I Rewatched Courage the Cowardly Dog So You Don't Have To
And you guys owe me because this show is as nuts as you remember
I’ve been thinking about the Mandela Effect — or something close to it, I’m not a scientist so don’t get mad at me — when it comes to childhood television shows.
The actual phenomenon refers to shared memories we all have about some things that are just plain false, coined after researcher Fiona Broome admitted that she thought Nelson Mandela (who died in 2013) died in prison in the 1980s and learned that she wasn’t alone in misremembering. You may have heard the classic examples, like that we all falsely remember The Berenstain Bears as The Berenstein Bears (okay TV tie-in! relevant!), that Mr. Monopoly has a monocle when he in fact does not, or that in Star Wars Darth Vader says “Luke, I am your father” when he actually says “No, I am your father.”
Many of us also have collective memories of the shows we spent hours watching as children — memories that may or may not be true. We’re not revisiting Hey Arnold or Arthur nowadays, so our recollections aren’t challenged; they remain cemented by what our itty bitty brains determined years ago. But in adulthood, I can understand that many of the things I thought were scary or exciting or scandalous weren’t actually as they seemed. Perhaps Ethan from Lizzie McGuire was actually not so dreamy, and maybe Sharpay Evans really just deserved the lead in High School Musical.
One memory that I will, if I may, call a shared memory is that Courage the Cowardly Dog was actually a very scary television show. But was this extremely bizarre Cartoon Network series about a pink dog who lived with an old couple actually as terrifying as we remember? I investigated.
In 1996, an animated short film called “The Chicken From Outer Space” written and directed by the animator John R. Dilworth was nominated for an Oscar.1 In 1996, I was two years old, busy only responding to people if they called me “Little Bear” and getting mad if they didn’t refer to my parents as “Mother Bear” and “Father Bear,” so the Oscars were not on my mind for once. But apparently a lot of other people were major fans of the Cartoon Network short film — at least enough that is was launched into network stardom: “The Chicken From Outer Space” became the pilot for Courage the Cowardly Dog, which aired from 1999 to 2002. Yes, this show was technically only on air for three years but it has haunted our nightmares for decades.
The show centers on an always-terrified pink beagle named Courage, who each episode must save his owners — an elderly couple, Muriel and Eustace — from a variety of horrors constantly descending upon their farmhouse in a town called Nowhere. There are kidnapping aliens, evil snowmen, ghosts and more. HBO says this is a show for 10-year-olds, and I say that’s true if we have a Benjamin Button-scenario on our hands and those 10-year-olds are actually full grown adults because this show is wack.
Approximately ten seconds into one episode titled “Shadow of Courage/Dr. Le Quack,” (there are two stories in each episode) an old man says to his butler, “Everything is for sale, James, even people… You should know that after 50 years with me.” Okay well, I thought, we are in for a wild ride. The old man then dies and his shadow goes on to taunt Courage, showing the dog shadow images of Muriel pulling off her own head, being burned alive, getting nearly chopped to bits, having her limbs pulled apart and more. I famously have nothing to do with children but I do know one nine-year-old and it’s safe to say that if I showed his parents this show they would never let him near me again, and that would be the right decision.
In “The Demon in the Mattress,” Muriel becomes possessed and her head — which has turned green and sprouted Medusa-like hair — does a full 360-degree turn before falling off. I don’t know what in the The Exorcist these Cartoon Network animators were playing at in the 90s but this is not a show for kids.
But perhaps we were actually better off watching Courage the Cowardly Dog as children. It's even more disturbing once you have a fully developed brain.
In one episode Muriel gets temporary amnesia and her husband Eustace tells her that her role is “slave woman.”
“Your job is cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry and anything else I can think of,” he adds in a very ugly-version-of-Harry-Styles-in-Don’t-Worry-Darling fashion. You may be thinking, okay well he must at least be nice to the dog, right? Wrong. One of the show’s throughlines is that Eustace is extremely abusive to Courage, constantly kicking him and strangling him and throwing him out of the house. I have comfortably enjoyed a meal while watching kidnapping, murder and even cannibalism in crime shows, but dog abuse in any form — cartoon or no cartoon — I will be having a problem with.
In an episode titled “Freaky Fred,” Muriel is paid a visit by her nephew Fred, who was recently released from a psych ward he was sent to due to his obsession with cutting people’s hair. He’s tall and slender with a toothy grin that resembles American Horror Story’s Twisty the Clown. He speaks in rhyme — a crime in and of itself, if you ask me. He describes his misbehavior as “naughty,” which is a word that should not be used unless you’re talking about Santa Claus, and probably not even then.
All this to say that Freaky Fred is extremely scary when he’s doing even nothing. But the writers decided to go absolutely cuckoo nuts and lock Courage in a room with Fred while the barber wannabe explains how he got so “naughty.” The whole time we’re being subjected to story time about how Fred fell in love with a girl named Barbara who had long, beautiful blonde hair until he shaved her head against her will, Fred is forcibly cutting off all of Courage’s fur.
As a child, I would have been freaked out by this man shaped like a french fry speaking in song and shaving a dog. But watching now, I get the same kind of anxiety I’d get from watching thousands of hours of shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Today, I understand that chopping off someone’s hair isn’t just weird — it’s a way to control someone else’s body, taking an important part of them away against their will. The trope pops up in a Criminal Minds episode in which a serial killer cuts strands of his victims’ wigs in an effort to make another lucky lady a wig, and in a college-campus-rapist plot on Veronica Mars, among others.
Courage the Cowardly Dog even goes full Black Mirror with “Mega Muriel the Magnificent,” an episode in which Courage’s computer takes control of Muriel so that it can show the world what it’s capable of. Watching in 2023 — the year Bing’s chatbot tried to break up a New York Times reporter’s marriage and TikTok used artificial intelligence to show us what we’ll look like in 50 years — I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
While I was watching Courage, I tried to imagine what little Mallika would have thought. As children, we’re drawn to what scares us, like passersby who can’t stop staring at a car accident. But we’re also free from knowledge of the world’s actual horrors (ignorance is bliss and all that). Children ask questions without knowing they should be scared of the answers, and say “what if?” without enough experience to understand that imagined situations can get worse and worse and worse. So when I watched Courage as a kid, perhaps I was just fascinated by the grotesque images. But now, the anxiety — similar to what I feel when I watch shows about kidnappings or serial killers — has an extra level. I know enough for my mind to spiral. What if? What if What if?
I’m not saying that I had to sleep with the lights on after watching a Cartoon Network show, but I did go to bed a bit uneasy. And I did check all my friends’ phone locations in case any of them had been abducted, which is what I will assume happened if you’re simply not at home.
We’ve talked before about why we watch scary shows, and the possibility that we do so to soothe ourselves. Law and Order is a comfort show for me and many others, for instance. But this must be something we grow into as we evolve and learn what’s ~out there~. I can’t imagine six-year-old me was tuning into Courage so I could say “hey that’s scary! At least it’s not happening to me!” But who knows — only a few years later I tried to ban my younger sister from playing outside for fear that she might be hauled off in a big white van.
On reflection, there's a lot of media from the early 2000s we still need to unpack — like that damn rope swing in Bridge to Terabithia or the Next bus on MTV or the fat shaming of Jessica Simpson — and Courage certainly makes the list.
That little pink dog might not be at the top of our subconscious, but there's no way he didn't do some serious damage.
B Plot
Question: If your life this week was an episode of Gossip Girl, what would the old-movie title be?
Mallika: Mine would be “Holiday in the Adirondack Sun” in honor of the critically acclaimed Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie because I am going on vacation next week and won’t shut up about it. If you need me, “Sorry I don’t believe I know you... No, I’m sorry, I don’t ever remember seeing you.”
Rachel: My episode would be titled “Who’s Afraid of Rachel (Virginia Woolf)?” because I famously contracted the COVID-19 virus (blast from the past!) this week while at home in Nashville visiting my family. My immune system is actually gorgeously effective and I’ve recovered so quickly, the common cold has been a bigger bitch to me. But my family is of course either avoiding me like the plague, going to Maggie Rogers concerts without me or approaching me with the trepidation one might have towards a rattlesnake with their car keys in its mouth. I’ve adopted the personality of a mid-century washed-up Southern biddy, fanning myself on the front porch while hitting on the younger gentlemen callers, “I don’t bite, hunny! Whatcha running away for? You afraid of lil old me?”
I debated making my movie “The Big Sleep,” but ever since Julia won our referral program, I now have at least 50 episodes of Love Island to catch up on. No rest for the wicked, babes, luv, bruv!
C Plot
Hollywood’s studio executives have already let loose that their strategy for the double writer’s and actor’s guild strikes is to let the union members go broke before resuming negotiations in the fall. But mother, we mean SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, has had some choice words for these “medieval land barons.” As did Sean Gunn, who plays Kirk in Gilmore Girls. As someone who had over 60 jobs in that show, Gunn should know a little something about labor! (For some good reporting about the strikes, check out the Too Much TV newsletter.)
That’s So Raven’s Raven-Symoné said this week that she actually has psychic visions: “I do have moments where I really will just stare and I will see a scene that is happening to me or that is going to happen to me in another dimension and I'm like, 'Yo, this is weird.’” You don’t have to be Jeremy Strong to be a method actor! Is this what happened to Mitch McConnell too?
Yellowjacket Melanie Lynskey has already been dubbed a gay icon just for being herself, but if it weren’t for her citizenship status, she could have played one of television’s queerest icons. The Australian Lynskey revealed in a recent interview that she was the first choice to play Willow in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but it became “kind of a visa issue.” A crazy notion in today’s world in which its not uncommon to look up the actors in a show like Under the Banner of Heaven and discover not one of those Utah Mormons was played by an American (except for Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn’s kid, who is a nepo baby NO ONE is talking about). Anyway, in this case, even Lynskey can agree that her loss was everyone’s gain because nobody could have played Willow like Alyson Hannigan.
Subscriber shout out!
Our loyal reader Julia Cramer bravely asked all of her friends to subscribe to Yes, We’re Still Watching and reached the first tier of our referral program (this could be you babes!) so here are her TV recommendations in her own words:
1. The upcoming Bridgerton season for feral girl fall
2. Selling Sunset — the Oppenheimer movie SHOULD have been about the Oppenheimer Realty Group
3. Heartstoppers because y’all all need to be more gay and the trailer for the new season was just released
Succession fav James Cromwell lost to Kevin Spacey for actor in a supporting role this year, too…a sign of bad things to come.
i liked this article :)
Wow you are one warped confused and WRONG woman...