An archaeologist at a museum scolds his small, silent dog, Shep, for supposedly removing a bone belonging to a dinosaur skeleton and orders Shep to bring the bone back, but Shep finds that the place where he buried his most recent bone has been dug up and a bulldog is walking away with the bone in his mouth. Shep chases the bulldog with intent of retrieving the bone, and so begins a battle of wits between Shep and the bulldog in a spacious yard surrounding the bulldog's house. After hoodwinking the dog into trading the bone for a giant plaster bone facsimile loaded with dynamite connected to an ignited fuse, Shep waits for the explosion, then flees the enraged bulldog. He goes back to the museum with the bone in his mouth, but to his dismay, he learns from the archaeologist that the archaeologist had the bone in question in his pocket all the time and that the bone Shep had labored to retrieve had just been an old soup bone, hence making all of Shep's efforts and the bulldog-related obstacles he went through pointless and a complete waste of time.
Notes
The short was re-released into the Blue RibbonMerrie Melodies program on January 21, 1956, though the original titles do exist.[1] The reissue print was copyrighted 1948, while the original titles were copyrighted in 1947. Originally released in Cinecolor, the re-release print is now in 3-hue Technicolor.
As such, the Associated Artists Productions print of the original titles has split cuts and is in very poor condition. One example of this poor condition is a split cut when at the very end, Shep says, "If you think for a moment that this little incident is going to upset me--" then it cuts to him freaking out. The rest of his line, "you're absolutely right", is missing in the original title print. The Blue Ribbon print does not have these split-cuts.[2]
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