When the puppies get framed for vandalizing the park, Dylan takes it upon himself to solve the mystery.
This episode features examples of:
- Animal Jingoism: Dolly suggests a cat framed them for vandalizing the park, as cats hate dogs. She's right about the culprit, but not the motive.
- Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Diesel causing even more damage to the already-vandalized park by digging into it (in his sleep, but still) inevitably leads to him getting arrested by Pearl at the end of the first part.
- A Day in the Limelight: Diesel and his keen sense of smell plays a large part in this episode.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: It's revealed that the one who framed the Dalmatians for destroying the park was a cat, one who has never appeared before the two-parter and is only briefly seen at the beginning of the episode.
- Dogs Are Dumb: Constantin shows this opinion when Dylan interrogates him about who snitched to Pearl.Constantin: You didn't think... How could you, you're a dog.
- Everyone Is a Suspect: Pearl says this word for word regarding which of the Dalmatians vandalized the park.
- Exact Words: Dylan asks Diesel to check the scent of the park, to see who was in it on the night of the vandalism. Diesel detects nothing. Later, when Dylan is trying to make sense of this, Diesel brings up he did smell rubber in the park. When Dylan asks why he didn't tell him so sooner, Diesel responds that Dylan asked him who was in the park, not what, much to Dylan's irritation.
- Extra-Long Episode: This is the show's first full-length twenty-minute episode, as opposed to its normal two shorts format.
- Frame-Up: The Dalmatians are banned from the park after being framed for vandalizing it.
- Gossip Evolution: This happens when Dylan uses the "World Wide Woof." The original message is "Mayday! Mayday! Must save Diesel!" but by the time it gets to Dolly, it's evolved in to "Wahey! Wahey! Must shave weasel!" When Dylan tries it again later in the episode, it evolves to "Beetay! Beetay! Must scratch evil!"
- Great Detective: Dylan takes on this role to solve the mystery of who vandalized the park.
- Hard Work Hardly Works: Dylan studied hard for the annual nose-off, and while it does get him to second place, he still loses to Diesel's naturally good sense of smell.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Pearl is hostile towards the Dalmatians in this special, but she has a perfectly good reason to act this way. After all, the evidence points to 101 Dalmatian Street since the flower beds were dug up and the statue was vandalized with pawprints - things which a dog would typically do. Considering that the Dalmatian puppies tend to cause chaos with their rowdiness, it's easy to see why Pearl saw them as suspects to the crime and banned them from the park in the first part of the episode.
- Likewise, it's really hard to blame Pearl for wanting to arrest the pups for committing a jailbreak in the second part. As she points out to Dylan and Diesel, "a jailbreak is a serious offense" - and it was Diesel sleep-digging into the still-vandalized park that had gotten him arrested in the first place. Considering that the other pups technically broke the law due to saving Diesel, can you really fault Pearl for wanting to bring them to justice?
- Karma Houdini: Cuddles ends up escaping before Pearl, Dylan and Diesel can catch him... and succeeds in picking up footage of the Dalmatians without the dogs knowing.
- Invoked with the Dalmatians themselves. Pearl does catch Dylan and Diesel after they find out the real culprit and plans to put them behind bars, but lets them off the hook and clears the family's charges once they chase Cuddles away.
- The Man Behind the Man: While Cuddles the cat was the one to vandalize the park, the reason they were doing so in the first place was to pick up footage of the Dalmatians for their human, Hunter de Vil.
- Multi-Part Episode: The episode is split into two parts.
- The Nose Knows: This episode reveals that Diesel has an extremely good sense of smell, to the point where he can tell where Godfrey was at the time of the vandalizing, what he was doing there, how he got home, where he was sitting on the way home, and more.
- Plot Allergy: Played with. The reason Dylan doesn't think a cat is the culprit is because his cat allergy didn't go off when he was sniffing around the park. However, he doesn't consider that it could be a hairless cat.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Like explained above, Dolly suspects the culprit is a cat because of Animal Jingoism. While the culprit is indeed a cat, they actually did it with the intent to capture footage of the Dalmatians.
- Sleepwalking: Diesel digs holes in his sleep.
- Wham Episode: In the end, it's revealed that Cuddles vandalized the park on behest of their owner, who has a keen interest in Dalmatians.
