John R. Dilworth's Courage the Cowardly Dog Review

As the opening song explains, the animated series Courage the Cowardly Dog focuses on a semi-anthropomorphic pink dog living with an elderly farming couple, Muriel and Eustace Bagge, in the fictional town of Nowhere, Kansas. Muriel and Eustace are typically terrorized by something paranormal, supernatural, extraterrestrial, and so on. Then the ironically named prone to screaming Courage has to rescue them.

Ordinarily he accomplishes this through determination or sheer luck. Courage does devise plans too. For instance, to gain Muriel, Eustace, and his own freedom from an intergalactic automaton named Robot Robot, Courage challenged the metallic menace to a break dancing contest. Courage was solely victorious because Robot Randy lost control performing a spin move. While saving his owners, Courage normally endures vicious or nearly fatal injuries, commonly accompanied with dazed laughter afterwards. He’s able to speak facile English to the viewer (breaking the fourth wall) and other non-human characters. Although, interestingly, the human physician Dr. Vinadaloo can perfectly understand what Courage says. Courage employs narrative shapeshifting when he’s trying to warn Muriel and Eustace about something bizarre or threatening. Sometimes, he requires the help of his sardonic, English accented, and apparently omniscient Computer. Furthermore, the pink doggy has asked Shirley the Medium, a Chihuahua gypsy fortune teller, for assistance before too.

Muriel and Eustace Bagge are extreme opposites of one another. Muriel is a benevolent Scottish woman that adores Courage and she spends her time drinking tea, playing her sitar, watching the telly, cooking (lots of vinegar), and tending to her garden. In contrast, Eustace is a money-driven crabby man that completely abhors Courage and he passes the day by working on his truck, reading the newspaper, viewing TV, and frightening Courage with typically his large painted goofy mouthed mask. Due to his cruelty towards Courage, created from enviousness or Schadenfreude, Eustace being whacked by Muriel’s rolling pin and his reaction of, “Ow! What did I do?” occurs in the majority of episodes.

Eustace even goes as far as recruiting previously trounced villains (“The Ball of Revenge”), so he can finally rid himself of that “stupid dog!” He’s been a bad guy before “Ball of Revenge” though: see the season two episode “The Magic Tree of Nowhere”. Likewise, Muriel’s husband is frequently the butt of a closing gag, normally the result of a botched get-rich-quick scheme or the monster of the week chasing him.

Now, it can be argued that perhaps Eustace doesn’t sincerely express how much he cares about Muriel often enough and maybe Muriel does dote Courage too much. However, in the episode “Farmer Hunter, Farmer Hunted”, it is revealed, through a flashback, that Eustace’s older brother Horst bullied him horribly. The two never got along either. Additionally, “Mother’s Day” shows that Eustace has, at best, a love-hate relationship with his own mom Ma Bagge. Could Horst’s and Ma’s ill treatment account for part of Eustace’s mean demeanor? I believe it could have.

Despite their monstrous or eerie look, some of Courage’s antagonists aren’t intrinsically evil. In fact, most of them turn out to be sweet, misunderstood, or plagued with melancholy, like Bigfoot (“Courage Meets Bigfoot”), Carmen (“Serpent of Evil River”), and the Storm Goddess (“Stormy Weather”). Conversely, there are villains that are totally fiendish such as the King of Flan (“King of Flan”), Jeeves Weevil (“Evil Weevil”), and The Great Fusilli (“The Great Fusilli”) though.

Courage’s arch-nemesis is the wryly Katz: a suave, sinister, smart, dark red colored anthropomorphic feline with a British accent. I flat out adore this character. In his first appearance (the show’s premiere episode), “A Night At the Katz Motel”, under the guise of a motel manager, Katz commences capturing and feeding the Bagges to his ravenous collection of gigantic spiders. He possesses slightly higher than average athleticism and master con artist skills. The sadistic Katz enjoys partaking in pre-defeat “sport” such as handball or a staring contest before he kills Courage. Nevertheless, when Katz isn’t screwing around, strangling is his preferred method.

Akin to Cartoon Network’s The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy created by Maxwell Atoms, Courage the Cowardly Dog features demented black comedy, surreal humor, sci-fi elements, and occasionally drama. This is intermixed with parodies and homages to horror, cinema, musicals, references to classic Looney Tunes, and Bob Clampettesque (fast and wild, focusing on zany jokes over action) sequences. Plots were penned by the cartoon’s head writer David Steven Cohen, along with Michelle Dilworth, Irv Bauer, Craig Shemin, Lory Lazarus, Bill Aronson, Bill Marsilli, and Allan Neuwirth.

For instance, the Dil products Courage uses are akin to Acme merchandise that Wile E. Coyote utilizes. Another nod to both Bob Clampett and Looney Tunes is when the ending iris closes upon Courage’s nose causing him to yelp in pain. This befell the Russian accented dog in the 1947 animated short “Hare Ribbin'”. Both characters utter for verbatim, the same line, “This shouldn’t happen to a dog!” John R. Dilworth plays around with this by having Courage state at the conclusion of several future episodes, again with an enclosing iris, “This still shouldn’t happen to a dog!”

To boot, the season one episode “Demon in Mattress” was an evident shoutout to The Exorcist (1973), a famous definitive horror film. Also, The Snowman from “The Snowman Cometh” clearly alludes to actor Sean Connery/James Bond, notable from his British voice and usage of, “The name’s Man. Snowman.” “In Everyone Wants to Direct”, Courage encounters an undead serial killer posing as an independent movie director calling himself Benton Tarantella. His name is derived from filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s. Courage the Cowardly Dog even mentions Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street through the crazy-about-shaving hairstylist Freaky Fred, Muriel’s grinning nephew.

From season four, “The Mask” is a pure representation of drama, very few laughs are to be had here. Kitty tells the Bagge family that he “treats her like a slave” which causes Eustace to say in response, “Sound like my kind of guy!” Upon meeting Courage Kitty attacks as she states, “All dogs are evil.” Thanks to Courage’s help though, Kitty admits this blanket statement was wrong. If someone were to label “The Mask” as controversial due to its themes of domestic abuse, prostitution, same-sex relationship, and perhaps even rape (Bunny seems to be wearing the jacket when being forced to do things by Mad Dog until the audience observes her in a pot with dirt without it, like she’s been sullied), yeah I could understand this. Moreover, I strongly think the theme of misandry was present in there too: substitute the word dog for men.

This episode hints several times that the female characters of Bunny and Kitty are more than simply friends (Kitty explains she feels “lost” without Bunny, “the sweetest gals that ever lived”, the inscription on the mouse reads “To Kitty, love from Bunny”, how the mouse toy was lifted similar to mistletoe towards the episode’s last moments on the train, “now we can be best friends forever!”). I pretty sure the motif of the mask for Kitty’s character and the title of the episode represents how she hides her real self through a replacement for the expression she/he is in the closet. As in, she loves Bunny but is denying these feelings/thoughts, opting to hide from the truth versus face it. Similarly, the jacket Mad Dog makes Bunny wear obscures her own lesbian identity. This suggests that she might be doing other stuff with Mad Dog that she doesn’t want to do. Which is why I typed the theme of rape earlier. Bunny yelling “Let go of me!” as Mad Dog’s thugs grab her kind of backs up the rape theme. No prior-to episode had covered since subject matter. 

Finally, neither characters have any clothing on (Kitty’s mask is gone as well) after Bunny’s rescue and Mad Dog’s defeat. This symbolizes the full embrace of their genuine identities and their love for another. Awww, how adorable.

The animated series can imperiously provide tone trauma: the cartoon can shift between a motley of moods in the blink of an eye. “King Ramses’ Curse”, universally deemed one of the show’s most chilling episodes, has an uproarious song jammed in it. This concept alone is an absolute departure from the earlier founded spine-tingling atmosphere of the episode.

Episodes starring the devious duck Le Quack have superbly done “tone trauma” as well. In “Dr. Le Quack, Amnesia Specialist”, after Courage defeats him and he’s on his way to jail all is well, right? Then your triumphant smile disappears upon realizing that Le Quack has escaped and is now wearing a stolen police officer’s uniform. At the finish of “Nowhere TV”, once again, a beaten and handcuffed Le Quack gets away from the cops, but behind him the prison sits… Engulfed in flames. In each ending, no policemen are seen. These brief scenes depict how genuinely diabolical Le Quack is capable of being. Showing him fighting against Courage in a stereotypical cartoony manner only amplifies the downright terror of these episode’s conclusions. That’s the great strength and barbarous beauty of “tone trauma”.

Terrifically accentuating the cartoon’s randomness, strangeness, wackiness, and scariness are songs/tunes composed by Jody Gray and Andy Ezrin. Together the pair have managed to construct many unbelievably memorable moments on the show due to their emotional, exquisite, haunting, lilting, and zippy musical compositions that incorporate an assortment of instruments, vocalizations, and sound effects. Katz’s maleficent presence is intensely heightened because of his theme, since he’s not chilling enough already. Selections of classical music, (a tip of the hat to Warner Bros. animation and scores by composer Carl W. Stalling), are integrated into Courage the Cowardly Dog episodes.

Of course, what also set Courage the Cowardly Dog distinctly apart from other animated cartoons is its gorgeously grotesque yet appropriate art style, influenced by the show’s creator John R. Dilworth’s. Courage the Cowardly Dog dabbled in more than 2-D, yes, various mediums, such as intentionally low-tech computer generated imagery (CGI), unanticipated claymation, stochastic movie clips, and humorous live-action stuff were ingeniously thrown in. I’d drool over the animation in unceasing awe every time an episode played on television, thanks to its rad unnatural visuals.

Ultimately, Courage the Cowardly Dog was a dark laugh out loud controversial nuanced abnormality when compared with other children’s cartoons between 1999 and 2002. Thirteen years since it finished, the animated show remains close to my dear heart. I’m twenty-nine now and the memory of Courage’s horrifying and facetious misadventures hasn’t waned in the slightest.

Along with the aforementioned Katz Motel episode “Robot Randy”, “The Magical Tree of Nowhere”, “The Hunchback of Nowhere”, “Heads of Beef”, “Katz Kandy”, “The Mask”, “Perfect”, “Everyone Wants to Direct”, “Night of the Weremole”, “Feast of the Bullfrogs”, “Freaky Fred”, “Nowhere TV”, “The Revenge of the Chicken From Outer Space”, “The Sand Whale Strikes”, “The Tower of Dr. Zalost”, “Human Habitrail”, “Farmer-Hunter, Farmer-Hunted”, “The Curse of Shirley”, “Family Business”, “Serpent of Evil River”, “Last of the Starmakers”, “Remembrance of Courage Past”, “The Nutcracker”, and "Curtain of Cruelty" are some of my favorites. 

Special thanks towards the animation’s voice actors: Marty Grabstein (Courage), Lionel G. Wilson (original voice of Eustace: seasons 1-2 and half of season 3), Arthur Anderson (Eustace: second half of season 3 and all of season 4), Thea White (Muriel), Billie Lou Watt (Ma Bagge), Paul Schoeffler (Dr. Vindaloo, Katz, Le Quack, Freaky Fred, The Snowman), Mary Testa (Shirley), Tim Chi Ly (Di Lung), Fred Melamed (The Magical Tree of Nowhere, The Spirt of the Harvest Moon), Peter Fernandez (Benton Tarantella, Robot Randy), and Ringo Starr (The Duck Brothers). Also, applause for the cartoon’s writers, artists, colorists, animators, composers, Stretch Films, Inc., and creator John R. Dilworth. And whoever else made Courage the Cowardly Dog what it is!