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One of the biggest pitfalls of talking into a microphone for 7 to 10 hours every week is knowing that you’re going to get some things wrong. From relatively small mistakes like mispronouncing the name of a city to completely butchering famous historical moments, my list of gaffes is long and growing. Combine this with my rapidly atrophying brain (a brain that, if we’re being honest, wasn’t particularly robust at the height of its power) and my habit of sharing stories that reside in the deepest recesses of my cobwebbed memory, and you’ve got yourself a real minefield of misstatements. This leads us to yesterday’s podcast, where -- for some reason -- I mentioned a snippet of a scene that I remembered from the 1959 Walt Disney film, The Shaggy Dog. At least, it was a scene I thought I remembered. “The only thing I recall about that movie,” I said to Luke, “Is that there’s a scene where a boy -- a boy who is maybe dog-obsessed? -- and he’s sitting on a porch, or sitting outside somewhere, and it looks like he’s reading a book, but then it’s revealed that inside the book is a comic book about dogs? Or a magazine celebrating the dog lifestyle?” Okay, let’s put aside the phrase “celebrating the dog lifestyle,” because I don’t know what that means, either. But the rest of my claim holds true. I don’t know why this insignificant moment sticks in my memory so specifically. Maybe it’s because it was the first time I ever saw that trope employed. I was a little kid, sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce in front of the family television, my eyes widening a bit when I learned that you can trick adults into thinking that you’re reading something serious when you’re actually reading something frivolous. I was thinking more about this after the show yesterday, and my curiosity eventually got the better of me. So I found a (completely legal, completely legit**) copy of The Shaggy Dog online. I downloaded it to my computer and started scrubbing through the timeline. After one pass through, my heart sank. I could find zero evidence of this scene existing. This is, of course, deeply deeply unimportant. Nobody besides myself cares if I properly recalled a 30-second snippet of a film I saw 40 years ago. But for some reason, this information lodged itself into my brain and stayed there for decades. And I honestly found myself a bit shaken at the idea that it never really happened. Did I invent the whole thing? Did I see this scene in a different movie and misremember where I saw it? Could the internet possibly help me with this? I doubted Google could offer much assistance with a question so vague, but I had to try. I wrote “1960s movie kid hiding dog book in textbook” into the search engine and kind of hated myself for typing something so desperate and futile. EXCEPT IT WASN’T FUTILE. My friends. That longshot of a longshot of a Google search connected me with an astoundingly detailed, blow-by-blow recap of The Shaggy Dog. It was posted five years ago on a blog called “The Great Disney Movie Ride: One girl's quest to analyze every Disney film ever made.” Exactly halfway through the dizzyingly detailed the recap, I came across the following words: “The next morning, Wilson is furious to catch Moochie reading a book about dog training, hidden behind an Uncle Scrooge comic.” I don’t know who Wilson is, and I don’t know what a Moochie is, but my god, this was the most beautiful sentence I’ve ever read. And I’ve read the complete sonnets of William Wordsworth!*** I fired-up my copy of The Shaggy Dog again, this time using the blog post as a guide, and I found the exact scene I was looking for. It appears at the one-hour, five-minute mark of the film. I uploaded it to YouTube for you:
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