The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #28: Disney Dalmatian Hopefuls

My nostalgic biases are probably showing, but for me, the experience of trawling through the extras at the back and front of a Disney videotape lost a lot of its mystique when Sorcerer Mickey was banished and replaced with that garish bouncy splodge. From then on, they felt less like eerie portals into another world and more like routine tours of what Disney was eager to sell me this season. Occasionally, though, they would throw up something sufficiently skin-crawling, and this promo for the 1996 remake of 101 Dalmatians certainly delivered the goods.

Curiously overlooked in the current debate over Disney's newfound love for cannibalising its animated classics to create live action analogues is that they went through a similar phase in the 1990s, only there they didn't get further than a couple of titles, with The Jungle Book being first to get the treatment in 1994, and 101 Dalmatians the last (although it proved a lucrative enough franchise on its own, also producing a sequel and a TV spin-off). Dalmatians '96 was influenced, no doubt, by the glut of live action animal flicks that dominated family cinema throughout the decade (such as Homeward Bound and Beethoven), and for as ill-remembered as the film is today, Disney hyped the living snot out of it at the time. And the campaign was hypnotically grotesque. One particularly bombastic teaser showed various world monuments sporting unsightly spotted makeovers to the sounds of "Also sprach Zarathustra". I also recall having to sit through a particularly long-winded preview before The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then there was this promo, which was always lying in wait at the start of the Toy Story VHS, and which may have been the most grotesquely chintzy of them all.

In the end, it all turned out to be mutt ado about nothing, as the movie itself kind of blew. It has only one thing to recommend it, and that's that Glenn Close makes for a pretty delectable live action Cruella. Which is not to say that she comes up to the animated original to any capacity (no mere human could possibly hope to equal that masterpiece of fur and fury) but for what it's worth I think she provides a really solid flesh-and-blood translation of the character. It's not enough to compensate for the multitude of sins, however (the film's sexual politics seem mired in the 1960s, while many of its concessions to the modern age - eg: making Roger a video game designer - are really cringe-inducing, there are raccoons and skunks wandering around in what its supposed to be the English countryside, etc). The most ominous hint in this promo comes from the mention of the producer of Home Alone (meaning John Hughes), for about midway through, it feels less like a re-imagining of a beloved Disney classic than an attempt to ride the Home Alone bandwagon which was already wearing down its wheels by 1996.

That much is not betrayed in the promo, although it does let you in that the remake is going to be a far tackier animal - still, for the film to have sported this same degree of deeply unsettling kitsch would have enabled a serious upgrade in character. The promo, which revolves around a faux casting call for the film's four-legged stars, is largely an excuse to unleash a cavalcade of dogs in obnoxious costumes and have them promptly dismissed by an off-screen (and equally obnoxious) director - unsurprisingly, as their (lack of) pertinence notwithstanding, none of the dogs seem to be particularly skilled at their respective talents (except perhaps the cat channeling his inner canine). The penultimate audition shows a young dalmatian with no discernable talent beyond being the desired breed, which impresses the director and segues into our punchline, implying that this whole ridiculous process will continue until one hundred others like him show up. There then follows an epilogue in which the director contends with a dalmatian imposter who disperses shoddily-applied body stickers all over his office.

I wouldn't describe this trailer as overly wild or surreal - it's goofy and veers just marginally on the side of unpleasantness - but as a kid it got well under my skin. I put that down, in part, to the severe chintziness overload, but I must admit that a great hunk of my unease lay in the grey area regarding whether we were intended to perceive these debased dogs as auditioning under their own volition, or as taking their cues from off-screen handlers who've dramatically misread (or else assume they can bypass) the specifications implied by a 101 Dalmatians talent search. The single hint of human intervention (other than the director's) is in the hand that reaches over to re-affix a fuzzy pom pom to a chihuahua - otherwise, we have no firm indication that they're there. This further raises the question as to whether the dog in the final audition is to be seen as complicit in the deception (if rather carelessly giving itself away) or as unwittingly thwarting its hypothetical trainer's improbable attempts to pass it off as a dalmatian? And to whom is the director speaking when he barks, "Take those with you!" - the dog or a trainer lingering just slightly out of screen? Naturally, the promo hits a higher level on the freakiness meter if we assume that these canine hopefuls have shown up unaccompanied, but then there are few things more unsettling than a character who refuses to make themselves seen, and the alternative reading - that these fashion-deficient dogs are merely avatars for some incorporeal wranglers' misplaced grasps at glory - is itself rather an unsavoury one.

Getting back to the chihuahua, just what is going during that audition anyway? Is its particular talent supposed to be modeling pom poms, or is it another imposter attempting to get by in applying fake spots onto its body? (If the latter, then it possibly steals the thunder somewhat from the cumulative gag.) This promo has several minor details that bug me - for example, the mise-en-scene includes a cloud backdrop which, for some reason, only features prominently during the ballerina dog's audition. I couldn't tell you what that's about either.