Consider Uggie: The Podcast

Ladies and gentlemen, we've entered "Peak Uggie." Skateboarding on Ellen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fv2mXFXJHY], making out with Katy Perry, impressing Gerard Butler. Uggie-Huggers Joey Moser and Megan McLachlan talk about the salad days of their favorite movie dog, including his uncredited cameo in Jay Roach’s The Campaign, a political satire starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis. Lingering questions include: Why didn’t Uggie end his film career with this cameo? Could The Campaign have benefited from more Uggie? Is this where Jason Sudeikis developed his Ted Lasso voice? All this and more in Episode 8 of the Consider Uggie podcast, where these Awards Daily colleagues discuss the filmography of Uggie the dog and his impact on popular culture.

“I’ll say one thing. He owes his life to that dog.” Or maybe that dog owes his life to this film! The Artist, formally known as The Little Bitch Artist and Look Who's Talking Now, wowed audiences when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, when Jean Dujardin won Best Actor and Uggie took the Palm Dog (eat it, Cosmo from Beginners!). Soon Oscar buzz surrounded our favorite Parsons Jack Russell, but BAFTA made no bones about their feelings toward rewarding canine actors and made sure that, despite S. T. VanAirsdale's Consider Uggie awards campaign, Ugg-man would not be eligible. In Episode 7 of Consider Uggie, Awards Daily's Joey Moser and Megan McLachlan look back at the film that made Uggie a star and answer lingering questions like, What's up Doris's (Penelope Ann Miller) butt in this film?  Was George (Dujardin) reluctant to do talkies because of his French accent? Did this film only win all of the awards BECAUSE of Uggie? All this and more in Episode 7 of Consider Uggie.

After a slew of B movies, Uggie’s next film was 2011’s Water for Elephants from director Francis Lawrence, Uggie’s biggest picture to date, despite the tepid response from rube critics. The film boasted two Oscar winners, Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz, and also starred heartthrob Robert Pattinson, in his first major post-Twilight role. RPattz was no stranger to off-screen romances with his co-stars and apparently neither was Uggie, who claims to have romanced Miss W in between her breakup with Jake Gyllenhaal and marriage to Jim Toth. “What I didn’t expect was for it to happen to me,” says Uggie in his autobiography. “At the ripe old age of 56 in human years, I had fallen in love for the first time, and with a human woman more than 20 years my junior. And boy, did I fall.” But while Uggie steals some scenes in the film, it’s another animal who runs away with the movie. Although the story surrounding her, in and out of the film, is one of the reasons why animal actors are nearly going extinct today. Did Uggie’s performance as Queenie break ground for Jared Leto’s Oscar-winning performance just two years later? What is Christoph Waltz’s accent in this film? Did Reese break up with Jake for Uggie? All this and more in Episode 6 of the Consider Uggie podcast, where my Awards Daily colleague Joey Moser and I, Megan McLachlan, discuss the filmography of Uggie the dog and his impact on popular culture.

Just as America’s sweetheart Meg Ryan threw her rom-com fans for a loop with graphic sex scenes in In The Cut, canine cutie Uggie dabbled in similar fare in Darin Ferriola’s Mr. Fix It. He reintroduces himself to audiences not as man’s best friend, but as a Man, best friend. In this 2006 film, David Boreanaz stars as Lance Valenteen, a wannabe race car driver whose side hustle involves repeatedly ripping off the plot of My Best Friend’s Girl [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1046163/]. Uggie yet again delivers a show-stopping performance, and unlike most actors who do graphic sex scenes in a film, he still has a career after it. In Episode 5, Joey Moser and I discuss the need for intimacy coordinators for animal sex in movies, the scene David Boreanaz probably wishes he could delete from his resume, and what watching Uggie’s filmography has taught us about how politically incorrect films were in the mid-aughts.

Well, this is one film I think Uggie would like to see OFF his IMDB resume. Shirtless prepubescent boys, one-dimensional female characters,. . . Janice Dickinson getting electrocuted in a tub (okay, maybe this last part makes it the best movie ever). With Wassup Rockers, director Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) tackles teenage boys engaging in boring hijinks in Los Angeles while (potentially) warding off lawsuits from Clint Eastwood in this film that premiered at TIFF in 2005. In Episode 4 of our Consider Uggie podcast, Joey and Megan discuss the film's bonkers intro, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ljVrLCOwU] nipple hairs, XY magazine, Kevin Costner in The Big Chill, the evolution of the character known as "Spermball", and where this film falls in Uggie's career trajectory.