User reviews

Well, there was also mixed feelings for 'Little Patch of Heaven', but at least there was much more of a Disney feel in that sing-along-songs video than in '101 Dalmatians Pongo and Perdita'.

A shame because even to a young adult who has been a huge Disney fan all her life the Disney Sing-Along-Songs videos are fun, charming, educational and nostalgic, with a great chance to bask in one's favourite childhood memories and know one's favourite Disney songs better. There are some fantastic ones in the series, especially the Disneyland and Christmas outings as well as the 'Zip a Dee Doo Dah', 'Be Our Guest', 'Heigh-Ho' and 'Circle of Life' videos. Almost all of them are worth watching in fact, and most of them very good to great.

'101 Dalmatians Pongo and Perdita' is not by all means unwatchable. The dogs are adorable and show great personality, the video is beautifully shot, the set design is wonderfully elaborate and who can't help getting nostalgic in the "Following the Leader" number especially. Two songs are good, and they are "Zip a Dee Do Dah" and more successfully "Following the Leader", the most well sung, the catchiest and the most entertainingly staged. The sequence of stupid dog tricks is fun too.

Because of the theme it must have been a struggle to find songs that fitted the theme without being irrelevant, however it just feels like any old sing along video as apart from "Zip a Dee Do Dah", "Following the Leader" and the live action Dalmatians to a lesser extent '101 Dalmatians Pongo and Perdita' doesn't feel very Disney-like. Even the use of "Cruella DeVil" and introductions from Professor Owl and Ludwig Von Drake would have made it feel more like a Disney Sing-Along.

The other eight songs are hampered by canine twists on standards that are not as clever as they'd like to think ("Hokey Puppy", "Pongo) or ridiculous, overblown and over-zany choreography with some sometimes painful hamming up and mugging from the children ("Take Me Out to the Ball Game", "Do Your Ears Hang Low"), while the rest are bland and forgettable with some of the shoutiest and out of tune singing of any of the Disney Sing-Alongs.

Disney's Sing-Along-Songs series often does a great job entertaining, educating and making one nostalgic, but '101 Dalmatians Pongo and Perdita' never really does either. Even the elaborate set design and sometimes spirited staging cannot disguise the children's overacting, very little of the video educates and in the couple of times it tries to it feels preachy and out of place and it's just far too removed from Disney to make one feel nostalgic. Usually the lyrics in the subtitle/sing along captions are easy to follow in the Disney Sing-Along series but not here, with the coming and going too quickly, some out of sync parts and sometimes not showing at all children and adults will struggle making sense of them here, because not everybody will know all the songs.

In conclusion, worth seeing as a Disney completest or as someone who wants to see all of the series, but this was the only one that disappointed me hugely. 4/10 Bethany Cox

... about dogs. Mostly the dogs are doing dumb things. Looks like a "funniest home video" show.

Nothing much to say about it. It has a skeleton plot that just barely props up its carcass. Some creepy lady has like 10 dalmatians (I guess they didn't want to dish out the cash for all101) and she holds a party where the guest list is entirely composed of little kids and their smelly dogs.

The score consists of a series of public domain songs rewritten for the worse. Most of these songs originally had absurd lyrics. Now the lyrics are less absurd but dumb and inane.

It's funny to look through the cast list on this site. Apparently all of the kids and all of the dogs in this 40-minute montage had names. Highly unnecessary.

I don't doubt some young children got a kick of it back in the day and it probably fulfilled its mission of getting 3-year olds to shut up for 40 minutes with its constant stream of songs and canine gyrations.

As for me, I had higher tastes in infancy. This was one of the cleanest VHS' in my garage, after being hardly touched for decades, when I decided to find and summarily dump all of my childhood VHS' recently.

Honourable Mentions: Amores Perros (2000). The greatest movie about dogs of all time.

I honestly love this movie so much. As a child, I was obsessed. And as an adult I can see why. I love how much the main women loves her dogs. She is such an "extra" dog mom. I must have learned it from her. Besides how cute the dogs are, I also love the songs. So much nostalgia.

I was utterly obsessed with this tape as a child, I watched it every single day. 101 Dalmatians were my favorite!!

That being said, even though I made this account for the sole purpose of posting this review and I'd rate this film 11/10 if I could, I find the bad reviews totally reasonable lol. The choreography is awfully cringey, at one point the kids are all doing synchronized generic dance moves and through the lens of 2022 it kinda looks like a painfully awkward prototype for the first Tiktok dance ever. The music was also markedly sub-par compared to other disney singalong videos, but its A STORY ABOUT A DOG'S BIRTHDAY PARTY.. you really can't beat it.

This randomly popped into my head 25 years later. Found it on youtube and now have found something my toddler and I can enjoy together!