How Rin Tin Tin Got His Name & More…96th Anniversary & Video

If you are like me, you’ve always wondered where this great dog actor got his odd name. After I tell you about the name, we’ll look at some of the history and a full episode of the TV show, but now…let’s go to Lorraine, France. The year is 1918 and these are the last few months of World War I.

An American soldier named Leland Duncan was stationed in the Meuse Valley and had been ordered to search a bombed-out German encampment. Inside one of the ruined buildings, Duncan found a German Shepherd cowering with her two pups, which were only a few days old. He named the pups Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after little yarn puppets that the French children played with. They gave these puppets to American soldiers as good luck charms.

In the photos below, we see Corporal Duncan with Rin Tin Tin as a pup on their return to the states and a postcard with Rin Tin Tin and Natalie. The puppets were actually characters from a French children’s book that came out before the war.

Nanette died shortly before Duncan made it home to Los Angeles, but Rinty, as Duncan called him, became a beloved pet.

After the war, Duncan began entering Rin Tin Tin in local dog shows. At one show, an inventor wanted to try out his new slow-motion movie camera, so he filmed the dog scaling a 12 foot wall. It struck Duncan that maybe he had a future movie star on his hands, so he wrote a silent movie script featuring the dog and shopped it around at various studios.

He was turned down by all of them. Then one day he was out walking with Rin Tin Tin when he came upon a film crew trying to shoot a scene with a wolf hybrid. The wolf wasn’t cooperating, so Duncan suggested that he and his dog could do the scene in one take. He was true to his word, and Rin Tin Tin had his first big break. He later signed a deal with Warner Brothers, and the dog had his first starring role in ‘Where the North Begins’ in 1923.

In addition to 26 feature films, Rin Tin Tin starred in a radio program, ‘The Wonder Dog’, in 1930, in which he did his own barking and other sound effects. The original Rinty died in 1932, and his son, Rin Tin Tin Jr., took over the role in his place. The immense profitability of his films helped make Warner Brothers Studios a success and advanced the career of Darryl F. Zanuck. In 1929, Rin Tin Tin may have received the most votes for the first Academy Award for Best Actor, but the Academy determined that a human should win and never released the vote totals.

In 1954, ‘The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin’ came to television. The show ran for five seasons on ABC on Friday evenings from October 1954 to May 1959. ABC reran the series on late afternoons from September 1959 to September 1961 and that’s where I remember watching this. How about you?

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