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Woof!Hollywood’s Best Friends — Meet the World’s Most Famous Dogs, From Scooby to Snoopy, Lassie to Toto and More

Aug 22, 2019 2:12 pm·

By Ed Gross

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You may not realize it, but in a sense dogs have been an important part of our lives from almost the beginning. Maybe you had them as a part of the family, always wanting to play, scrounging for something to eat and desiring to have their bellies scratched. But even if that wasn’t the case, there’s a good chance you and your family gathered around the television on Sunday nights to watch the Classic TV exploits of Lassie, the world’s most famous collie who could put members of elite armed forces around the world to shame with what she was capable of doing. And if not Sunday night, then maybe Saturday mornings with Scooby-Doo and the rest of the Scooby Gang.

Even those were only scratching the surface of the dogs who were out there entertaining us. They’ve been on the big screen (Toto in The Wizard of Oz, Marley & Me, Cujo), animated (The Jetsons, Family Guy), in live action sitcoms (Full House, Frasier, The Brady Bunch) and slightly more dramatic fare (Columbo). They were there towards the beginning of television in The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, and you can bet they always will be.

So join us as we celebrate our furry friends from Hollywood and check out the most famous among them.

Please scroll down for more.

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Astro (‘The Jetsons’)

George, Jane, Judy and Elroy Jetson provided TV viewers with a look into the future in this animated show that originally ran for one season between 1962 and 63 and has lived on ever since. We saw wall viewer phones (just larger versions of our iPhones) and flying cars, though we’re nowhere near the latter (hey, Back to the Future lied to us on that front too). The other thing they gave us was Astro, their Great Dane who always had something to say, like “Ruh Ro, Reorge,” or, when George shrunk to itsy-bitsy size, “Rook at the rimp; rook at the rimp.” And don’t be making fun of Astro’s speech impediment. What has your dog said to you lately?

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‘Beethoven’ (Several Films)

Now this is an oh-so-cute adventure focusing on a St. Bernard, unlike that vicious, blood-thirsty one we’ll be dealing with shortly in Cujo. There have been eight films (initially created by Ferris Bueller‘s John Hughes) and more about a family doing their best to deal with the misadventures of the title character. Between the big screen and made-for-video adventures we’ve had Beethoven (1991), Beethoven’s 2nd (1993), Beethoven’s 3rd (2000), Beethoven’s 4th (2001), Beethoven’s 5th (2003), Beethoven’s Big Break (2008), Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure (2011, where the image above is from) and Beethoven’s Treasure Tail (2014). On top of that, there were two video games released between 1993 and 1994, and a Beethoven animated TV series that ran from 1994-95. They definitely got a lot of bite out of that bark — pun intended.

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Boomer (‘Here’s Boomer)

We don’t want to say that this show was a take-off of the Benji feature films of the mid 1970s, buuuuuuut….. First appearing in the 1979 TV movie A Christmas For Boomer, the series ran with a similar premise of the title dog, a stray, who would travel from town to town helping people out of any particular jams they found themselves in. At the end of each episode, he would take off for his next adventure and encounter a whole new group of characters. Think of Boomer as The Fugitive with fur.

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Brian Griffin (‘Family Guy’)

He’s a white Labrador Retriever who — along with psychopathic infant Stewie — is the brains behind the Griffin family, and certainly seems to have his act together far more than the rest of them. He walks, he talks, pursues hot women, and he serves as the audience’s eyes and ears for the insanity around him, oftentimes reacting the way we would.

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Comet (‘Full House’)

Like everybody else in the Tanner family on Full House, this Golden Retriever brings on the “aww” factor whenever he’s on screen — which didn’t start to happen until the third season episode “And They Call it Puppy Love.” In one episode he ran away… until he saw little Michelle on television asking him to come home and, dognabit, he did. Everyone together: “Aww.”

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Cujo (‘Cujo’)

And here’s that other St. Bernard mentioned earlier, he of Stephen King‘s creation. Featured in the King novel as well as the 1983 film, it’s about a dog that gets bitten by a bat, is inflicted with rabies and starts to lose its mind, viciously going after a mother and her son, who get trapped in their car. A really effective thriller and a really scary dog.

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Djinn Djinn (‘I Dream of Jeannie’)

You may think of a 2,000-year-old dog who can make himself invisible as kind of a fun novelty (would really impress the kids at birthday parties), but this nasty little bugger hated uniforms because of the way it was treated by palace guards all those centuries ago. Needless to say this did not go well when he was reunited with his original owner, Jeannie (Barbara Eden), whose “master” (are we allowed to even say that now?) Tony Nelson happens to work at NASA and wears a uniform. Uh-oh.

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Dog (‘Columbo’)

Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo was accompanied by his Bassett Hound an awful lot of the time, but the dog’s purpose was not to do very much but lay around and look cute. If that was his assignment, he done good. He was also the middle finger to the network by the show’s creators who were requested to add another continuing character.

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Eddie (‘Frasier’)

Pretty much everywhere he turned, Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammar) had a foil to deal with, and one of the biggest on this show was Eddie, the Jack Russell Terrier that belonged to his father, Martin. More than anything, the dog liked to stare at Frasier, which unnerved him and usually resulted in the shout, “Stop staring at me, Eddie!” Thankfully he never did.

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Fang (‘Get Smart’)

Would you believe this was the smartest dog to ever walk the Earth? Would you believe he was smarter than a barrel of monkeys? How about brighter than a doorknob? In fact, he was a Briard who also happened to be Agent K-13 of CONTROL, who in the first two seasons of the spy spoof Get Smart would occasionally work with Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart and Barbara Feldon’s Agent 99. Was he good? He graduated from the same class that Max did, so we’re not sure what that says about Mr. Smart. Sorry about that, Chief!

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Goliath (‘Davey and Goliath’)

“I dunno, Davey!” was a frequent worrying refrain from the dog who sometimes served as the moral compass of young Davey Hansen whenever he would do something questionable (relatively speaking — this clay-animated series was squeaky clean, coming from the United Lutheran Church). Goliath would only talk in front of Davey, which probably made anyone witnessing their conversations think that the boy had taken leave of his senses.

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Hooch (‘Turner and Hooch’)

By the late 1980s, Hollywood was all about the buddy cop movies (or the notion of teaming up a cop with his polar opposite). There was cop and convict (48hrs.), cop and Russian cop (Red Heat), cop and dysfunctional cop (Lethal Weapon), cop and alien cop (Alien Nation) and a pair of wiseass cops (Running Scared). In 1989 someone had the bright idea of bringing the cycle to a close with Turner and Hooch, about a cop (Tom Hanks) and his police dog (Hooch). Together they try and find a killer.

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Lassie (Radio, Film, TV Star)

We’ll give you that that Rough Collie had her beginnings in an 1859 short story and a 1940 novel by Eric Knight, which served as the source for a number of films throughout the 1940s and then periodically afterwards. But her greatest fame resulted from the TV series that ran for nearly 20 years. For her first decade, Lassie has adventures with people from a small farming community — all of whom became well-versed in the phrase, “Timmy fall in the well, Girl?” in response to her excited barks (for the record, Timmy never did) — but then she began working alongside the United States Forest Service Rangers in the wilderness, proving herself tougher than Rambo in the field. Anyone who grew up with this show finds it virtually impossible to see a Collie and not call it Lassie.

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Marley (‘Marley & Me’)

Spoiler alert: You will cry watching this movie. If you have a pulse, you’ll cry. Released in 2008, the film stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston as the owners of the Labrador Marley, and the story follows the family, and their dog, through the years. Marley is so bad, but also so cute and his impact on the family is a strong one.

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Max (‘The Bonic Woman’)

His name was actually Maximillian, pet of Jaime Sommers in season 3 of The Bionic Woman, who is critically injured in a chemical lab fire. The decision is made to save his life by equipping him with bionic implants that allows him to run at 90 mph and bite through solid steel. The whole bionic thing, which began with The Six Million Dollar Man in the early ’70s, may have been pushing the concept a bit much. That point was actually addressed on the Captain & Tenille variety show and a regular segment called “The Bionic Watermelon.”

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Murray (‘Mad About You’)

A collie mix belonging to Paul and Jamie Buchman (Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt) in this ’90s sitcom, he was usually played for laughs. Sometimes he’d run around the apartment in pursuit of a non-existent mouse, another time Paul and Jamie came home to find him just standing on their dining room table, causing Paul to comment, “This is new.”

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Muttley (‘Wacky Races’)

Muttley was just a supporting character in the 1968 animated series Wacky Races, serving as the disobedient dog to his partner in crime, Dick Dastardly. He was as underhanded as Dastardly, but his saving grace was that wheezing laugh that became iconic.

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Petey (‘The Little Rascals’)

We know we’re cheating here a bit, because Petey and the Rascals originally began life as Hal Roach’s Our Gang theatrical shorts, but they found a long afterlife on the small screen and we’re all the better off for it. We love Petey, with his black circled eye (added via make-up), and the fact that he went right along with Spanky, Alfalfa and the gang on many of their adventures.

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Rin Tin Tin (Film and TV Star)

From 1954-59 the show Rin Tin Tin followed the adventures of the title German Shepherd. The premise is that young Rusty was orphaned in an Indian raid and, in the aftermath of that, he and Rin Tin Tin were adopted by the troops at Fort Apache in Arizona, working together to help establish order in and around Mesa Grande. The canine was a big screen star first.

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Scooby-Doo (TV Shows, Movies)

Currently celebrating 50 years and still going strong, Scooby, Shaggy and the rest of Mystery, Inc. hardly need an introduction at this point. They’ve been entertaining a couple of generations of fans, and Scooby is at the center of it all. You may notice that when Scooby speaks (wait, is that unusual?), he sounds an awful like The Jetsons’ Astro. Could they be related? Or could it be that the same guy, Don Messick, voices both of them? Ponder amongst yourselves.

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Snoopy (Comic Strips, TV Shows, Movies)

Whether you think of him as Joe Cool, a World War I Royal Flying Corps pilot, or an aspiring writer, Snoopy at the end of the day is the pet beagle and best friend to that old blockhead, Charlie Brown. Created by the late Charles M. Schulz, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang have appeared in numerous TV specials, theatrical films, and the Broadway stage for nearly 60 years. Next up: the animated Snoopy in Space for the Apple+ streaming service.

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Tiger (‘The Brady Bunch’)

Those Brady Kids loved their Bearded Collie oh-so-much … for the first season and a half of the show. And then? Tiger mysteriously disappeared, although his doghouse managed to survive the full length of the series, which ran from 1969-74. Things did get dicey at one point when it seemed that Jan (Eve Plumb) had developed a serious allergy to the dog, and it was so sad watching the family gather up her things and say goodbye to her … Oh, wait, that was our twisted version of events. Turns out it was the dog shampoo or something, and they all stayed a bunch …. at least for a little while.

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Toto (‘The Wizard of Oz’)

This particular dog had quite the life, traveling with Dorothy Gale over the rainbow and then down the yellow brick road for a variety of adventures before revealing the true identity of the supposed Wizard of Oz. He could be rude, of course, eating Professor Marvel’s hotdogs back in Kansas before he and Dorothy were invited to, but his heroics far outweigh his flaws.

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