Not only in the 1982 remake (as noted above), but also in the 1950s original The Thing from Another World, the sled dogs are killed by the Thing. One of them ends up in a box in the greenhouse and causes a minor shock.
Dogs end up with human heads in the 1979 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in Mars Attacks!. One assumes that the chihuahua with Sarah Jessica Parker’s body in the latter dies, since the ship crashes.
The saddest dof dying, to me, wasn’t Old Yeller in a movie, but the real-life Laika, sent up in a Sputnik. I remember all the books and articles at the time talking about how great it was that she was a Dog in Orbit, but nobody said anything about her dying up there. It was pretty clear to me that she did, since nothing was ever written about her coming back.
Yes, but there’s a far less ambiguous example in Mars Attacks! When the Martian agent sneaks into the White House and gets all the way to the Presidential bedroom, he’s distracted by and reflexively fries the president’s dog, giving the president and first lady a chance to dodge the second blast.
And even in the book, Richard Adams is quite explicit (in the body of the text, through the fourth wall) that it’s a Deus ex Machina, inserted only because the readers wouldn’t like it if it weren’t.
I’d forgotten that. Like many moments in that film, it’s clearly inspired by the original 1960s cards, which include one entitled Destroyinging a Dog, which constitutes another example from pop culture of the dog dying:
I came in to mention that one. I was going to have to look it up, since I couldn’t remember if it was Big Jake or Rooster Cogburn. You saved me a trip to IMDB. I like how Jake’s only command to the dog was just “Dog!” The inflection he placed on the word gave the command. I have no idea if you could train a dog that way, but it was cool anyway.
A minor dog, but in Cool Hand Luke, one of the bloodhounds runs itself to death trying to catch up to Luke. The weeping handler carries the limp dog back to the prison camp after they fail to catch Luke.
Oooh! There’s yet another dog death in Mars Attacks! – the cards, not the movie. In the new set, painted in 1989 but unreleased until 1994, card #64 – Slaughter in the Suburvs – features yet another Martian-killed dog: