Tommy Rettig wanted to leave the series after three seasons. He was fifteen and did not want to continue playing the role of a child. At the same time, Jan Clayton also wanted to return to musical theatre. Timmy was added to the cast to start a slow transition. But when George Cleveland suddenly died, the change to a new cast was accelerated.
The famous "whistle" theme associated with the show's opening and closing credits was not actually introduced until Season 5. The previous four seasons used a more traditional orchestral theme for its opening and closing music. Cloris Leachman did not like her role in the series and often argued with the cast and crew. Lassie was both owned and trained by Rudd Weatherwax and reportedly lived to be 19 years old. The first two seasons of Lassie with the above cast garnered an Emmy award each of those years for best prime time children's show.
Lassie never won an Emmy after that. Tommy Rettig was getting too old for the part, so he voluntarily left and was replaced by Timmy and his adoptive parents, the Martins. The critical quality of the show writing, acting, etc. With the notable exception of a couple of acclaimed Christmas shows the popularity of the dog Lassie and her acting abilities carried the show for many years.
The story of this courageous dog was spread to anyone who would listen. Set during Depression-era England, the story has Lassie tracking down her master, whose family was forced to sell their home and move, across a great distance. Over the years, Lassie has been featured in no less than 50 books designed for readers of different ages. The first adaptation of everyone's favorite rough collie arrived on the big screen in the form of 's Lassie Come Home.
Lassie was played by Pal. These days, a studio would never release a franchise film and not have the star character in the title somewhere. Much later, there was a pair of movies one in and the other in simply given the name Lassie , though they were fairly unmemorable.
Enjoying a long life of 18 years spanning from to , Pal is the Rough Collie who played Lassie in seven feature films and two TV pilots. In between, he became a major draw for crowds at shows, fairs, and rodeos around America. Few dogs enjoyed a career with such longevity. His son, Spook, briefly played the part, although he was never comfortable on the set.
Rudd got him to power through, though, while his brother, Baby, was being trained to take over. And Baby did so, working the show for six years, but dying at the age of eight all the other Lassies lived to be at least Mire took over from , with Hey Hey coming in for Originally cast in the role of Lassie in Lassie Come Home was a female collie, but the producers replaced her with a male when she began to shed excessively as the film was in production during the summer.
Others commented that the male collie Pal just looked more impressive in the part. Mayer commented that Pal went in the river, but Lassie came out; and upon watching Pal in action, the demand was made for more footage to be shot. What was an amazing stroke of luck is that when the seventh Lassie film, The Painted Hills , was released, MGM made it clear there were no intentions of producing anymore. Thinking they were making the better deal, the studio went for it.
As to the photo above, Rudd did such a great job with Pal, that he could make public appearances like any other celebrity, such as encountering the Lone Ranger and Tonto. With the film series played out, but sensing that there was still a lot of love out there for Lassie, the decision was made to bring her adventures to the small screen. Lassie ran from to on CBS and then moved to first-run syndication from During that time, the first 10 seasons were filmed in black and white, the remaining nine in color.
Female collies were not ignored because they are any less intelligent; in fact, some of Lassie's stunt doubles have been females. Weatherwax got Pal as payment for a debt. He ran a kennel that not only supplied movie dogs, but taught "regular" dogs obedience. Pal had several bad habits, which included constant barking and chasing motorcycles.
After Weatherwax had the collie awhile, the original owner realized he really didn't want Pal back, so he gave him to Weatherwax in lieu of paying the bill. Incidentally, Weatherwax managed to get Pal to stop barking constantly, but never did break him of chasing motorcycles. Sometimes the habit even came in handy on a set! While most books and magazines associate Lassie with Rudd Weatherwax, he and his brother Frank owned the dog in partnership.
Did you know two members of Lassie's television cast also had parts in two of the movies? The Little Rascals. Pal didn't always play a character named "Lassie" in his movies. Lassie is played by another dog! Challenge to Lassie is based on the story of Greyfriars Bobby. Bobby, a Skye terrier, apparently slept at the foot of his master's grave in the Greyfriars churchyard for fourteen years; a statue of him stands in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has become a symbol of a dog's faithfulness to his owner.
Eleanor Atkinson made the dog famous worldwide by writing a book about him. Challenge to Lassie substitutes Lassie for Bobby, and portrays his owner, John Gray, as a shepherd, although in real life he was supposed to be a town watchman.
When Disney made the film Greyfriars Bobby in with a real Skye terrier , Donald Crisp was once again in the story, but as James Brown, the graveyard caretaker. Modern Farmer: Lassie is the most famous fictional farm dog that ever existed, but the history of where Lassie came from is a little bit unclear.
What was the first instance of Lassie in popular culture? Knight was an American citizen who had come from Britain. He was a freelance writer and well respected journalist, and he had been sent back to England to report upon the desperate times during the war; people were suffering so much that they had to sell their prize dogs to keep going.
That became a best-selling novel. From there, MGM bought it as a B-picture. AC: A-pictures were the front run pictures, the pictures that closed the night.
B-pictures were lesser budgets with lesser stars, and they were usually the first movies shown in the theater on the night, and then you would have the newsreel and the cartoon and the big feature. They looked at over different dogs to play Lassie, and finally picked a show-winning dog. They were trying to film a middle sequence where Lassie has to swim across this wide expanse. Well, Rudd had a dog named Pal at his kennel that was a collie; it was just a dog that the owner had left so that Rudd could break the dog out of the habit of barking and chasing motorcycles.
Rudd had no use for a collie, but Pal was an intelligent dog, and he knew that Pal was athletic. So to save the movie scene, they had Pal swim the river, and come out the other side with beautiful acting — coming out of the side, looking exhausted.
AC : A couple of things. One, the United States after World War II was moving from a rural culture to a more urban culture, so many people that lived in the city remembered growing up on the farm.
And so the image of the farm dog, of working the fields, of the barn, of the adventures they had growing up, all that rang true.
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