Rusty the wonder dog

I mentioned briefly last week that TCM's Saturday morning airings of the Dick Tracy movies had reached an end and that, frome the start of the new year, the series that would show up on Saturday mornings before the Bowery Boys movies is the Rusty the Dog series. The first of them is tomorrow at 9:15, The Adventures of Rusty. In this one, a boy Danny (Ted Donaldson) who's dealing with the difficulties of his father's remarriage and having a stepmother he doesn't get along with finds a dog who, it turns out, had been trained by the Nazis to be a Nazi service dog. The result is that the dog finds it difficult to trust people. Danny takes to the dog and begins to rehabilitate it; as he does so he begins to learn how to rehabilitate his own relationship with his stepmother.

There were eight movies in the series, although for whatever reason, TCM will only be showing seven of them, skipping The Return of Rusty which should have aired next Saturday (January 9) if TCM had all eight movies. Anyhow, a look at the March schedule shows that the Rusty films do in fact resume after 31 Days of Oscar, with the final two films in the series airing on March 5 and 12. On March 19, TCM will start running the Lone Wolf series.