When it comes to animal acts, Lorne Michaels is more closely associated with Toonces the Driving Cat, but in the early ’90s, the Saturday Night Live creator took on a very different kind of pet project: the heroic collie Lassie.
Buried deep in Michaels’ filmography is an unexpected departure from sketch comedy: the 1994 family adventure Lassie, a dramatic reboot of the 1940s canine classic.
His association with the franchise began in 1991, when Broadway Video acquired Palladium Entertainment, a bankrupt British company that owned the rights to Lassie, The Lone Ranger, and other legacy IPs.
As Susan Morrison recounts in her biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, the purchase marked a new direction for Michaels. Broadway Video had recently brought in entertainment executive Eric Ellenbogen to restructure its finances, and Michaels gave him “enormous freedom to pursue business opportunities.”
Michaels, having left SNL from 1980–85 without owning the rights to the show, had learned firsthand the value of copyright control—and wanted more of it. Alongside Lassie, Broadway Video’s new portfolio included Felix the Cat and the pre-1974 library of Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials.
“These kiddie properties provoked a lot of tittering around Broadway Video,” Morrison writes, “but they appealed to Michaels’s ‘television generation’ mindset.”
By 1993, Michaels was ready to revive Lassie for a new generation. Teaming with Paramount Pictures—his studio partner at the time—he announced a new film that aimed to breathe life into a dormant franchise. (The last feature had been 1978’s The Magic of Lassie, and a recent TV effort, The New Lassie, lasted just two seasons.)
Lassie director Daniel Petrie told the Allentown Morning Call that Paramount Pictures head Stanley R. Jaffe was out to dinner with Michaels, and had perked up at Michaels’ mention of the dog franchise.
Until that point, Michaels’ film resume was tightly linked to SNL—including spin-offs like Wayne’s World and Coneheads and other projects featuring former cast members. So a sentimental dog movie raised eyebrows. “It will be warm,” he promised, though curiously, his name doesn’t appear in the film’s credits—just “Broadway Video.”
And it was warm. The movie followed a family’s move from Baltimore to rural Virginia and the stray dog who saves their son’s life—earning her a place in their hearts. Tom Guiry, fresh off The Sandlot, played the boy, Matt.
“I think the picture deals with the myth and acknowledges the old television series and the old movies,” Michaels said in a PBS documentary about the franchise, “and tries to find what there is in a contemporary setting that’s relevant about that.”
He also offered a vintage showbiz aside: “In a film history sense, Lassie is an MGM dog. I’m not even sure Lassie bit,” he said. “Rin-Tin-Tin, which was Warner’s dog, I think bit.”
The film did modest but respectable business, grossing around $10 million on a reported $5 million budget. Critics were kind—it currently holds an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.
But the real payoff came later. In 1996, Michaels’ Broadway Video sold its entire family catalog—including Lassie—to Golden Books for a reported $91 million. Morrison calls the sale a “colossal windfall,” even compared to the booming success of SNL.
Lassie is currently streaming on Artiflix, a niche service devoted to the “world of forgotten cinematic treasures.”
