THE SECRET FILES OF THE SPY DOGS

Ralph and Mitzy are agents of SpyDog.

In the introduction to these adventures, we see a man and a dog out in the backyard playing fetch as we hear the narrator begin, "Behold the dog! We know him as man's best friend but ... what do we really know". The man receives a pager summons and hurries away, leaving the canine to stand up on his hind legs and seeing a medallion on his collar glowing, races to his doghouse which converts to an elevator taking him deep below ground to an impressive headquarters where monitors display events around the world and even just outside the planet. "In truth, all dogs belong to a secret organization dedicated to keeping mankind safe from really bad stuff." At this point we see images of fiendish and menacing felines, including one particularly sinister figure in the shadows, holding a pet rat. "These are their amazing true stories. These are the secret files of the Spydogs" Note the lack of space in that final word. Is that the name of the organization? I'm guessing so but then again, I'm a human and we are not supposed to know these things.

Okay, so SpyDog is run by Dog Zero, an unseen and only heard director who is in charge of all the operations by his spy dog operatives against all the nasties out there that can threatened the humans that the dogs protect. Leading this band of ne'er-do-wells, and the main nasty that we see confronted on just about every adventure, is the dastardly (can never use that word enough these days!) Catastrophe. This creature with the metal tail because he lost his real one years before is always trying to take over the world but SpyDogs is out to stop him and his minions.

The two agents mentioned at the beginning of this discourse are Ralph and Mitzy, both of whom are Americans.

Ralph is considered to be the best agent in the organization and is the one who most regularly goes up against Catastrophe. He appears to be a mix between a Labrador Retriever and a Dalmatian. He nominally belonging to the human known as Gordon.

Mitzy, his frequent partner in most of the adventures, is a Yorkshire Terrier who is quite adept at the martial arts, as those cat thugs are regularly finding to their pain.

Of course there are a bunch of other agents for SpyDogs what we will meet coming and going but for the most part, it is Ralph and Mitzy that routinely save the day.

This series of half-hour-ish animated spy adventures is designed for young kids and therefore not supposed to be logical or sensible and therefore is neither but since it lasted for two seasons of roughly 11 double episodes each, someone somewhere liked it. I never watched it when it was on because I did not know about it until long after it was no longer on television.

I cannot say I liked it - but since I am a lot older than the target audience, who cares.

The writing was pretty impressive for such a young audience in that there was enough to entertain younger adults as well. A ton of characters pulling off lots of tropes.