He’s been called the “lovable lawman with a badge of tin and a heart of gold.”
That’s how the announcer introduced the title character in each week’s opening of TV’s The Deputy Dawg Show, produced by Terrytoons, the studio famous for theatrical shorts featuring Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle.
The Deputy Dawg Show ran on CBS from January 1960 to December 1964. It was extremely popular, inspiring numerous pieces of merchandise from coloring books to lunchboxes and is fondly remembered by the generation who grew up with it and those who discovered it during its syndication run afterward.
The plots of each Deputy Dawg cartoon centered on the title character, a simple-minded, lantern-jawed white dog who served as second in command to a human sheriff of a small town in the South.
The other characters in the show – Muskie Muskrat (with his catchphrase “It’s possi-bull!”), Vincent van Gopher, Ty Coon, and Pig Newton – would usually spend each cartoon trying to pull one over on the dim-witted deputy. Other supporting players on the show included Deputy Dawg’s doppelganger little nephew, Elmer, and a space alien named Astronut, who proved so popular he eventually got his own spin-off series of theatrical cartoon shorts.
Paul Terry sold Terrytoons to CBS in 1955, and several years later, business manager and executive producer Bill Weiss fired creative director Gene Deitch and pointed the studio in a new direction. In his book Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, author Charles Solomon noted: “Weiss also encouraged the writers and directors to create new characters, ostensibly for theatrical shorts, but with an eye to television production.”
One character to come from this was Deputy Dawg, the brainchild of Larz Bourne, a veteran writer in the animation industry working with Terrytoons studios at the time.
In his book, Terrytoons: The Story of Paul Terry and His Classic Cartoon Factory, author Gerald Hamonic wrote of Deputy Dawg: “Much of the humor in the cartoons is sight gag based with some jokes focused around humorous accents and stereotypical southern characteristics.”
This can be seen in such Deputy Dawg shorts as Heat Wave, where Muskie and Vincent attempt to get into the sheriff’s icehouse as they try to cool off during rising temperatures while Deputy Dawg looks to protect the store of ice.
Another, The Yoke’s on You, has the Deputy protecting the hen house. In Little Red Fool House, Deputy Dawg is the truant officer who tries to get Muskie and Vince to stop fishing and return to school where they belong.
In addition to taking opportunities for sight gags and slapstick in these situations, there are innocent jokes, most featuring Deputy Dawg and his lack of intelligence, as the butt of them.
In Little Red Fool House, the sheriff asks, “How much education have you had?” In response, the Deputy answers, “I can read anything as long as it isn’t written.”
Dayton Allen
Allen had gotten his start in radio and had a tremendous talent for voices and characters. He appeared and provided voices on the children’s shows Winky Dink and You and Howdy Doody and also appeared on The Steve Allen Show.
In addition to the Deputy Dawg characters, Allen voiced Heckle and Jeckle for Terrytoons. He also provided the voice for the main character in the Saturday morning live-action series Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp.
Deputy Dawg also provided a big break for a young animator named Ralph Bakshi, who worked on the show years before directing such films as Fritz the Cat (1972) and later, Lord of the Rings (1978).
Deputy Dawg was so popular at the time that some of the cartoons were shown in theaters. This wasn’t as successful as hoped, as author Hamonic noted: “Unfortunately, the cartoons looked unfinished and inexpensively produced on the wider screen.”
Like so many TV shows, Deputy Dawg has become relatively obscure over the years. Historians have noted the character and the series’ place in time in animation history, and Deputy Dawg has been covered several times here in Cartoon Research:
In an insightful 2016 Cartoon Research article, “Segregation and the Selling of Deputy Dawg,”, Christopher P. Lehman (author of the books American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era and The Colored Cartoon) discussed the backdrop that Deputy Dawg debuted against.
Writer and historian Greg Ehrbar, who has authored the upcoming book Hanna-Barbera, The Recorded History: From Modern Stone Age to Meddling Kids, wrote about Deputy Dawg on records for Cartoon Research in 2016. In that article, Ehrbar delves into how the story structures of the cartoons carried over to records.
In 2021, cartoonist Charles Brubaker shed light on how the character came to be in “The Secret Origin of Deputy Dawg” and a “Deputy Dawg Follow-Up”.
As we head into these dog days of summer, and things get as lazy as the small Southern-town this canine lawman presided over, it could be the perfect time to discover, or re-discover, Deputy Dawg.
