective shots we get of the dog standing beside the freeway, and of the city lights and buildings in the backdrop, giving the visuals a pleasing if still rather nondescript urban flavour. The biggest problem with this sequence is the overwhelming predictability of it all - from the moment the road clears and the dog begins to walk across, it's painfully obvious how this is going to play out. Sure enough, the stoplight switches back to green with our dog right in the middle of crossing, and suddenly a whole barrage of traffic comes hurtling down upon him. Frantically dodging the merciless vehicles, our dog is forced to retreat and winds up right back where he started.
Fear of one evil shortly overcomes the fear of another, however, for the dogcatcher sneaks up on him from behind and forces our dog to make a desperate bolt across the freeway. He's very close to reaching the other side, when he suddenly sees a huge lorry tearing down upon him and becomes paralysed with terror, but is rescued by the saluki, who yanks him out of the vehicle's path. This seems to lift our dog's spirits, for he feels that he's finally been accepted by the ferals. Okay, but why exactly? What did our dog do, precisely, to convince them that he belongs in their pack? Have they just taken pity on him because he's so small and helpless and blatantly won't survive on the streets on his own? Or are they genuinely impressed by his persistence in having followed them this far? Whatever, they've decided that they like him now, and allow him to accompany them to their new hang-out down by the railway tracks.
Once we move out into the city and into the railroad setting, the soundtrack adjusts itself accordingly, switching from the jazzy trumpet score to more of a blusey harmonica sound, which is a nice touch. Unfortunately, it's also at this point that the entire feral dog plot thread begins to wear out its welcome, feeling less like the episode is making any kind of satisfying narrative progression than it does a single sequence is running on ad infinitum. We see the dog still struggling to live the life of the wild rogue but just about managing to hang in there; in another scene with an all-too predictable outcome, the dogs corner a small cat that seems defenceless enough, until our dog decides to get in on the fray, whereupon the cat turns vicious and completely savages him (this leads to the saluki actually breaking the fourth wall, by giving the viewer an incredulous sideways glance). I'm certainly not adverse to a bit of non-verbal storytelling - in fact, the show's reliance upon visual narration is one the things that I find interesting and unique about it - but I feel that "Call of The Mild" struggles to sustain interest in its central scenario for long, mainly because what we're shown isn't particularly interesting. If anything, the shift away from the series' usual suburban setting feels like a missed opportunity for some inventive atmospheric work. We do get a smattering of neat little visual moments, such as when the dogs' shadows are cast against the train carriages and our dog gets a momentary confidence boost from seeing his shadow as big as the others, but these are few and far between. Above all, there's no real sense of the dog's wild experiences building up in any specific direction - he learns repeatedly that life is hard (a lesson he could learn over and over simply by staying at home) but it's never implied that he misses his life as a house dog, or that he's slowly adjusting to the life of a feral dog.
In another sequence, the dogs steal sausages from a pair of hobos, the only particularly interesting thing going on here being that one of the two (who only appear in silhouette form) is implied to be Al from the episode "Doggone Girl Is Mine"; we hear him talking about one Vina who was seduced away from him. The ill-fated Al/Vina relationship actually does resurface a few times throughout the series as a running gag, although Al's implied presence here as a hobo residing in a box car does raise a few questions with regards to continuity. For example, what's become of his dog Katie? And isn't he supposed to be running a doughnut shop in South Dakota right now? Al's supposed to be a down on his luck guy, so you could infer that his business failed and that Katie ditched him, although that doesn't fit with what's later shown in the tenth and final episode and - well, we'll get to that.
Finally, the dogs settle down to sleep in one of the box cars, only to be approached by a pack of rival dogs who feel they've muscled in upon their territory. The saluki's gang are certainly up to their challenge, but our dog finds it all too horrific and scarpers beneath the box car to hide, which turns out to be an entirely sensible move, as the dogs will soon have more to worry about than just one another. The feral dogs are so caught up in their confrontation that they fail to notice the dogcatcher's wagon approaching until it's too late - most of them are able to flee, but the dogcatcher seizes the saluki leader, who can only writhe around helplessly in his grip. At this point, our dog suddenly summons the audacity to leap out and bite the distracted dogcatcher in the hand, forcing him to drop the saluki, but getting his own hide busted in the process. Our dog finds himself impounded in the local animal shelter, where he's thrown into a pen with some distinctly unsympathetic mongrels.
As the Binfords arrive to collect their dog in the early hours of the morning, we get a glimpse inside the dogcatcher's office, and it's revealed that he's a fanatical cat lover. Because nothing indicates an intense dislike of dogs quite so much as being seriously keen on cats, am I right? Or maybe the whole point is to show that he's really a softie deep down inside, despite the flagrant sadism he exhibits while stalking the feral dogs (actually, there is a somewhat amusing bit earlier on where he pauses one of his anti-mutt tirades to proclaim his weakness for little kittens). The Binfords discover their dog in a less than stellar state, having had the stuffing ripped out of him by the other dogs. Buffy starts chiding him for being a "bad doggy" and suddenly I have a new appreciation for those long-winded box car scenes in which she was at least well out of the picture.
As the Binfords drive their dog back home, they wonder what prompted him to run away, with Billy brazenly suggesting that he bolted to escape his mother's cooking. As Bev jadedly declares that the family can eat take-out pizza every night for all that she cares, our dog hears the feral dogs howling off in the distance and becomes momentarily roused by their calls, but finally settles down dejectedly upon the car seat. Buffy then pats him and says, "I love you, my favourite little doggy," which seems to lift his spirits, although the sheer glibness of this ending has me reaching for a barf bag. Really now, if "Call of The Mild" was looking to make a statement about the dog ultimately being better off where he was then it fails rather dismally. As noted, the we're never given any reason to suspect that the Binfords' home was ever on his mind while he was roughing it with the feral dogs, or that he intended to give up the wild lifestyle once he'd started. He ends up going back purely because he gets caught and impounded. And he gets caught and impounded because of the one thing he does in the episode's entirety to suggest that he might have a bit of killer instinct in him, not because he ultimately couldn't make it as a feral dog. Not to mention, the lifestyle that awaits him at home involves having a paper bag shoved over his head and being forced to dance around inside a cardboard box. (Having the saluki and co show up howling in the distance at the very end, while it does make for a lovely closing image, also seems like a glib means of rounding off their story - more of an acknowledgement of their continued existence than a convincing indication of our dog's relationship with them having reached its natural conclusion. Not that there was ever a massive sense of relationship-building with these dogs in the first place.)
Overall, "Call of The Mild" is a curious but ultimately not very satisfying attempt at creating an episode with minimal dialogue, one which basically takes its central scenario of the dog roaming with feral dogs and stretches it as far as it can go without any genuine feeling of structure or development. The result is one of the more "different" episodes of the series' run, but also one of the most dull (although with the Binfords largely absent it's at least tolerable). The only especially striking elements are the city sequences which, while not as visually adventurous as they perhaps could have been, nevertheless do a decent job of showing the dog in unfamiliar territory in which he's even more dwarfed and overwhelmed than usual. The potential for a dark and arresting romp through the nocturnal world of the urban fleabag was definitely there, but "Call of The Mild" approaches the matter rather too mildly for its own good.
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