The DCOM Pantheon #2: You Lucky Dog (dir. Paul Schneider, June 27, 1998)

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Kirk Cameron didn't get worse, the media just got marginally better. You Lucky Dog was made after Kirk Cameron had alienated the entire Growing Pains cast and crew and maybe (probably) got Julie McCullough fired for posing in Playboy. He had publicly complained his big sitcom, a franchise so anodyne it could illuminate Sesame Street's edges in comparison, didn't reflect his personal values. But he got a DCOM because those values were largely sympathetic with Disney's. Now big companies post LGBTQ+ messages on social media and add queer characters to the 2021 Growing Pains equivalents, but in 1998 you could be a "They call it the theory of evolution, not the fact" weirdo and show up in mainstream family fare.

But here we are. A cross between Disney's old crazy animals features (i.e. That Darn Cat, whose title is reflected here) and magic/sci-fi ones (i.e. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, which Cameron had helped remake in 1995 with future Ant-Man director Peyton Reed), You Lucky Dog is about Cameron's former pet empath, who loses his ability to psychically communicate with dogs. And then! An old rich guy brings in his dog Lucky and Cameron's abilities zap back. Lucky's owner dies, his doting owner leaves everything to Cameron, the one person who really got his dog, and nothing to his three garbage relatives. Oh, are they mad! So mad they want to frame Cameron for being crazy, which would prove their uncle had himself been mentally incompetent, proving the will they were written out of was faulty. They being to stalk Cameron.

Everybody else in this movie, including the old dead guy's lawyer, played by Cameron's real wife Chelsea Noble, thinks Cameron's good at reading dogs. In fact, the dog controls his life. If it needs to scratch behind its ears, Cameron needs to scratch behind his ears. The dog digs up bones around its mansion, Cameron enters a fugue state, gets on all fours and secures a mouthful of bones, ripping off Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice act when in dog mode. He has to find a way to either prove he's actually psychically bonded to Lucky, which seems impossible, or play it cool and disguise his irregular shifts to dog brain land. Essentially, Kirk Cameron plays a faded child prodigy who desperately needs to convince the ruling class he's still got some spark so that he can stage a comeback. Cameron probably related to the role.

When the money-grubbing relatives fail to prove Cameron's mental incompetence, they hire a lawyer. The film takes a left turn into courtroom drama in its final 15 minutes, which kids love, and which brings up a larger point: Chelsea Noble's character has a daughter, who we see for all of five minutes, but there aren't any other children in the movie. Cameron was 28 when You Lucky Dog was released, and however physical his performance is, it's weird that he's supposed to be the audience surrogate. Disney knows that kids like watching slightly-older kids in movies and I don't know why they threw a washed up pet psychic in the place where they'd normally put one of those slightly-older kids. It's a movie for children with almost zero children.

Production-wise, this is the machine coming to life. The October-June distance between this DCOM and the last is the longest wait between releases that Disney would have until 2009. In a few years, Disney was churning out a DCOM every month. At the time, that may have helped You Lucky Dog feel special, but now it's an example of a tightly streamlined company figuring out how to best use its new movie release format. The movies would get better and they'd be more kid-focused and they'd come out like clockwork.

What I had remembered from childhood: The opening-- Kirk Cameron pretending to be a dog psychic but actually taking a nap-- was pretty clear in my mind. I also remember my mom telling me that Chelsea Noble was Cameron's real-life partner. Was this a big deal? Did Mom just read a lot of People? Why did anybody know who Chelsea Noble was?

The year is 1998: This is some embarrassing shit but Cameron's secretary has an Animaniacs Happy Meal toy on her desk and we see it partially, for two seconds. I recognized it because I have the same one in my office. The theme song, "Togetherness" by David Michael Frank and Todd Smallwood, was nominated for an Emmy and it's absolutely the same song as "You've Got A Friend In Me." The score is also full of Randy Newman's tics. I love Randy Newman, but this ain't Randy Newman. Other than that, the movie isn't especially tied to the late-90s. I don't mean this as a dunk, but Kirk Cameron's appearance in a mainstream TV movie is the main signifier that we aren't in the present. This was his last original secular role-- he would go on to show up in two Growing Pains reunions and get a cameo on his sister's show Fuller House, but otherwise he's exclusively made religious fare. That I'm a non-practicing Jew watching a Kirk Cameron vehicle makes the role a bit of a novelty. I actually liked Growing Pains as a kid and watched a fair amount of it. I preferred Boy Meets World (funnier) and Family Matters (more likely to get totally crazy), but Growing Pains was on level with Step By Step. Networks played cartoons after school and then transitioned to sitcoms, and I wasn't about to turn the TV off. To my mind, Kirk Cameron's legacy is primarily tied to that amazing photo of his 41st birthday and, to a lesser extent, the video where he disproves evolution by pointing out how easy it is to unpeel and eat a banana.

The _____ was in your heart the whole time: ability to psychically dominate a dog that was psychically dominating you

Before they were big: There are plenty of established actors here, but nobody who hit You Lucky Dog on the way to the top. The dog actor who played Lucky was actually named Bogus, though, so that's cool.

Well after they were big: Kirk Cameron, obviously, but also character actor and "that guy" platonic ideal Taylor Negron, who had by this point settled into the "experimental stage work for me and the occasional kids movie bad guy to pay the bills" phase of his career and John de Lancie, though he was still playing Q in various Star Trek shows and would do excellent work in Breaking Bad a decade later. The late great James Avery, arguably a more famous sitcom star than Cameron, or at least a more enduring one, plays Cameron's driver, which is one of those things that isn't racist but feels racist. This was also the last on-screen appearance from prolific voice actor Christine Cavanaugh, who you'd recognize as Chuckie Finster from Rugrats or Babe from Babe. She had a remarkable range. You can hear that Chuckie high-pitched crackle in a hundred shows of the era, but you scroll through her IMDb and realize she also played, say, the title character in Dexter's Laboratory. She passed away in 2014, but if you're around my age, her voice is all over your TV and film memories.

Wouldn't fly today!: The garbage relative played by John de Lancie pulls a fucking gun out in the middle of court and shoots Lucky! The bullet just grazes Lucky's ear, but jeez. It's a fucking gun! The bad guy shoots and tries to kill the fun dog we've all grown to love!

Ultimate Ranking:

Under Wraps
You Lucky Dog

Ultimate Ranking Notes: There are some great actors in You Lucky Dog, but it just isn't engaging. It feels like an extra-long episode of a Disney channel show, like there should be another five of these to communicate a full story. As fun as Taylor Negron is here, he needs more to do. You're watching a recurring guest star who never gets a chance to recur. Not a terrible movie, fun at times, but if you aren't an idiot watching every DCOM in order, you don't have to revisit You Lucky Dog before you queue up the really good ones.