Animal Insting

Here are some important things to know about Rin Tin Tin:

1.  He was a real, live dog.
2.  He had a big career in movies and on TV.
3.  He was the sire of lots of puppies, and one in each generation was named Rin Tin Tin.
4.  The current Rin Tin Tin is Rin Tin Tin XI.
5.  The Rin Tin Tin name is copyrighted, so I will probably have to go to jail because I used it in my blog.
6.  Rin Tin Tin is a weird name for a dog, but it's fun to say.

So now I will tell you the true story of this famous German Shepherd dog.  It all started in France during World War I, where a dog kennel got bombed, and an American soldier named Lee Duncan found a mother dog and her five puppies.  These were not just stray dogs.  They were Dogs With Pedigrees.  And at that time, the puppies were only five days old.

Corporal Duncan and his battalion took the mama dog and her pups back to their camp.  Later on, Corporal Duncan found out that the German Kennel Master from the bombed kennel had been captured by the Americans, so he visited him in the prison camp and learned more about the dogs and about the German Shepherd breed, which he didn't really know much about.

When the war ended two months later, Corporal Duncan took two pups on the ship to go back to the U.S.  These two were Rin Tin Tin and his littermate Nannette.  During the trip, Nannette got sick with distemper, and shortly after she got to America, she died.

You may be wondering where the name Rin Tin Tin came from, and now I will tell you.  In France, the children used to play with little puppets named Rin Tin Tin and Nannette.  And the children gave these puppets to the American soldiers for good luck.  This luck must have been pretty good because it helped the Americans and their allies win the war.

Anyway, after Mr. Duncan got home to Los Angeles with his dog, he taught Rin Tin Tin to do a bunch of tricks, including jumping and stuff like that.  And Rinty (which was his nickname) performed in dog shows, where a film producer saw him and decided that he could be the next Strongheart.  Of course, you will remember that I already told you about the famous movie star dog, Strongheart.

So Rin Tin Tin began his film career by playing the role of a wolf  in The Man From Hell's River in 1922.  And he played a wolf in some other films, even though he didn't really look much like a wolf.  Rinty's first starring role was in Where the North Begins, which was made in 1923.  This movie made so much money that it probably saved Warner Brothers from going bankrupt.

Rin Tin Tin went on being a movie star for some years after that, and he was also the star of a radio series. He did his own sound effects on most of the radio shows until his death.  After that, his son, Rin Tin Tin, Jr. took over.

When Rin Tin Tin died in 1932, he was 14 years old.  Mr. Duncan had Rinty buried in his home country in the Cimetiere des Chiens.  This is where Barry, the famous St. Bernard, is also buried.

In 1954, Rin Tin Tin IV starred in a TV series called The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.  This series was on TV until 1959.  Mom remembers watching it when she was a little girl.  She liked it because she liked dogs.  She also liked horses, but her parents wouldn't let her have either a horse or a dog, which doesn't seem fair to me, but I wasn't even born then, so nobody asked for my opinion!

Anyway, in this TV show, there was a boy named Rusty, and he was an orphan because his folks got killed by Indians, and Rin Tin Tin was his dog.  And Rusty got adopted by a cavalry unit, and they all lived at Fort Apache in Arizona in the late 1800s.  They had lots of adventures, and Rin Tin Tin was the hero who bit the bad guys and saved a lot of people.

Mr. Lee Duncan, the original owner of Rin Tin Tin, died in 1960, and a woman named Jannettia Brodsgaard Propps continued breeding Rinty's descendants in Texas, and then her granddaughter, Daphne Hereford, went on doing it after Mrs. Propps died.  The current Rin Tin Tin has his very own website here:  http://www.rintintin.com/HomePage.html  and travels all over the country making appearances.  On April 10, he was at an art auction to raise money for a library in Danville, and last year on July 4, he was right here in Kansas City at the World War I Museum.  If I had known Rinty was here, I would have liked to meet him, but I didn't know, and neither did Mom.

On the website, I found out that you can buy a puppy from the Rin Tin Tin line for a cost of between $1,250 and $2,500.  These puppies were born on March 29.  I asked Mom if we could get one, and she said no because we can't afford one, and also we already have our Legal Limit of Dogs, as she keeps telling me.  So maybe I will just get an autographed photo of Rin Tin Tin.  That only costs $6.99.