Trivia / Family Dog

• Descended Creator: Brad Bird himself voiced the dog in the original Amazing Stories episode.
• Disowned Adaptation: Brad Bird is not proud of this show, which was so heavily criticized for its animation and premise that Bird has distanced himself from the series, which lasted a mere ten episodes before it was cancelled. Also he states how it would never work, before said series even aired. It should be clear that Bird does speak fondly of the original Amazing Stories episode.
• Follow the Leader: The show, along with Fish Police and Capitol Critters, tried to capitalize on the success of The Simpsons. None of them suceeded.
• International Coproduction: Between Universal, Warner Bros., and Amblin Television in the United States, Nelvana in Canada, and Wang Film Productions in Taiwan.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The show was given a few VHS releases and a complete series release on LaserDisc, but no DVD releases. Every episode can be found on YouTube, however.
• The Other Darrin: None of the cast members of the original Amazing Stories episode reprised their roles for the TV Show: ^note In the cases of Buffy and Billy, it might have been out of necessity since they were a case of Children Voicing Children, therefore by the time the show was greenlit and aired (in 1993, six years after the original episode aired) their voice actors most likely went through puberty.
  • Martin Mull replaces Stan Freberg as Skip
  • Molly Cheek replaces Annie Potts as Bev
  • Cassie Cole replaces Brooke Ashley as Buffy
  • Zak Huxtable Epstein replaces Scott Menville as Billy
  • and Danny Mann replaces Brad Bird as the voice of the titular Family Dog itself.
• Screwed by the Network: Two years of production issues and delays, along with the failure of Fish Police during that time, killed CBS's interest in the series. By the time it was finally ready to air, they ran it on Wednesdays opposite Unsolved Mysteries reruns in the little-watched summer months. Five weeks and ten episodes later, and it was off the air for good.
• Troubled Production: The series was sunk by its less than ideal production cycle. Besides Brad Bird, who created the original Amazing Stories episode it spawned from, feeling that the concept wouldn't work as a weekly series, production suffered from a series of delays over objections from producers Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton to the animation quality, which led to the original thirteen-episode slate being cut to ten while Nelvana was hired to fix the work. CBS, who had to eat two years worth of wasted production costs, not to mention the failure of Fish Police in the interim, lost faith in the series and left it for dead on Wednesday nights in the summer of 1993, over two years after it was supposed to come out, where it was slammed by critics for its weak production values (especially given the pedigree involved) and unlikable characters, and died a quick death against summer reruns of Unsolved Mysteries.
• What Could Have Been: Frederick Coffin was originally cast as the voice of Skip Binsford for the series, but Spielberg decided to replace him with Martin Mull, after animation was completed on the first three episodes.