All Dogs Go to Heaven
Don Bluth's tale of a scoundrel dog who cons his way out of heaven and back to the streets, voiced by Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. It got flattened at the box office by opening the same day as The Little Mermaid — then found its real life on VHS, playing in living rooms all through the '90s.
All Dogs Go to Heaven was released November 17, 1989, directed by animation legend Don Bluth: Charlie B. Barkin (Burt Reynolds), a con-artist German Shepherd murdered by a rival, sneaks back out of heaven for revenge and slowly finds his conscience through an orphan girl who can talk to animals. Dom DeLuise voiced his sidekick Itchy — the two were old friends who insisted on recording their parts together, and Bluth said their ad-libs often beat the script.
It had the worst possible release date: it opened the very same day as Disney's The Little Mermaid and got steamrolled, taking only about $27 million in North America. But like a lot of Bluth's work, it became a sleeper on home video — one of the top-selling VHS releases of all time, moving over three million copies in its first month — and that's where the '90s kids who love it actually met it, on a worn tape watched on repeat. A theatrical sequel followed in 1996, along with a 1996–1998 TV series.
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