The Crying Dog Toy — Update 2: Silent Movie Stars
I am ecstatic to have yet another update on the crying dog search so soon. Our biggest update to date.
You see, I finally know how old the dogs are and the answer may surprise you.
Previously, I had estimated on the safe side that the crying dogs were made sometime around the 50s. The further back in decades that stuffed toys go the less accurately I am able to identify them both due to my own limited knowledge as well as information available online. One of the drawbacks of being a mortal human child. The crying dogs were made in a way that suggests they could be pretty old, or that they could be homemade or intended to appear that way. But boy was I in for a shock.
During another one of my early morning searches I stumbled upon someone not only mentioning the crying dog toys specifically, but with photos. I had probably smashed “crying dog toy” into Google at least six prior times at that point with no results but due to just how broken and user-unfriendly google has become in recent years for whatever reason it was only this time that anything showed up in the search. So rest assured, if Google is just giving you Pinterest links and covert ads just go back in a few days and try the same search again.
According to the post the crying dogs were from the 1920s. That’s right. Almost a hundred years old, before the second world war, before lord of the rings. Even now it’s so hard to wrap my head around that.
The photos included were stills from two movies: It (1927) and Spite Marriage (1929)
Finding out that the dogs were this old was surprising. But I immediately set out to finding these movies and seeing for myself. They were easy to find as they both appear to be in the public domain, but the extremely low resolution and grainy footage is a lot for me to get used to. (I’m one of those nerds who hates jpegs and only listens to music in lossless format to give an idea of how particular I am about media quality)
I found the fact that they were silent movies easier to follow along than seeing them blown up to a dimension they just weren’t meant to be on YouTube and Dailymotion. A neat tip is if you want to take screenshots from a YouTube video is to download it, and the download will allow you to play it at its native resolution in an offline video player.
Interestingly enough the crying dog in both movies ends up being a gift in a very toxic straight relationship and is used to visually express the feelings of the protagonist. In “It” the dog is given to the protagonist by the man she really wants to be with to the point that she uses his friend/brother to get closer to him, and in “Spite Marriage” the protagonist got married to an actress he admires but to her all it ever was a failed plan to make her ex jealous and the dog is a gift he gets her only to come home and realize what was happening. Strangely in both movies the couples seem to end up getting back together anyways after some hijinks on a boat. I’m not going to pretend I understand. I am afraid of the ocean. You will never catch me going on a yacht.
I was genuinely surprised that the dog got so much screen time in these movies, with “It” even having the dog show up in promotional photos but it was good news for me because the closeup shots allowed me to get as good a look at the dogs as possible with the quality of the footage.
Funnily enough other people claimed there were even more silent movies featuring the crying dog in them, but upon checking the dog featured was actually Dismal Desmond, who I mentioned briefly in my gingham dog post. It’s cool that in the end the crying dog ended up being more closely related to Desmond than I initially thought.
Adding to the fact that the only two crying dogs that showed up for sale online were different from each other, there are slight differences between the dogs in both movies. It could even be debated that the crying dog in the “It” promo photos was different than the one that was filmed. There are some slight differences in the face embroidery.
The dog in “It” has a crescent moon shape for the spot on its tail and the crying dog in “Spite Marriage” appears to be a different type of fabric and have its facial features drawn on. All dogs in these silent movies resemble the tan and brown one, and they all have felt tongues in their mouths which wasn’t present on tan and brown but are also different than the felt tongue that the little red dog has.
The biggest inferable lead I can derive from the use of the dogs in these movies is that they are amusement park prizes. Specifically because in “It” the dog is obtained after a day at a park known only as “the beach” in the film.
Several people have claimed to know which park these scenes were filmed in and names included Steeplechase Park (Coney Island) or Ocean Park Fun Palace (California) but there’s not enough photo evidence available to coroborate this. The name Pacific Ocean Park was brought up too but I believe this was the rebranded name for Ocean Park Fun Palace after it burned down either prior or during the filming of the movie.
As my crying dog is from the west coast and the only other one to show up for sale online was from the east coast, it could honestly be from either park or more likely, something that was sold at parks nationwide.
It’s weird, because my other specific stuffed toy dog obsession is what I refer to as the “blue dogs” who are amusement park prizes from 1998. It all comes full circle I guess.
But my discoveries did not end there. You see, I was doing another one of my 4AM searches and wouldn’t you know, this time using a mobile android device instead of a windows desktop, a new result is found. One that I assumed was not real and a product of my sleep deprivation.
But it was real.
Lo and behold, I had found the actual patent filed for the stuffed dogs themselves. And the patent contained art, a description of the dog, a description of how to make the dog, and what looked to be a working pattern to construct the dog.
To save some time I will be making that into its own post, but for now, here are the basics.
The crying dog toy was patented September 15, 1925 by someone named Lester Shäfer.
The crying dog is now in the public domain and as a result I can copy it as much as I want with no repercussions.
A key selling point of the crying dog toy was its loosely stuffed body so that it would be harder for a child to use as a weapon. That’s right. It says that.
I do not know how common the practice of understuffing soft toys was in 1925, but Lester is acting like this is entirely new. He goes into detail about how easily the toy can be posed and moved in a way quite similar to things said by Ty Warner of Beanie Babies fame. Could this be the very precursor to that style? Could we be so bold as to say that the crying dog is the ancestor of beanie babies? That Spot without a spot is-
We are not talking about Beanie Babies.
Several people have suggested the possibility of a pattern being out there somewhere, and I am hoping that the pattern included in the patent is not just for show.
One of the more unfortunate results of finding out that the crying dog toys come from the 1920s is that it pretty much explains why they’re so rare. The more time passes the more things fade and become untraceable. They are nearly 100 years old, it’s luck that they were featured in surviving silent films at all.
Another negative that I find myself coming back to, and why I did hesitate making this update is that the age of these dogs doesn’t just affect their rarity, but their value. I wanted to be honest and I am first and foremost an archivist, not a greedy hoarder of secrets, so I am sharing in the end. But now that it’s going to be more public knowledge that these dogs are almost a hundred years old the chances of me ever getting another have gone down significantly.
I’ve joked about how even the reproductions of Dismal Desmond are out of my price range. Well, the crying dogs are literally from the same exact era as Desmond. So I’d assume that anyone who finds my research and decides to sell one of their own would do so at a price I couldn’t justify. It’s unfortunate, but it makes me grateful I got the red crying dog for so cheap when I did. Makes him all the more special.
The biggest obstacle at this point in the search is that so much knowledge about the tiny insignificant details from this time period is just gone. And when you do find something it’s pretty much never a firsthand account. You’re lucky if it’s a secondhand source. In the same way that nobody bothers to write down where a city is located in ancient times because “everyone already knows that” leading to its true location being lost to historians, nobody thought to meticulously photograph every inch of an amusement park. That’s the importance of silly little photos and vlogging and hell, recreating your favourite shopping mall in minecraft.
So where does this leave the search?
I have a decade.
I know that the red dog is the exception to the tan/white norm.
I know the dogs were extremely varied in how they were made.
And I’m also aware that these guys are going to be extremely rare and almost certainly out of my hands.
I’ll continue looking. Not just for more of them but for a potential pattern. Something very significant in the discovery of when the dogs came from is the confirmation that they are public domain. That means I can make my own, buy my own, pay a friend who knows how to use a sewing machine to make me a giant one out of arcade carpet patterned fabric to make me one, whatever I may want.
