Max Fleischer and his wife or girlfriend have a cute little dog with them at the studio. Max decides to draw the dog but every time he does, the drawing changes into Koko the Clown. Finally, Max decides to give Koko a whip and an assignment: "Here's a dog (of your own) to train," he says.
This looks a lot better than I telling it as the clever artwork is fun to see. (It better be since there is absolutely no sound, not even sound-effects.)
In no time, Koko features this dog in a carnival act inside a circus tent, packed with paying customers. The dog doesn't disappoint - he's amazing. He does tricks, like standing up on his tail or overly dramatic begging for food. He does imitations, such as a dog in a pound, or taking a family portrait or - the one I literally roared laughing at - Teddy Roosevelt.
Unfortunately, that was the highlight of this 11-minute cartoon as the last five minutes of it was a little too slow and repetitive. Koko asks the dog to play dead with the idea that his trained flea will wake up the dog. It does, but hundreds of fleas wind up escaping out of their little box and cause havoc. In this case, I'm making sound, perhaps, better than how it played because mostly all we saw were people and inanimate objects scratching themselves until the end.
Thus, this is a cartoon that started strong, but finished weak and was way too long for the material it presented. It's also unusual in that almost all of these early Fleischer efforts were extremely entertaining while this was just "fair," at best.
