As a five-year-old seeing this in the theater I was traumatized when the bad guys kick Tiffany, the little white Maltese-looking dog.
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Seconding Milo & Otis!
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Yeah. Right.
I was the movie guy for a summer camp full of children with disabilities. First night movie? You guessed it, “Old Yeller.” A hundred kids crying their eyes out. The camp leadership were not amused.
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I’ve coveted Ken Barry’s office from that movie for years.
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Benji came out when I was in elementary school. Our next door neighbors had this aging sheep dog named Benji (who couldn’t have been named after the movie).
Benji was vicious. Benji terrified me and my brother. Benji claimed half of our front yard as its territory. Benji bit the mailman. Benji’s owners were sued by the mailman. Benji’s owner fell down and couldn’t get up, and blamed us that we didn’t hear him–because we were too scared of their dog to play on the side of the house where we could have heard Benji’s owner. Benji is why I was scared of dogs until I was a teenager.
I’ve never seen the movie.
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The Incredible Journey was pretty incredible as well. https://youtu.be/9nj1ClN7kw8
And I’m not sure if I saw Benji the Hunted before Benji, but I probably considered both films to be the greatest films made to date, at the time. Followed closely by Lassie, and the Littlest Hobo, of course.
I went through years of reading the entire Jim Kjelgaard library, to prepare myself for our first family dog, Toby, the Border Collie / Labrador mix, who loved chasing snow flakes and airplanes. In hindsight, I missed my chance at grooming Toby to become a celebrity; I never caught him on videotape, and he was gone before Youtube came along.
Are people making good home movies with GoPros and their pets?
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What did you follow it with the next night? Watership Down?
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Was this film not available?
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Never saw any of the Benji opus, but one of my favorite moments in the history of television is the moment Gene Siskel chewed out Roger Ebert for giving a thumbs-up to Benji the Hunted on the same show in which he gave a thumbs-down to Full Metal Jacket (!).
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A great boy turns into man moment in American Cinema.
Apparently in that movie (and several other Benji sequels), the part of Benji was played by his daughter Benjean who looked similar. No, I am not making this up.
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Although, Ebert had a point that the film seemed rather derivative given that there were a lot of similar Vietnam War movies in the 1980s. Ebert believed that you had to judge a movie on what it was trying to do. A story about a dog may not be as “important” as a story about a war, but it is quite possible that the dog story does what it is supposed to do better than the war movie.
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oooooh yes! thats my only dog-film. (thankfuly I saw that one after watership down)
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To be completely honest, I have little recollections of watching the movie in the 1970’s but one thing I do vividly recall is how the Scholastic novel version was our reading assignment. The entire class got the paperback, and we spent the next 4 or 5 English lessons reading the book out loud, and doing comprehension exercises, writing your own tale, those sort of things. And seeing “Benji” on all of the variety shows of the era, or on things like Battle of the Network Stars.
You know, I don’t think I ever saw the movie or its sequels. Much like I never saw Smokey and the Bandit in a theatre either.
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Gimme Baxter.
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You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the film - now try the stew?
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