Air Bud

Buddy was a real dog with a real act. Kevin DiCicco found him as a stray in the Sierra Nevada in the summer of 1989, took him home to San Diego and trained him in basketball, baseball, football, soccer and hockey. The basketball trick — bouncing a ball off his muzzle and into a hoop — got him onto America's Funniest Home Videos in 1992, three David Letterman appearances, and an episode of Full House as Comet. DiCicco pitched Keystone Entertainment on a movie in 1991. He reportedly wanted to call the film Buddy, but a movie with that title had come out two months earlier.

Directed by Charles Martin Smith and written by Paul Tamasy and Aaron Mendelsohn, Air Bud follows twelve-year-old Josh Framm, who moves to Fernfield, Washington, after his father's death and befriends a retriever that has escaped from an abusive clown named Norman Snively. A retired pro turned school custodian, Arthur Chaney, ends up coaching the team, and when an injury leaves the state final with four players, the officials find no rule that keeps a dog off the court. Miramax held the rights first, but it went out as a Walt Disney Pictures release on August 1, 1997, opened seventh with $4.7 million, and finished with $29 million on a $3 million budget.

Buddy never made another film. He began limping in December 1996, near the end of shooting, and in 1997 his right hind leg was amputated after a cancer diagnosis. He died in his sleep on February 10, 1998, at his owner's home, aged nine. By that April DiCicco and Keystone's Robert Vince had fallen out, and the sequel Air Bud: Golden Receiver went ahead without him; DiCicco said he had never been paid for the first film.

Golden Receiver got a theatrical release in 1998 and flopped, so everything after it went straight to video: World Pup in 2000, Seventh Inning Fetch in 2002, Spikes Back in 2003. Then came Air Buddies in 2006, a spin-off about Buddy's talking puppies that grew into its own series. All told the franchise runs to fourteen films, and by March 2014 the franchise's first twelve titles had grossed $220 million, second only to Disney Fairies among direct-to-DVD lines. A new theatrical Air Bud Returns is dated for 2027.