12 September: Lassie

On this date in 1954 Lassie debuted on US TV. Here are a few facts you may not know about Lassie:

1. Although Lassie is supposed to be a female Dog, all the dog actors to play her were males. The main reason for this was that male collies are bigger and also because when the dogs shed their coats in summer, when most of the filming was done, it made the females look even smaller.
2. That said, the producers originally hired a female dog to play Lassie in Lassie Come Home, but the dog in question refused to enter a fast flowing river, so a male dog called Pal was brought in as a stunt double, and did so well at it that he got the role proper.
3. Pal belonged to a dog trainer called Rudd Weatherwax, who often supplied dogs for films as well as training people's pets. Pal started life as a pet, but his owner got fed up of his constant barking and chasing motorcycles and handed him to Weatherwax to try and break him of them. Weatherwax managed to stop the barking but he still chased motorcycles. The owner decided he didn't want the dog back and gave him to the trainer in lieu of payment.
4. Pal retired at the age of five. All subsequent Lassies were his descendants. Some Lassie stunt doubles, however, have been females.
5. The dog which played the role for longest was called Baby. He was Lassie for six years. Unlike the others, who enjoyed a lengthy retirement, living to the grand old age of seventeen, Baby died suddenly at the age of eight.
6. During the making of Lassie Come Home, Pal the dog was paid more than the film's human star, Elizabeth Taylor. She was on $100 a week whereas the dog took home $250.
7. On set, there would be other dogs behind the scenes which were there purely as playmates for the dog playing Lassie when he was not actually acting, including two miniature poodles called Buttons and Bows.
8. The original film was based on a novel by Eric Knight, who also wrote This Above All, which was also made into a movie, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine, and a humorous book called The Flying Yorkshireman. In the book, Lassie is described as "a beautiful tricolor collie," with "perfect Black mask" which means she doesn't have the White blaze on her face characteristic of the dogs in the films.
9. A little about Lassie's human co-stars. Tommy Rettig, who played Jeff, one of the children in the TV series, was allergic to dogs. The original Ruth Martin was Cloris Leachman, who allegedly hated the role. Perhaps she hated being cast as a mother, or perhaps she hated the fact that a dog and a kid had a higher billing. On a TV interview she was asked if she used Campbell's soup (the sponsor's product) and replied that she would never use that stuff - she always made her own soup. Whether that was intentional or not it had the desired effect - it got her fired. It was also the end of the road for the actor who played her husband. He had to go too, for if they'd brought in another actress to play opposite him, viewers might think he'd divorced and remarried which wasn't done in a family show back then.
10. There are any number of spoofs and jokes on Lassie involving Timmy falling down a well. However, while Lassie rescued Timmy from all manner of scrapes over the years, he never actually fell down a well.

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