Morgan (Christian Convery) and friend are part of a secret world where pups learn to be a human's best friend in Pup Academy.
Pup Academy (Netflix)
They can do a lot of things with special effects these days, but they still can't make a dog's mouth look normal when it talks. The dog mouths in Pup Academy, the new Netflix series about dogs who go to school, are some of the worst I
think I've ever seen. Truly sickening stuff.
Pup Academy is (or was at some point last week) New Zealand's fourth most-watched thing on Netflix, according to the new feature that tells you what everybody else in the country is watching. This feature is full of fascinating insights into viewer behaviour. It seems, for example, that we would rather just rewatch Happy Gilmore than Adam Sandler's critically-acclaimed new film Uncut Gems, or that putting horrible smooth CGI mouths on otherwise real dogs somehow isn't a total deal breaker.
Made by Air Bud Entertainment, leaders in the dogs-doing-human-things genre, and initially airing on the Disney Channel (shouldn't it be on Disney Plus? I don't know how anything works any more), Pup Academy does have some, shall we say, pedigree. With several very large nods to the Harry Potter franchise, the series follows a trio of unlikely pups invited to join a prestigious school for dogs by a Dumbledorian husky known as the D.O.G. (an academic acronym, it stands for Dean of Graduates).
The Harry, Ron and Hermoine in this case are Whiz, a timid sheepdog who's afraid of sheep, Corazon, a "cool" labrador who sometimes wears a hoodie and Spark, a purebred boxer puppy who is the most well-groomed stray you'll ever see. All are controversial selections for the prestigious dog school but the invitation of a stray in particular raises plenty of eyebrows. "She'll disappoint you," predicts one Snape-like senior dog, "just like the last one."
