The same dog actor starring in (l. to r., top to bottom) Hot Dog, College Hounds, Who Killed Rover?, and The Dogway Melody. His work ethic reminds me of Jude Law's output in 2004.
If you've frequented the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, whether during a festival or not, you've undoubtedly seen clips from one or another of the "All-Barkie Comedies". The common genres of films released in the early days of talkies are all lampooned in the form of theatrical shorts. They starred dogs that were dressed up in human clothes and made to "talk" and "act" by obviously nefarious means. They use a lot of the same dogs in featured parts, like the fella pictured above. The dogs involved were all unquestionably mistreated and abused, but the Barkies are important artifacts of cinema history.
Warner Archive's The Dogville Collection features all 9 shorts made from 1930-31 that were put together by the same team that would soon thereafter bring us The Three Stooges. In various polls of theatergoers, the Barkies were voted more popular than any other shorts running before features, even ones that critics and historians have elevated to more prominent heights. The same reason audiences in the 30's loved these movies is why the atrocious "spoof" movies continue to do well: people like to laugh at things that make fun of the artistically successful. If someone did new versions of these, I'm reasonably sure people would love Barkie versions of Obsessed, The Proposal, or Zombieland.
As a whole, the Barkies are very much hit and miss, depending on the one you pick. Some hew so closely to their source material that they become just as tedious as the stale genres they assail, whereas others end abruptly or nonsensically. I feel terrible laughing at some of the gags that rely entirely on "here's how we made this dog do this," but I'll be damned if it isn't funny.
I've gotten through the first disc of them, and they look and sound great considering their age. My favorite thus far is their "Great Woof Way" backstage musical The Dogway Melody. There are no extras, as is the case with the rest of the Archive titles, but I've been dying for the shorts for so long that I don't really care. The Dogville comedies are no more politically correct than many of the Our Gang shorts (also on Warner Archive), but just as with those films, these shouldn't be categorically erased from availability.
This is the perfect example of why the Archive program is out there, and why I'm glad to be a customer. The Archive folks were good enough to send a review copy of this and a couple others to me, but trust me when I say they're still getting plenty of my money otherwise and I'd have gladly spent the $25 myself. In fact, I probably will a couple times over to gift this to a couple friends with upcoming birthdays.
I've just found this vintage 6-page article explaining how the trainers worked with the dogs.