If there was any doubt that Old Yeller, my April and second film of Audient Zeitgeist, is deserving of its spot in the series, that doubt was expelled in late February, long after I'd already queued it up as my second movie. But I'll get to that in a moment.
First, spoiler alert for Old Yeller, if that is actually something you need.
And second, my personal history with Old Yeller.
I have no direct history, obviously, because I had never seen the movie. But on the playground back in elementary school, everyone knew what happened in the movie and it was mentioned a surprising number of times, especially for a movie that came out 20 to 25 years before that (in 1957).
What happens, of course, is that the titular dog gets rabies and has to be shot.
I knew this from at least age ten, probably younger, as it was something that seemed to get referenced at least once every couple months. Some of that may have been in other entertainment products, but I think most of it was by other kids, many of them having dogs and being worried such a fate might befall theirs.
A worry, I should say, that Phoebe Buffay's mother was trying to prevent her from ever having.
As you know, I have been rewatching Friends, though that project is now over, as it left Netflix in Australia at the end of March. I gave it the old college try to get through the whole thing, but only finished six seasons. I could have watched a few more episodes but decided it was cleaner to finish one season completely, although that season ends on quite the cliffhanger. (Richard comes back to tell Monica he still loves her.)
And in late February I watched episode 20 of season 2, called "The One Where Old Yeller Dies." You may remember it. Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) walks in on the rest of the gang approaching the end of the classic Disney film and already ready to start shedding tears. She's confused because she thinks it's a happy movie. See, her mother always turned it off just after "Yeller saves the family from the wolf and everyone's happy," a moment I did not know about then because it did not rise to the level of narrative distinctiveness of him being shot. Phoebe's mother told her kids that was the end of the movie, and did this for a number of other movies in order to shield Phoebe and her siblings from the sadness of the world. Except it only delayed that, as now Phoebe experiences years' worth of accumulated sadness in one humorous existential crisis, as she finds out about the real endings of all those movies her mother turned off early. For 22 minutes, she becomes an embittered cynic.
So this proves Old Yeller was still in the zeitgeist in 1996. It doesn't prove anything about the zeitgeist 29 years later, a time when I am not near any playgrounds and I don't discuss Old Yeller regularly with anyone.
Or does it?
The thing about Friends is it is not just me rewatching it. Millions of young people now adore Friends, and many of them are rewatching it too. That's right, they already watched it once, and now they are rewatching it. Which means those who have gotten far enough have seen "The One Where Old Yeller Dies" at least twice (and had the movie spoiled for them, I suppose).
Despite Old Yeller having been spoiled for me personally for the past 40 years, it was time for me to finally see it and process all the concomitant doggie endangerment.
The first thing that surprised me was that the word "rabies" is not mentioned once.
Any time the groundwork is laid for the ultimate fate of Old Yeller -- and there is a lot of groundwork laid -- they refer to the sickness as "hydrophobia," which may be more consistent with how it was medically classified in the 19th century, when the film takes place. First there is the specter of a rabid cow that has to be put down. Then there are wild pigs that rough up both the dog and his child owner, Travis (Tommy Kirk), leaving us to worry that both might have gotten hydrophobia from them. However, it is ultimately a fight with the aforementioned wolf that definitely dooms the dog, though not until more than two weeks after the bite does he start showing symptoms.
And how many animals does this dog have to fight in one movie? He actively fights not only with the pigs and the wolf, but also with a mama bear coming after Travis' exhausting younger brother Arliss (Kevin Corcoran), one of whose obnoxious behaviors is to try to drag around the bear's cub by the leg. (This movie could not have been made the way it was in modern day, as the ASPCA would have been all over it.) Then Yeller also tussles with a cow that has gone off to give birth to a calf, though it is mostly to bring the cow in line, which Yeller is able to do in multiple different scenarios through some sort of canine mind control I guess.
Given how evidently superior Yeller is as a specimen of doghood, it's odd how much Travis hates him at first. He initially brands Yeller as a thief -- true, but what can you do, it's a dog -- and he himself makes menacing threats of shooting the dog, before ultimately only shooing him, and then accepting him into the family when Arliss takes to him. (The shooting threats being another form of foreshadowing of the dog's ultimate fate.)
The movie is casually violent in how these characters think about animals, which certainly would have been more common 70 years ago in our world, and 160 years ago in theirs. For example, when trying to bring the cow in line -- just ornery at this point, not yet rabid -- Travis says he's going to milk that cow if he has to break every bone in its body. Yes, this is a Disney movie, but as discussed, it was a different time.
But even after Yeller has distinguished himself and Travis has become his biggest champion, Travis still seems extremely dismissive of most animals -- even the cute ones. A neighboring girl brings the mutt offspring of Yeller and her dog -- which basically looks just like a young Yeller rather than the combination of their breeds -- and Travis dismisses the pup with the words "I already got a dog." What, it's not possible to have two dogs, not even one as cute as this?
Of course the narrative arc here is that Travis is going to grow to love this dog also, and that this dog will be the replacement for its deceased dad, but I found it a bit of a stretch of Travis' traits as a character to get to that point. Almost as though he views the puppy as some rival to the not-yet-rabid Yeller, he describes him with some series of inappropriate adjectives along the lines of "mangy old," which is hilarious because this dog is as fresh as the newfallen snow, and far cuter. It's just one of the ways the script is simplistic.
I think it's difficult to watch Old Yeller in 2025 and not be overly distracted by the "gee whiz" nature of it all. This is earnest, hokey, broad family entertainment of the highest order, entirely lacking in nuance, and it does occasionally try a person's patience. Maybe more than occasionally.
But by the end, I got at least some of the way there toward bemoaning the ultimate fate of this extremely loyal dog. By no means was I tearing up, like the characters on Friends who watched it, but then again, I didn't have the personal history with it that they did. And since, unlike Phoebe Buffay, I'd had the ending spoiled for me more than 40 years ago, it was more a matter of seeing how they got there and how it was actually staged than what happens.
They did manage to make the dog look a little bit vicious -- again, who knows what they had to do to get that to happen -- but the actual scenes of a rabid, or hydrophobic, Yeller are comparatively few. They've penned him up to monitor his symptoms, and they move fairly quickly from the confirmation that he's rabid to the realization that he must be shot, which occurs just a few minutes of their time later, a full ten to 15 minutes before the film ends.
I did like how they wrapped it up -- Travis and Arliss' father finally returns, having been gone the whole movie, and gives Travis a nice speech on the good and bad contained in life -- so I was ultimately on the film's side by the end.
I'll be back with more Audient Zeitgeist in June.
