Lassie was a popular long-running U.S. television series about a collie dog and her various owners. Over her more than fifty years history, Lassie stories have moved across books, film, television, comic books, and other forms of popular culture. The American Dog Museum credits her with increasing the popularity of Collies.

    British writer Eric Knight created Lassie for a Saturday Evening Post short story in 1938, a story released in book form as Lassie Come Home in 1940. Knight set the story in his native Yorkshire and focuses it around the concerns of a family struggling to survive as a unit during the depression. Lassie's original owner Joe Carraclough is forced to sell his dog so that his family can cope with its desperate economic situation, and the story became a lesson about the importance of interdependence during hard times. The story met with immediate popularity in the United States and in Great Britain, and was made into a MGM feature film in 1943, spanning six sequels between 1945 and 1953. Most of the feature films were still set in the British Isles and several of them dealt directly with the English experience of World War II. Lassie increasingly became a mythic embodiment of ideals such as courage, faithfulness, and determination in front of hardship, themes which found resonance in wartime with both the British and their American counterparts. Along the way, Lassie's mythic function moved from being the force uniting a family towards a force uniting a nation. The ever-maternal dog became a social facilitator, bringing together romantic couples or helping the lot of widows and orphans. In 1954, Lassie made her television debut in a series which removed her from Britain and placed her on the American family farm, where once again, she was asked to help hold a struggling family together. For the next decade, the Lassie series became primarily the story of a boy and his dog, helping to shape our understanding of American boyhood during that period. The series' rural setting offered a nostalgic conception of national culture at a time when most Americans had left the farm for the city or suburbia. Lassie's ownership shifted from the original Jeff Miller to the orphaned Timmy Martin, but the central themes of the intense relationship between boys and their pets continued. Lassie became a staple of Sunday night television, associated with "wholesome family values," though, periodically, she was also the subject of controversy with parents groups monitoring television content. Lassie's characteristic dependence on cliff-hanger plots in which children were placed in jeopardy was seen as too intense for many smaller children; at the same time, Timmy's actions were said to encourage children to disobey their parents and to wander off on their own. Despite such worries, Lassie helped to demonstrate the potential development of ancillary products associated with television programs, appearing in everything from comic books and Big Little Books to Viewmaster Slides, watches, and Halloween costumes.

    By the mid-1960s, actor Jon Provost proved too old to continue to play Timmy and so Lassie shifted into the hands of a series of park rangers, the focus of the programming coming to fall almost exclusively upon Lassie and her broader civic service as a rescue dog in wilderness areas. Here, the show played an important role in increasing awareness of environmental issues, but the popularity of the series started to decline. Amid increasing questions about the relevance of such a traditional program in the midst of dramatic social change, the series left network television in the early 1970s, though it would continue three more years in syndication and would be transformed into a Saturday Morning cartoon series. Following the limited success of the 1979 feature film, The Magic of Lassie, yet another attempt was made in the 1980s, without much impact on the market place, to revive the Lassie story as a syndicated television series. The 1994 feature film, Lassie, suggests, however, the continued association of the series with "family entertainment."

    Many animal series, such as Flipper, saw their non-human protagonists as playful, mischievous, and child-like, leading their owners into scrapes, then helping them get out again. Lassie, however, was consistently portrayed as highly responsible, caring, and nurturing. In so far as she created problems for her owners, they were problems caused by her eagerness to help others, a commitment to a community larger than the family, and more often, her role was to rescue those in peril and to set right wrongs that had been committed. She was the perfect "mother" as defined within 1950s and 1960s American ideology. Ironically, of course, the dogs who have played Lassie through the years have all been male.

    -Henry Jenkins

    CAST

    Jeff Miller (1954-1957).............................. Tommy Rettig  

    Ellen Miller (1954-1957)................................ Jan Clayton  

    "Gramps" Miller (1954-1957)................. George Cleveland  

    Sylvester "Porky" Brockway (1954-1957).... Donald Keeler

    Matt Brockway (1954-1957).......................... Paul Maxey

    Timmy (1957-1964)...................................... Jon Provost

    Doc Weaver (1954-1964)............................ Arthur Space

    Ruth Martin (1957-1958)........................ Cloris Leachman

    Paul Martin (1957-1958)............................. Jon Shepodd

    Uncle Petrie Martin (1958-1959)............. George Chandler

    Ruth Martin (1958-1964)............................ June Lockhart

    Paul Martin (1958-1964)................................ Hugh Reilly

    Boomer Bates (1958-1959)........................... Todd Ferrell

    Cully Wilson (1958-1964).............................. Andy Clyde

    Corey Stuart (1964-1969)............................. Robert Bray

    Scott Turner (1968-1970)................................. Jed Allan

    Bob Erikson (1968-1970).......................... Jack De Mave

    Garth Holden (1972-1973)............................. Ron Hayes

    Mike Holden (1972-1974)........................... Joshua Albee

    Dale Mitchell (1972-1974)............................ Larry Wilcox

    Keith Holden (1973-1974)........................... Larry Pennell

    Lucy Baker (1973-1974)......................... Pamelyn Ferdin

    Sue Lambert (1973-1974)....................... Sherry Boucher

    DOG TRAINER

    Rudd Weatherwax

    PRODUCERS

    Jack Wrather, Bonita Granville Wrather, Sheldon Leonard, Robert Golden, William Beaudine, Jr.

    PROGRAMMING HISTORY

    451 Episodes

    CBS

    September 1954-June 1955   Sunday 7:00-7:30

    September 1955-September 1971   Sunday 7:00-7:30

    FIRST RUN SYNDICATION

    Fall 1971-Fall 1974

    FURTHER READING

    Barcus, Francis Earle. Children's Television: An Analysis Of Programming And Advertising. New York: Praeger, 1977.

    David, Jeffrey. Children's Television, 1947-1990: Over 200 Series, Game And Variety Shows, Cartoons, Educational Programs, And Specials. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1995.

    Fischer, Stuart. Kids' TV: The First 25 Years. New York: Facts On File, 1983.

    Shayon, Robert Lewis. "Softening up Lassie." Saturday Review (New York), 3 March 1956.

    Thumbnail of Mike Post

    Mike Post on the theme to Lassie

    01:26
    Thumbnail of Leo Chaloukian

    Leo Chaloukian on sound for Lassie

    00:56
    Thumbnail of Joseph Sargent

    Joseph Sargent on Lassie and other early shows being his training ground for directing

    02:41
    Thumbnail of Joseph Sargent

    Joseph Sargent on dealing with the dog on Lassie

    02:28
    Thumbnail of Joseph Sargent

    Joseph Sargent on his first directing job on the series Lassie

    08:56
    Thumbnail of Joseph Sargent

    Joseph Sargent on the ways in which Lassie was a product of its era

    01:08

    Leo Chaloukian

    Leo Chaloukian on creating the sound effects on Lassie and Sea Hunt

    00:57

    Leo Chaloukian on sound for Lassie

    00:56

    Jeffrey Hayden

    Jeffrey Hayden on working with several trained geese on Lassie (and also how well-trained the dogs were on the show)

    01:48

    Frank Inn

    Frank Inn on the original feature film "Lassie," and on the inception of the Lassie television series

    07:33

    Frank Inn on shooting Lassie in Canada

    02:14

    Frank Inn on working with "Lassie" on Lassie

    04:28

    Frank Inn on teaching "Lassie" tricks on Lassie

    01:18

    Frank Inn on Lassie and the PATSY awards, and on the end of his association with Rudd Weatherwax

    04:25

    Russell Johnson

    Russell Johnson briefly on difficulties working with animals when guesting on a Lassie episode

    00:56

    Gene LeBell

    Gene LeBell on fighting a bear on an episode of Lassie (in which he got hurt)

    04:16

    Sheldon Leonard

    Sheldon Leonard on directing a Lassie episode featuring a lion

    03:53

    Ann Marcus

    Ann Marcus on getting an script for Lassie rejected

    01:09

    Mike Post

    Mike Post on the theme to Lassie

    01:26

    Joseph Sargent

    Joseph Sargent on his first directing job on the series Lassie

    08:56

    Joseph Sargent on the tone of Lassie and working with the producers

    01:36

    Joseph Sargent on dealing with the dog on Lassie

    02:28

    Joseph Sargent on the ways in which Lassie was a product of its era

    01:08

    Joseph Sargent on Lassie and other early shows being his training ground for directing

    02:41

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