Air Bud's Title Came About Because A Gorilla Movie Had Used The Director's First Choice

It's a little wild how successful the "Air Bud" film franchise has been. The premise of the original 1997 movie was relatively simple: a despondent 12-year-old boy named Josh (Kevin Zegers) moves to a small Washington town with his mother after the recent death of his father. THere, he makes friends with a passing golden retriever named Buddy. Josh soon finds that Buddy has been trained to bonk a basketball off his nose and into a basket. Fast-forward through a convoluted plot, and "Air Bud" climaxes with Buddy joining Josh's school basketball team for an important championship game. As a referee points out — reciting one of the single best lines in cinema history — there ain't no rule says a dog can't play basketball.

That simple idea, that a dog can play basketball, fueled a property that lasts to this day. In "Air Bud: Golden Receiver," Buddy plays football. In "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch," it's baseball. In "Air Bud Spikes Back," it's volleyball. And that's nothing to speak of the multi-film "Air Buddies" series, which features Buddy's many puppies, or the upcoming legacy sequel "Air Bud Returns." It's worth noting that the original movie's title, "Air Bud," was derived from Nike's popular shoe brand Air Jordans, itself named after Michael Jordan (as chronicled in the movie "Air"). The title only makes sense in the context of basketball, but the follow-ups have kept the name anyway.

Indeed, "Air Bud" director Charles Martin Smith ("Never Cry Wolf," "Dolphin Tale") once declared that he never really liked the "Air Bud" title. In a 2017 interview with Newsweek, Smith said that he wanted the film to simply be called "Buddy," after the dog. Sadly, he wasn't able to use the title because a 1997 movie about a gorilla had already taken it.

Smith talked about the trials and foibles of making a movie like "Air Bud," and how startled he was by the film's unexpected popularity. "Air Bud" was a low-budget film that cost a modest $3 million to make, yet it grossed many times that at the box office and entrenched itself in the mind of a very specific generation. But while Smith was happy to learn that people born in the late 1980s were still magnetically drawn to the picture, he still felt the title sucked, stating:

"You know, I never really liked the title 'Air Bud.' I always thought that sounded a little less elegant than the movie I was trying to make. I was saying we should call the movie 'Buddy,' because that was the dog's name. But there had just been a movie called 'Buddy' with a chimpanzee or something."

The film Smith is alluding to, "Buddy," was released in June 1997, only two months before "Air Bud" arrived, and it was actually about a gorilla, not a chimpanzee. "Buddy" was based on "Animals Are My Hobby," a memoir written by the wealthy socialite Gertrude "Trudy" Lintz. The real-life Lintz kept a zoo's worth of animals at her home in Brooklyn, including a gorilla she named Buddy. The movie starred Renee Russo as Lintz, and the gorilla effects were provided by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. No one really remembers "Buddy" because, frankly, it's not good. This is also why the film bombed at the box office.

Then again, "Air Bud" is a far more memorable title than "Buddy." So, even if Smith didn't (and still doesn't) like the title, it may have benefitted his film in the long run.