Won Ton Ton

There was a movie made long ago. Why did I go to it? It doesn't seem very appealing.

It was called Won Ton Ton, the Dog that Saved Hollywood. Bruce Dern desperately wants to be a movie writer in the silent era. He has ideas for movies----like one where a shark attacks bathers in a northeastern tourist town.

The movie was made in the '70s. Had Virginia Mayo, a couple of the Ritz brothers (about whom I said unkind things in another entry somewhere), Johnny Weissmuller, Huntz Hall, Lincoln Perry (aka Stepin Fetchit) and Edgar Bergin, Lash LaRue, Dorothy Lamour, Joan Blondell. And lots more!

Milton Berle....Henny Youngman.

I was going to say something very intelligent about it, but I forget what it was.

Why did I go to it? It was 1976 when the movie was released. I would have been thirteen or fourteen. I remember not being especially amused. I wouldn't have recognized the old stars doing their cameos or realized that I was supposed to recognize them.

But it's still there. Seared into my memory. That's something for the filmmaker to take heart in. Your most forgettable efforts will be seared into the memory of thousands of people.

There was a recent biography of RinTinTin. He was a huge star in his day, rescued from a bombed out building by an American soldier in World War One. In the silent era, before dialog, animals and humans were on more equal footing and there was talk at the time of the dog winning an Oscar for Best Actor.

But I would watch some of these animal shows. Lassie, Gentle Ben, Flipper, and Skippy, an Australian show that followed the same formula. The lonely son of a game warden has adopted a wild animal as a pet. A kangaroo in the case of Skippy.

In most cases, the animals served no useful role in the story. In one episode, Lassie pulls a rope with her teeth and pulls some kid to safety. It's good that she did it, but a human character could have done just as well.

Gentle Ben did fight a partially drugged tiger. Burt Reynolds was trapped in a wreck airplane carrying the tiger to a zoo somewhere, so Gentle Ben saved him. I wonder how they set up the fight between the two animals.