Jerry the Troublesome Tyke: Wales First Cartoon to Appear on Screen

In 2002, "lost" episodes of Jerry the Troublesome Tyke were discovered and brought back to life.

Jerry the Troublesome Tyke was a series of shorts created by Sid Griffiths during the silent film era. Forty-two shorts, about 4 minutes long, were made between 1925 & 1927 and were shown at the big screen at Cardiff's Capital Cinema in Wales. The charismatic and cheeky dog lives on paper on Griffiths drawing board, and is often visited by Griffiths. This was the first animated series to be made in Wales, and was also the longest running British animated series during that time.

First episode

You can see all episodes at British Pathé.

Snowy: Tintin's Dog

Snowy became famous as Tintin's loyal dog and companion in one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century.

Ninety years ago an adventurous boy named Tintin and his faithful little white dog Snowy came to life in print. The characters, created by Belgian artist Georges Remi who wrote under the pen name Herge, solved mysteries and fought crime throughout the world. The comic strip made its first appearance in a Belgium newspaper on January 10, 1929, running as a serial until May 1930. The series was then published in a book form titled Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

Herge never had a dog until his later years, but he did admire a white Wire Fox terrier that belonged to the owner of a little cafe he often visited. It was this dog that inspired Snowy's character. Herge named the dog Milou, the nickname of his first girlfriend Marie-Louise. When The Adventures of Tintin came to America, Milou was given the name Snowy. It was a short name to fit in the speech bubbles, and the name fit well with the color of his fur.

In the beginning Snowy was a cynical type of dog that often expressed his thoughts, but after the appearance of Captain Haddock he became more light-hearted, as the Captain took over the role of the cynic. The bond between Tintin and his dog is significantly strong. Snowy is always at his side, unless he is forced away from him. The dog's character is a lively one. He is known for mocking others, is superstitious, feels overly sensitive at times, and shows excessive self-satisfaction in his achievements.

Snowy is constantly saving Tintin from dangerous situations and freeing him from captivity. He is fearless against those who are bigger than him when it comes to saving Tintin, but he is extremely fearful of all spiders. Snowy is occasionally faced with problems of moral order when having to choose between duty and his desires. He loves bones, meat and whiskey. When Snowy is expected to come to the rescue, he sometimes finds himself distracted by his temptations. These might slow him down a bit but he always comes through in the end.

Twenty-three Tintin stories were published during Herge's lifetime, and a 24th issue that was still in progress at the time of his death was published posthumously. Before Herge passed away in 1983, he had expressed the wish that no other artist draw Tintin after his death. The comic strip on paper ended, but Tintin's adventures continued on the big screen for the first time when Steven Spielberg released The Secret of the Unicorn in 2011.

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Snoopy: Charlie Brown's Dog

Snoopy, Charlie Brown's good-natured beagle who lives quite an exciting life in his fantasies, has been around for almost 70 years and is loved by many of all ages around the world.

Early drawing of Snoopy

Snoopy made his first appearance on October 4, 1950, two days after the comic strip Peanuts debuted. When Charles Schulz, the creator of the strip, was 15 years old he drew a picture of his dog Spike which later served as the inspiration for Snoopy. Schulz planned on naming the dog character Sniffy but discovered that name was already used in a comic strip so he came up with the name Snoopy from a suggestion his mother had mentioned earlier about naming the next family dog Snoopy. The name first appeared about a month later on November 10.

According to some strips in 1968, Snoopy's birthday is August 10. When the comic strip first came out, Snoopy appeared to belong to no one. As the years went by, the beagle began to spend more time with Charlie Brown than with the other characters. It was eventually confirmed that Charlie Brown is the dog's owner when he says his parents bought him Snoopy after a boy dumped a bucket of sand on him.

Snoopy often imagines himself in fantasy lives. Some of his lives include being a writer, a bow tie-wearing attorney, a hockey player, a college student known as Joe Cool, and an astronaut - claiming to be the first beagle on the moon. His best known role is the British WWI flying ace. In his fantasies he often fails when trying to become famous. His books are never published and his doghouse (the Sopwith Camel) is always being shot down by the German flying ace Red Baron, his imaginary enemy. According to Schulz, "He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don't envy dogs the lives they have to live."

Over the years, Snoopy became the mascot of several companies, including NASA and the insurance company MetLife. With NASA he became their safety mascot after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire disaster. With MetLife he became their corporate mascot in the 1980s. Three airships owned by MetLife that provide aerial coverage of sporting events feature Snoopy as the WWI flying ace on their fuselage.

The comic strip came in last place in the New York World Telegram’s reader survey of cartoons the first year it came out, but it didn't take long for it to gain popularity and appear on the tv and  big screens. At the time of Schulz's passing in 2000 (mere hours before his final comic strip was published) Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the other Peanuts characters were appearing in more than 2,500 newspapers in 75 countries with over 350 million readers.

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