On February 20, 1995, Cartoon Network launched a new show that not only defined the network for an entire generation, but kicked off a renaissance at one of the most important animation studios of all time. Created by veteran animator and president of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons Fred Seibert, What a Cartoon! was an animation showcase featuring shorts from dozens of creators. A few of those eventually became full-fledged Hanna-Barbera series in their own right, including Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken and The Powerpuff Girls.
However, the groundwork for these series and for this particular renaissance was laid a couple of years earlier on Cartoon Network’s sister network TBS with a little show about two un-nammed, dimwitted canines simply titled 2 Stupid Dogs.
Created by then-recent CalArts graduate Donovan Cook, 2 Stupid Dogs focused on two stray dogs simply referred to as “Big Dog” and “Little Dog.” Big Dog was a large, dull, slow-moving sheep dog who mostly only thought about eating, while Little Dog was a confident, hyperactive dachshund who was full of ideas and assumptions, all of which were ill-informed. Their voices contrasted as much as their personalities; Little Dog had a fast-talking, high-pitched voice provided by voice actor Mark Schiff, while Big Dog featured the booming baritone of Brad Garrett just a few years before he hit it big as Robert Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond.
As simple-minded as the dogs were, the show was simple too. In the very first episode, the Big Dog is chewing on a can, then the Little Dog surprises him, causing him to drop the can and it rolls down the street. From there, the episode is about getting the Big Dog his can back as they tackle various obstacles along the way. Similarly, other episodes are about wanting to eat some corn flakes or chewing on a tennis ball. The plots were usually stupid in the best kind of way.
To make a comparison, 2 Stupid Dogs was a bit like the Three Stooges in that the plots were usually very straightforward. In one adventure the stooges are firemen, in another they’re golfers, then they’re house painters, and so on. From that, they would just have a pile of jokes in the given circumstance. 2 Stupid Dogs was much the same, there was no commentary or deeper message behind it, it was just designed to be funny. For example, in one episode they’re just trying to get some pie from a pie restaurant on the top floor of a shopping mall, so the story is them going into store after store of the mall, tangling with various salespeople while searching for that pie.
Even the cleverest episodes of the show were predicated on the stupidity of the lead characters. For example, one episode is all about the Little Dog falling in love with one of those mechanical toy dogs that flip. The entire story is the Little Dog going through every stage of a relationship — from infatuation to jealousy to the Little Dog feeling like she’s crowding him. The toy dog only ever barks and flips, but Little Dog interprets it differently each time.
In another episode, the Big Dog sees a hole in a fence and sticks his head through it. As a result, the Little Dog thinks the Big Dog is stuck and does everything he can to free his pal. The Big Dog, meanwhile, isn’t stuck, but he does try to help his friend free him. He even pulls his head out of the hole to council Little Dog for a moment before re-inserting it, but neither dog even notices.
In a recent interview, creator Donovan Cook credited the ability to tell these kinds of simple stories to the show’s format. Each adventure was just seven minutes long, which he patterned on Looney Tunes shorts. While Looney Tunes originally played in theaters, when they ran on television beginning in the 1960s, three seven minute shorts (plus commercials) would fill a half hour of airtime.
In the early 1990s, however, most cartoons either sustained a story for a full half hour or split the time between two 11-minute shorts. While the difference between 11 and seven minutes may not seem like much, Cook insisted that seven minutes was the perfect amount of time to tell a story, beginning, middle, and end in cartoon form without having to needlessly complicate it. This is likely why the show was so simple that he got away with not even having to name his characters.
Another charming aspect of 2 Stupid Dogs is its animation style. The simple lines that formed the characters harkened back to animation from Hanna-Barbera’s heyday of the 1960s with characters like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. This kind of animation was definitely not in vogue at a time when Nickelodeon’s various Nicktoons were making the biggest waves in TV animation.
This simplicity of design proved to be one of the most influential things about 2 Stupid Dogs as several of the What a Cartoon! TV shows that followed it were similarly simplistic. Just look at Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo and The Powerpuff Girls, all three of them employed a similarly flat, simple style to great effect. Dexter’s Laboratory and Johnny Bravo also made use of the same seven-minute, three-segment format that 2 Stupid Dogs did (Powerpuff Girls, with more complex superhero-like stories, used the 11-minute, 2-segment format).
In recent years, there have been many demands for a revival of Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls successfully got a reboot in 2016, but no such calls seem to be coming for 2 Stupid Dogs. To be fair, 2 Stupid Dogs wasn’t nearly as successful as those other shows, only lasting two seasons, though part of that short run could be attributed to it airing for two years in a dying cartoon block on TBS, as opposed to a then-newly-energized slate of cartoons on Cartoon Network.
Regardless, a reboot of 2 Stupid Dogs — or, ideally, a mere continuation of it with the same look and format with the same creator behind it — would be refreshing to see in 2026, not because cartoons today are bad, but because the place 2 Stupid Dogs would occupy is currently untapped. A lot of kids cartoons are truly great nowadays. Bluey can tackle life’s most complex issues and boil them down to a funny, heartfelt message for kids and adults alike, whereas Adventure Time has a beautiful, complex, character-driven lore. But maybe there’s just a little room left over for some simple, low-investment, harmless stupidity?
You can watch 2 Stupid Dogs on MeTV Toons, Philo and Fubo.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
