Movies with Doxies: TV Wieners and Big Screen Little Dachshunds

6 min readMay 3, 2020

Dachshunds do make important appearances in movies. The following has lists of 10 movies featuring Dachshunds broken up by categories. These are excerpted from Long & Short Lists of Dachshund Fun Facts: Best Cities, Names, Movies & More About Your Wiener Dog (both on Kindle and paperback).

In the opening scenes of the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, a girl is chasing her Dachshund named Betty onto a ski run.

It almost causes a runaway skier to hit the dog, and the girl scolds the “silly little dog.” The skier is soon murdered.

One of the first movies to win the Best Picture Academy Award, Grand Hotel in 1932/1933 features a handsome full-sized black Dachshund owned by a Baron played by John Barrymore.

“Grand Hotel” with John Barrymore and his Dachshie.

The dog is very much coddled by the Baron, who says he would much rather spend time with the dog even with a superb cast that includes Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo who utters her famous line “I want to be alone” in that film.

But it’s the Baron who wants to be alone with his dog, and is caught by the hotel staff snuggling and kissing him.

At the tragic end of the film, the dog is taken away and one of the hotel workers is practically sweeping up the gallant dog, hitting it with a broom and brushing away any memory of the Baron ever being at the Grand Hotel, where nothing ever happens.

Tim Burton’s 2012 interpretation of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein story is with a Dachshund-like character Frankenweenie .The dog is brought back to life after a boy is desperate to bring his dog back to life.

The earliest depiction of a Dachshund in the movies is perhaps the 1913 silent movie The Artist’s Dream, a short that features a cartoonist who draws a Dachshund and when the leaves the room, the animated dog springs to life and tries to eat a plate of sausages.

A mean-spirited movie by Todd Solondz in 2016 caused a protest started by me and my National Dachshund Examiner column because Wiener-Dog seems like a delightful family film in every aspect until the horrific end.

I was really looking forward to this movie, which was a big secret for a long time. There were reports of Danny DeVito walking a Dachshund during filming and people shouting “Hey Danny, cool dog!” Jimmy Fallon even asked on “The Tonight Show,” “Why is Danny DeVito walking a Dachshund with a dress on through the streets of Manhattan?” He got his answer with the film.

The movie was billed as a follow up to director Todd Solondz’s 1995 indie hit “Welcome to the Dollhouse” and brings back the lead character named Dawn Wiener, played by Heather Matarazzo, who returns now as an adult.

She was always teased about her last name and got the nickname “Wiener-Dog” and then she got a real-life wiener dog that she named Little Hope.

The real-life 3-year-old red Doxie truly bonded with the cast that includes Academy Award winners Ellen Burstyn and Brie Larson as well as Kieran Culkin, Zosia Mamet, Tracy Letts, Greta Gerwig and Julie Delpy, who helped co-write the script. All the actors have interactions with the delightful comical and cute dog.

The dog that has been a muse and inspiration for others throughout the movie then runs out of the yard and gets run over by a pack of teen-agers, then run over again and again! The dog’s carcass is scooped up and made into some kind of sick art installation.

Yes, it’s as horrible as it sounds.

Dachshunds Stand-in as Rats

The horror movie “Deadly Eyes” uses Dachshunds as killer rats. The film is about contaminated grain that breeds overgrown rats, and instead of special effects, director Robert Clouse put Doxies in rat suits.

Reviewers say that the use of the dogs are very funny, flopping around with fake rat tails, even though the plot involves the rats eating babies.

However, on a most horrific note, supposedly one of the Dachshunds died on the set due to suffocation possibly because of being trapped in the rat suit.

That is perhaps why the film is hard to find.

Animated Movies

Drawn Dachshunds have worked with Pluto, Goofy, Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor Man, Porky the Pig, Bugs Bunny, Wallace & Gromit, Tom & Jerry and more.

Here are other great animate films featuring Doxies: