Rover (Rodney Dangerfield) is a high rolling, care-free, one liner spewing Basset Hound who lives in Las Vegas embracing the highroller lifestyle as the pet of Vegas showgirl Connie (Shawn Southwick). When Rover inadvertently disrupts a mafia deal with Connie's sleazy boyfriend, Rocky (Sal Landi), costing him a large amount of money, Rocky swears revenge on Rover. With Connie set to go on the road she has Rocky petsit for Rover which he's all too happy to do. Rocky drives Rover to the Hoover Dam chucking him off in a tied up sack where he's saved from drowning by two fisherman and wanders around the countryside until he comes across a family farm. The farmer, Cal (Gregg Berger), doesn't want Rover believing him to be useless, but his son Danny (Dana Hill) takes a shine to the dog and reluctantly allows Rover to stary. Rover struggles adapting to life on a farm, but eventually manages to make a more determined effort after falling in love with Daisy (Susan Boyd), a Collie from next door.
Rover Dangerfield is a 1991 animated film produced, written by, and starring noted comedian Rodney Dangerfield. The movie had its origins in the mid 80s as a concept outlined by Harold Ramis and Dangerfield both of whom had collaborated on the hit films Caddyshack and Back to School. The film was initially written as an R-rated animated film in the style and tone of something like Ralph Bakshi's urban films, but the film was the subject of heavy interference by Warner Bros. Who gutted large portions of the script's raunchier and more risqué material in order to reverse engineer this R-rated film into a G-rated family film. The exact reasoning behind why has never been explained as Dangerfield only briefly touched on the film in his autobiography and the film has been mostly forgotten with no real trade articles or box office information to speak of (though it most likely didn't do well). The working theory posited by some was Dangerfield pulling out of the doomed Caddyshack II may have resulted in some bad blood between Dangerfield and Warner Bros. With the sabotage of Rover a "tit for tat" action, but that's just speculation. Regardless of its history, the end result may have Dangerfield's stamp, but it's a far cry from his best work.
To start off on a positive note, the movie is certainly a gorgeous looking movie (in part). The movie was the sophomore feature of studio Hyperion Animation, the same outfit who put together the independently produced animated feature The Brave Little Toaster which was regrettably denied a theatrical release as Disney opted to instead hype it as an original for their cable venture The Disney Channel. Given how good Brave Little Toaster looked for a movie that didn't have studio backing, it's no surprise the studio was able to give us some stronger and more dynamic visuals with an actual budget behind them. The film features some well done model work and environments with both the Vegas scenes and the farm scenes very fluid with good line work and strong sense of atmosphere and both the human and animal models look pretty good. The one major exception however is on Rover himself who is a massive miscalculation because in contrast to all the other animals of the movie, Rover has been quasi-anthropomorphized with a design that tries to capture Dangerfield's look and facial expressions on Rover and it does not work at all. Rover's face in particular often looks dead eyed because the animators were so focused on capturing the look of Dangerfield's real life eyes that they didn't pay attention to the fact his eyes often look in two different directions at once. Rover also is the only animal character who can stand up and has hands and the fact he keeps flip flopping between being a quadruped and having hands with opposable thumbs is really distracting.
On the writing level Dangerfield shows himself struggling with being the sole credited writer on this film and even if he had gotten an R-rating as intended I'm not convinced the film would've worked. Despite the film carrying relics from the raunchier version of the script such as the Vegas setting, rover being a vice ridden gambler, Rocky the mafia antagonist, or the plethora of scantily clad showgirls, the overall plot wouldn't have differed all that much from what we got and it would've just included more "blue" jokes. The plot of the movie is clearly intended to be thin by design because it's obvious Dangerfield wanted the primary focus to be on the jokes more than anything plot or character related. The problem however is that Dangerfield writes the movie like he's delivering jokes in front of an audience and not within the context of a film narrative so Dangerfield keeps cracking one-liners with no sense of pacing, setting, or context because his strength is and always has been his delivery but that's ALL the film has going for it. Rover isn't really a character in this film because unlike his roles in Caddyshack or Back to School there hasn't been any effort dedicated to creating a character and from Rover's design it's clear the directive was "Dangerfield is a dog" and that's where it starts and ends because aside from a few puns about bones or paper training there's nothing that makes this character stand out. On occasion some of Dangerfield's jokes do land but it's usually because A) there's a straightman involved rather than the joke by itself, and B) like the Vegas setting there's usually a meaner context behind them that's also possibly a relic of the R-rated version. That's really a major problem with this movie in that there is no straightman to work off against Dangerfield and if you saw Caddyshack and Back to School the straightmens' reactions and lines were almost as big a part of those films as Dangerfield himself was.
Rover Dangerfield is an oddity of a movie that features telltale signs of production tampering especially with how disjointed and sloppily told the narrative is. It's highly unlikely that the original R-rated version of this film would've improved much upon it and it's equally doubtful the script or original animatics survive. Even if you're a hardcore lover of Dangerfield's style of humor and got mileage from Easy Money or Ladybugs this is only worth maybe a one time curiosity if that.
Rover Dangerfield is a 1991 animated film produced, written by, and starring noted comedian Rodney Dangerfield. The movie had its origins in the mid 80s as a concept outlined by Harold Ramis and Dangerfield both of whom had collaborated on the hit films Caddyshack and Back to School. The film was initially written as an R-rated animated film in the style and tone of something like Ralph Bakshi's urban films, but the film was the subject of heavy interference by Warner Bros. Who gutted large portions of the script's raunchier and more risqué material in order to reverse engineer this R-rated film into a G-rated family film. The exact reasoning behind why has never been explained as Dangerfield only briefly touched on the film in his autobiography and the film has been mostly forgotten with no real trade articles or box office information to speak of (though it most likely didn't do well). The working theory posited by some was Dangerfield pulling out of the doomed Caddyshack II may have resulted in some bad blood between Dangerfield and Warner Bros. With the sabotage of Rover a "tit for tat" action, but that's just speculation. Regardless of its history, the end result may have Dangerfield's stamp, but it's a far cry from his best work.
To start off on a positive note, the movie is certainly a gorgeous looking movie (in part). The movie was the sophomore feature of studio Hyperion Animation, the same outfit who put together the independently produced animated feature The Brave Little Toaster which was regrettably denied a theatrical release as Disney opted to instead hype it as an original for their cable venture The Disney Channel. Given how good Brave Little Toaster looked for a movie that didn't have studio backing, it's no surprise the studio was able to give us some stronger and more dynamic visuals with an actual budget behind them. The film features some well done model work and environments with both the Vegas scenes and the farm scenes very fluid with good line work and strong sense of atmosphere and both the human and animal models look pretty good. The one major exception however is on Rover himself who is a massive miscalculation because in contrast to all the other animals of the movie, Rover has been quasi-anthropomorphized with a design that tries to capture Dangerfield's look and facial expressions on Rover and it does not work at all. Rover's face in particular often looks dead eyed because the animators were so focused on capturing the look of Dangerfield's real life eyes that they didn't pay attention to the fact his eyes often look in two different directions at once. Rover also is the only animal character who can stand up and has hands and the fact he keeps flip flopping between being a quadruped and having hands with opposable thumbs is really distracting.
On the writing level Dangerfield shows himself struggling with being the sole credited writer on this film and even if he had gotten an R-rating as intended I'm not convinced the film would've worked. Despite the film carrying relics from the raunchier version of the script such as the Vegas setting, rover being a vice ridden gambler, Rocky the mafia antagonist, or the plethora of scantily clad showgirls, the overall plot wouldn't have differed all that much from what we got and it would've just included more "blue" jokes. The plot of the movie is clearly intended to be thin by design because it's obvious Dangerfield wanted the primary focus to be on the jokes more than anything plot or character related. The problem however is that Dangerfield writes the movie like he's delivering jokes in front of an audience and not within the context of a film narrative so Dangerfield keeps cracking one-liners with no sense of pacing, setting, or context because his strength is and always has been his delivery but that's ALL the film has going for it. Rover isn't really a character in this film because unlike his roles in Caddyshack or Back to School there hasn't been any effort dedicated to creating a character and from Rover's design it's clear the directive was "Dangerfield is a dog" and that's where it starts and ends because aside from a few puns about bones or paper training there's nothing that makes this character stand out. On occasion some of Dangerfield's jokes do land but it's usually because A) there's a straightman involved rather than the joke by itself, and B) like the Vegas setting there's usually a meaner context behind them that's also possibly a relic of the R-rated version. That's really a major problem with this movie in that there is no straightman to work off against Dangerfield and if you saw Caddyshack and Back to School the straightmens' reactions and lines were almost as big a part of those films as Dangerfield himself was.
Rover Dangerfield is an oddity of a movie that features telltale signs of production tampering especially with how disjointed and sloppily told the narrative is. It's highly unlikely that the original R-rated version of this film would've improved much upon it and it's equally doubtful the script or original animatics survive. Even if you're a hardcore lover of Dangerfield's style of humor and got mileage from Easy Money or Ladybugs this is only worth maybe a one time curiosity if that.