I wonder about that a lot. I wonder whether our sophistication makes that impossible today.
I do think that the equivalent has become Spiderman and superheroes although I don’t think that it’s got the same emotional appeal that Rin Tin Tin had. Could we embrace that again? I think that we certainly respond to real-life hero dogs with a great deal of emotion and amazement. So maybe it’s just that we haven’t yet, that no one has managed to write that character with the contemporary mentality that [could work today.]
There was something naive about the idea of a dog who could solve crimes, Dogs do perform pretty amazing, heroic tasks, but they are tasks that are unique to being dogs. I think that’s what’s different now. We’ve come to understand dogs better. I think a hero dog could be created today if it were one who relied on abilities that dogs have and that people don’t. Their incredible ability to smell and to hear and tremendous bravery. Those are heroic.
You probably could create a character that was a dog-dog, not a human-dog. I think in those silent films, Rin Tin Tin was just like another one of the characters. He happened to be a dog, but he did things that we wouldn’t take seriously today. To figure out crimes better than people could. I do think that you could create that character but you’d have to create it understanding what we know now, a story that we could believe today as opposed to what people could believe in 1923.
