How Underdog Was Born

Rating:
Summary: The Creative Process, History Lesson and Superhero Insights
Review: I picked up this book for the simple reason I am still an Underdog fan and that it promised insight to how he got his beginnings. If you're looking for a book about the Underdog cartoon character or art, this may not be your first choice. There's a lot of great stuff about Underdog, but this accessible read goes well beyond what we saw on the screen.

First, the story is an honest and real look at the creative process - how words become ideas and ideas combine with other ideas, and then in steps the guy who's writing the checks, and some new ideas... -- until at the end, in this case, you have Underdog.

I was struck by the authors' honesty - ie: meetings in a station wagon to a sea of martini's - which helps build a sense of transparency. I really felt that these men are sharing their experience without an agenda for their ego or legacy. Note the way they handle who ended up proposing the Underdog name with a mutual quote. I found the creative process element of the book energizing as I relate to it professionally.

Now, I shouldn't be surprised that Biggers and Stover, the team that conceived Underdog on the shoulders of another creation, Tennessee Tuxedo (they would have been remise not to have included a brief history) would carefully tuck away the educational element of this book. Yet I found myself so engaged in the story of how Underdog was created that it wasn't nearly until the end of the book did I realize that I was actually learning about the early days of animated television.

Having grown up with most of those shows and experienced this period of television differently, it was an interesting perspective to see it as the birth of something so common in contemporary life. I still love animated television just as much as I still love Underdog.

Which is why I was delighted with what this book had to say about his humble beginnings. I highly recommend The Underdog Bible to any fan (Afterward) - a collection of documents Biggers and Stover used to guide the creation of the series. It includes a history of Underdog - from his beginnings in West Virginia to the death of his mother - a moving and revealing look at the character and morals in which the cartoon dog was based.

The story holds plenty of other gems as well, including the inside answer of why a frog in the famous line: "Not plane. Nor bird. Nor even frog." It's not just because it rhymes with dog, as I always was content to believe. And you'll finally learn why Underdog always spoke in rhyme. And my lurking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, Sweet Polly might not be as sweet as she seems, was, at least in part, validated.

I suppose I could just as easily give you the answers... but there's a context to all of it. That's the true beauty of this story, how all of these things converged: animation, television, the evolution of the advertising industry... and the creative process of two men that led to the birth of Underdog. And the rest, as they say, is history.