In the midst of showreel-editing misery, this brought up some fond memories:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, I know they look exactly like real dogs. Thank you! Yes, we could possibly could have just used real dogs. Next question…

Inspiration was provided by hours and hours of old “Challenge of the Yukon” radio shows….

….which in combination with lengthy rendering times might have made me go a little nutty. I gave all the dogs names. They were.. let’s see.. I think Nanuk was the left-hand dog, Snowball the right-hand one, and of course Yukon Prince in the lead. In my daily dailies drawings I had him starring in an action-packed series of adventure novels circa 1933 (I have a thing for period book covers.. title fonts are some of the great freebies on Blambot):

It’s a good thing I work in the animation industry otherwise people might think drawing imaginary covers for imaginary books was a really strange thing to do.

I also was working on a heron for a while, but his series (more around the mid-1910s I’d say) was less successful: