Upsetting Day: Pound Puppies TV Special

The '80s were an especially unscrupulous time for toy vendors. "Buy my sparkly unicorns that shit and vomit" is a weird sales pitch, but it's nothing compared to "buy this cute plush dog, or it will be murdered," which is the basic conceit of Pound Puppies. We all know what happens to puppies if they stay at the pound too long. They're not called Holistic No-Kill Shelter Puppies. These dolls are goners if you don't take them home, kid.

The number one word used over and over again in Pound Puppy advertising is lonely. Most commercials try to convince kids their products are fun; Pound Puppies wanted to associate their product with the saddest emotion.

I guess I'm trying to establish my bias here. I think Pound Puppies are the worst thing on Earth, and I'm going to talk about their 1985 television special, which is set in a bizarre nightmare world, but first I need to tell you all of the ways in which the Pound Puppies have transgressed against me, personally.

It's not just that I was constantly reenacting Sophie's Choice at the toy store every time I had to leave 29 dogs behind and only take one home. They also created the creepiest television commercial of all time, and let me tell you, the competition is stiff. I once spent a very long time looking for creepy toy commercials, and I sure did find them, but this brief clip from a 1980s Pound Puppies commercial is the one I think about every day.

That is a six-year-old girl jumping out of a cake to give a boy a Pound Puppy. This sentence should not be legal. It's only a brief clip in the commercial that I slowed to half speed so we can really let it sink in and say, um, what the fuck! A human person was like, "What do girls enjoy doing? Well, whenever I see them, they're usually coming out of a big cake and doing a dance. I guess that's what they like. Having never interacted with a girl before beyond this context, I will now make a commercial."

What do the rest of these kids think is happening? They’re excited the second she starts to emerge, long before they’ve seen the Pound Puppy.They have no context for why this is exciting. They should be afraid, or at the very least pissed they’re not getting real cake! There's an intruder in your food, idiots! Why are you cheering!?

So I didn't go into the Pound Puppies 1985 TV special with a favorable opinion of the Pound Puppies franchise. How will they make the, “Please Don't Old Yeller Me Dogs” into a fun story for kids, I wondered. It turns out they didn't! The Pound Puppies remain lonely and sad in this dark and bizarre TV special that somehow got picked up for a TV show with the caveat that every single thing about it be changed, which was a good note!

The story opens with Violet Vanderfeller, a rich dog who has pierced floppy ears, on the run from two robbers who have dognapped her in the hopes of ransoming her back to her wealthy family. Before they can capture her, she's picked up by the dog catcher, a man named Nabbit.

A quick aside about dogcatchers-- they may be the most maligned job by cartoons. I know several dog catchers, and they're always people who love dogs and want to help keep them safe and healthy. In every cartoon with a talking dog, "dog catcher" equals "gleeful dog murderer." This is also the case with Pound Puppies, where there is more infrastructure in place to prevent dog escapes than levees and schools combined.

In the Pound Puppies universe, there is no such thing as a dog adoption program. The dogcatchers capture the dogs, throw them in puppy prison, and that's it. They hope they die there. Sarah Mclachlan does not exist in this world. And if she did, her biggest hit would be "I Will Shoot The Fucking Convict Dog."

Feeling that lifetime incarceration without a trial is a bad long-term plan, the puppies have come up with an entirely dog-run, high-tech adoption program with troublingly powerful surveillance capabilities.

They run their adoption program from tunnels underneath the dog pound where they can observe everyone in the city who so much as mentions the word dog. For instance, they deliver a puppy to one little girl whose father says they can't afford a dog because it will eat them out of house and home, so they leave it with a lifetime supply of dog food, stolen from the pound! It's kind of sweet if you don't think about where the pound puppies got this CIA surveillance equipment.

Look at this stuff in their secret fort! They've got so many lights, and gears, and a table with some levers made out of bones. So many unidentified bones! This is the coolest underground cave full of bones I've ever seen! Don't ask where the bones came from!

The show's overall premise is weirdly close to Hogan's Heroes, the '60s sitcom that took place in a Nazi concentration camp. Several storylines revolved around keeping the current commandant in charge of the camp because he was an idiot, and the prisoners could do whatever they wanted as long as he was in charge.

Cooler, the lead Pound Puppy, wants to keep the head of the pound, Bigelow, in charge so he can continue running the sophisticated operation under his nose. The mayor is trying to replace Bigelow with his son, weirdly voiced by Ed Begley Jr., everyone's favorite guy from that thing whose name you can’t remember but you know it’s silly. Bagel something? Ed Bagelman?

Every single human character was cut when it was rebooted into a recurring show because they are all creepy and gross. The only human adjacent-character who got to stay in the Pound Puppies universe after this special was Bigelow's cat, Catgut, who rules.

No notes! The one thing I liked about the Pound Puppies TV Special was Catgut. He's a perfect embodiment of all cats-- a fat little chaos demon who only wants to watch the world burn, and yet somehow, you love him. Catgut boldly asks the question, what if pudding were evil? And answers it with, "That would fucking rule." He doesn’t do anything and is completely meaningless to the plot; again, so much like a real cat.

Anyway, Cooler works with his trusty butler dog Barkerville to use their surveillance system and help find Violet's home. You might notice that Barkerville is wearing a Chippendales dancer uniform, bowtie and cuffs without a shirt, because the Pound Puppies people are perverts! What dog wakes up and is like, I need a top hat and a monocle, but pants are not necessary? The kind who watched its previous owner die masturbating. There is something deeply wrong with Barkerville.

The Pound Puppies want to help Violet escape the pound and return home, but the robbers who kidnapped her have turned up at the pound. In a normal world, the robbers could simply adopt Violet and continue their plans, but again, Sarah Mclachlan does not exist-- only puppy prison. So they have to break into the pound and steal Violet.

Cooler devises a plan wherein Bigelow can get credit for returning Violet to her rich owners and catching the dognappers, which will hopefully help him keep his job. Unfortunately, things go awry resulting in, I'm not kidding, Cooler getting catastrophically hit by a car.

Having a dog get hit by a car in a kids cartoon is just cruel. And they linger on Cooler' corpse. All of the other Pound Puppies gather around him and cry. Nabbit loads his limp body into the dogcatcher's car and hauls him away. There's an entire scene where we're led to believe Cooler is dead! After about five minutes of terror, it's revealed that he escaped with only a terrible head injury. Thank God that will have no long-term consequences for Cooler.

Everything goes back to normal, which means, oh yeah, the dogs are all back in prison. We exit on a wide shot of the pound, which is still a terrible barbed wire covered jail, but now it's daytime!

In the '80s, if you had a TV show based on a toyline and it didn't literally explode people's televisions, it became a series. Pound Puppies ran for two seasons on ABC, but the biggest note the network had was, "Hey, maybe the puppies shouldn't live in a Gulag."

So the prison was retooled into a cute home run by a little girl named Holly, but they still couldn't get the tone of a kid's show right. For instance, what do you think would be a good villain for the Pound Puppies to fight? Is it a twelve-foot tall sea captain with a metal claw hand and red glowing eyes named CAPTAIN SLAUGHTER?

No? That sounds like too much for a pound puppy to handle? What if I told you he has I HATE PUPPIES embroidered on his sea captain jacket? Still no!? Maybe don't write the villain from I Know What You Did Last Summer into your cartoon for babies, Pound Puppy people?

Hasbro created Pound Puppies to suffer. They continue to manufacture them and advertise them like, "Uh oh, we created all of these dogs, and now they're lonely. Please buy them." It's the most fucked up version of "Oops All Berries" ever and it will never end.

Lydia posts pictures of her adopted dogs on Twitter. They are weird looking.