When was lassie made

Enjoying a long life of 18 years spanning from to , Pal is the Rough Collie who played Lassie in seven feature films and two TV pilots. In between, he became a major draw for crowds at shows, fairs, and rodeos around America. Few dogs enjoyed a career with such longevity. His son, Spook, briefly played the part, although he was never comfortable on the set. Rudd got him to power through, though, while his brother, Baby, was being trained to take over. And Baby did so, working the show for six years, but dying at the age of eight all the other Lassies lived to be at least Mire took over from , with Hey Hey coming in for Originally cast in the role of Lassie in Lassie Come Home was a female collie, but the producers replaced her with a male when she began to shed excessively as the film was in production during the summer.

Others commented that the male collie Pal just looked more impressive in the part. Mayer commented that Pal went in the river, but Lassie came out; and upon watching Pal in action, the demand was made for more footage to be shot.

What was an amazing stroke of luck is that when the seventh Lassie film, The Painted Hills , was released, MGM made it clear there were no intentions of producing anymore. Thinking they were making the better deal, the studio went for it. As to the photo above, Rudd did such a great job with Pal, that he could make public appearances like any other celebrity, such as encountering the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

With the film series played out, but sensing that there was still a lot of love out there for Lassie, the decision was made to bring her adventures to the small screen. Lassie ran from to on CBS and then moved to first-run syndication from During that time, the first 10 seasons were filmed in black and white, the remaining nine in color.

What was unusual about Lassie is that two pilots were intended from the beginning. The first showcased the bond between a boy and his dog, while the second was designed to give a look at what a typical episode would be like. It worked, and CBS placed the show on its schedule, premiering on September 12th at p. Things changed in when both Ellen and Jeff said that they wanted to leave the show. In response, the decision was made to find a new boy to bond with Lassie and the show would start to follow them.

My mother was not in show business; she grew up in a little farm in Texas and her idol growing up was Jane Wyman. Well, she was a seamstress when she came to L. When my parents got married, she read an ad in the LA Times that Warner Bros was looking for two to three year old blond boys to be in a movie starring Jane Wyman.

My mom thought if she took me on this audition, she was going to meet Jane Wyman and get her autograph. That was the only reason she took me. There were over little boys and little girls whose moms had cut their hair to look like little boysAnd I got the job.

How crazy is that? He was cast as Timmy on Lassie, as noted, in We were like a big family. Come on, who has stuff like that? Pal served as the progenitor of the subsequent line of Lassies, owing to the distinctive facial markings he passed down to his offspring; in fifty years there have been a total of eight Lassies, each with similar appearances but different personalities. Rettig leaves the show in for fear of typecasting, and to give himself a break from show business.

Also in the Lassie name is bought by Jack Wrather, and a new family is brought in to star alongside Lassie. Lassie made many personal appearances over the years, and Weatherwax had it in his contract that Lassie would visit hospital patients, particularly children.

Did you know two members of Lassie's television cast also had parts in two of the movies? The Little Rascals. Pal didn't always play a character named "Lassie" in his movies. Lassie is played by another dog!

Challenge to Lassie is based on the story of Greyfriars Bobby. Bobby, a Skye terrier, apparently slept at the foot of his master's grave in the Greyfriars churchyard for fourteen years; a statue of him stands in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has become a symbol of a dog's faithfulness to his owner. Eleanor Atkinson made the dog famous worldwide by writing a book about him.

Challenge to Lassie substitutes Lassie for Bobby, and portrays his owner, John Gray, as a shepherd, although in real life he was supposed to be a town watchman.

When Disney made the film Greyfriars Bobby in with a real Skye terrier , Donald Crisp was once again in the story, but as James Brown, the graveyard caretaker. Lassie's eighth motion picture wasn't really a movie at all, but a compilation of five television episodes from the Timmy era called "The Journey. Richard Kiel, James Bond's nemesis "Jaws," played a mute hermit in the story.

Richard Simmons, who was famous for playing the stalwart Sergeant Preston of the Yukon in the s TV series, has a small role—ironically as another Mounty! MGM, feeling Lassie was a failing attraction after The Painted Hills, sold the television rights to the character to Robert Maxwell Productions, figuring Maxwell might get a couple of years of a kiddy show out of the collie, if that many.

Lassie went on to run for 19 years, 17 years of them on the CBS television network, and spawned novels, children's toys, and four sequels, two animated and two live-action, not to mention three more theatrical features. Florence Lake, who played Jenny, the Calverton telephone operator for the ten-year duration of the farm shows, was the sister of Arthur Lake, "Dagwood" in the Blondie movie series.

An accomplished Broadway actress, she sang several times on the series, most notably in "The Gypsies. Contrary to how good it all looked on TV, Rettig and the boy who played "Porky" really didn't get along. Joey Vieira whose stage name was Donald Keeler recalls that he and Rettig were always fighting. If you always thought "Porky" and "Pugsley" on the television series The Addams Family looked a little bit alike, you weren't mistaken.

Joey Vieira and Ken Weatherwax are half brothers. Want to ask a sure-fire "stumper" at a TV trivia contest? Cloris Leachman got tired of playing second fiddle to a dog and a boy and was about to ask to be let out of her contract when Fate struck. The story possibily apocryphal, but it fits her peppery personality goes that Leachman had an interview in which the reporter asked her if she used the sponsor's product Campbell's Soup, for the run of the series on the CBS network.