I was in two minds whether to resurrect an old thread where I asked a sort of related question, but this question isn’t that question.
A commonly lampooned trope in the heroic animal story genre of TV (Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Lassie, Flipper, The Littlest Hobo, etc) is where the animal protagonist tries to communicate with a human by making noises and/or gestures, and the human is able to interpret this as a complex sentence such as “What’s that Skippy? Little Jimmy got bitten by a snake and tripped and fell down the old abandoned quarry and the landfill dump is about to collapse on him?”
Question: did this sort of dialogue actually happen in any of these animal-hero TV series, or was it never more complex than “I think he wants us to follow him, something must be wrong!”
Or: what was the most complex and specific message given to a human by an animal in any of these shows?
Are we misremembering the actual moments from the shows, perhaps because of how they were lampooned in later comedies about them?
This was spread across three clips in episode 3x06 of the Animaniacs revival. I compiled it after watching the episode because I thought it was pretty dark even for them.
In Episode 24 of “Jeff’s Collie” (seriously? It wasn’t called “Lassie”? Copyright problems?), Jeff (Timmy came later) sees a land speculator taking the cover off an old well and he sends Lassie to get his mom and grandfather. She barks, Gramps says, “What is it, girl? Is it Jeff?” and the adults follow Lassie to the well. Jeff never falls in, although the evil lands speculator does, later in the episode. The scene is at 9:12 in this video:
I haven’t watched any of those shows since I was a kid, but that’s pretty much how I remember it going. Although as I recall it usually took the animal a couple of attempts before the human got the point. So it went more like:
Lassie: “Bark bark bark bark!”
Gramps: “Go away, Lassie. I’ve gotta get the hay in the loft. I don’t have time to play with you right now.”
Lassie: “Bark!” grabs Gramps’s arm in her mouth and tugs “Bark bark!”
Gramps: “Oh, you want me to follow you? Well let’s go!”
I swear that around the time I was 10 in 1960, Timmy (Jon Provost) fell down a mine shaft, ended up upon or hanging on to a ledge, Lassie saw him and ran for help.
The trope is named for Lassie, who was always alerting the humans to any trouble in the area. Please note, however, that the phrase is a Beam Me Up, Scotty!, as Timmy never actually fell into a well. He fell into a lot of things, but never a well. The fact that Timmy never fell down a well is amazing, seeing as how most of the trouble he got into is A) generally lethal and B) things no normal child of average intelligence should ever have to deal with. Clearly, falling down a well was too mundane for him. John Provost, who played Timmy, titled his autobiography Timmy in the Well: The John Provost story, after the phrase. Here’s a short list of things Timmy has done that Lassie has saved him from:
lets a rabid dog out of a cage ("Graduation")
eats deadly nightshade berries ("Berrypickers")
is threatened by an escaped female circus elephant ("The Elephant")
hides out in the treehouse when he has pneumonia ("Spartan")
is threatened by a mother wolf ("The Wolf Cub")
falls into the lake ("Transition" and "The House Guest")
develops a high fever from the measles ("The Crisis")
is almost shot by Paul ("Hungry Deer")
ignores severe stomach pains; he's diagnosed with appendicitis ("Hospital")
is trapped in an abandoned house with Boomer ("Trapped")
wanders into a live mine field ("Junior GIs")
is menaced by a bear ("Campout" and "The Renegade")
is trapped in a mine ("Old Henry")
gets a black eye playing football ("Growing Pains")
nearly flies a home-made glider off a cliff ("Flying Machine")
runs into a burning house to save a neighbor lady and passes out ("The Whopper")
is endangered by dynamite picked up by an escaped lab chimp ("The Man from Mars")
is locked in a shed with Lassie by an armed robber ("Star Reporter")
runs away from home believing he and a friend killed someone ("Alias Jack and Joe")
is exposed to radiation ("Space Traveler")
gets trapped on a cliff with Rudy and Don ("Explorers")
is trapped in a pipe ("Wrong Gift")
is caught in quicksand ("The Fog")
is trapped on a ledge ("The Rescue")
is out in the woods hunting a dangerous tiger ("The Gentle Tiger")
is tossed out of a little racing car and knocked out ("Big Race")
is trapped in a mine with Cully ("Fool's Gold")
is threatened by a bull ("White-Faced Bull")
is threatened by a rabid dog again ("Mad Dog")
freezes while on a narrow path at the Grand Canyon ("Lassie at the Grand Canyon")
is threatened by a killer collie ("Mysterious Intruder")
is trapped in a badger hole ("Badger Game")
is knocked out ("Hike")
is stalked by a presumably dangerous tiger ("Lassie and the Tiger")
with Lassie, is carried off in a balloon, must survive in the wilderness, and almost drowns ("The Journey")
almost drowns ("Disappearance" part 1)
is caught in an earthquake and threatened by a dam spillover ("Moving Mountain")
is struck by a hit and run driver ("Hit'n'Run")
The first four seasons (1954-1957) had a different cast and a kid named Jeff. The Timmy most boomers grew up with started in 1957 and starred Jon Provost as Timmy. And then it somehow continued on another seven seasons, 19 in all.
The series lasted so long that when it went into syndication it was competing against the new episodes. As was the usual custom in those days, the syndicated version was given a different name so people didn’t think these were the new episodes. Jeff’s Collie were reruns of the first four years only. Bonanza did the same thing, syndicating itself as Ponderosa. L
“Old Henry” 9-13-59 “…When Timmy remembers having seen a harness in an old mine and goes in to fetch it, he becomes trapped…”.
My memory is a Lassie’s POV shot straight down to Timmy not terribly far below, clinging or hanging on a ledge with only darkness below him, looking up and saying something that undoubtedly included the word “Girl.” SPOILER ALERT If memory serves Lassie successfully brings adults to the rescue.
I can’t speak to Lassie’s advanced communication ability, as I wasted more of my childhood watching Flipper.
Even there, my memory is vague at best. However wasn’t it a recurring theme that young Bud was able (or thought he was able) to understand in detail what the dolphin was saying?
I apologize that my recollection is so fuzzy, and for the fact that I do NOT have time today to search the Web and confirm it. But I am pretty sure Bud would translate, “Ork-ork-ork-ork,” to “Flipper says there’s a disabled sub, and the crew only have 2 hours of air left.” Then the rest would leap into action based on Bud’s word.
Only Bud had this ability. Does that ring a bell with anyone else? Or is this another Mandela effect?
That’s only a list of what Timmy got into. I remember episodes where Ruth and Paul (the parents) got themselves into danger in equally preposterous ways where only Lassie could save them.
I suspect Children’s Services investigated and decided that keeping the family together would limit the danger to the rest of the community if they were separated.
