"What doesn't hurt you makes you stronger..."
Finally getting a break from all those LEGO blockheads and turning to the world of xenafiction...The heroine of our proposal is still a creature worthy of the praise she gets to this day, however.
What's the work?[]
Space Dogs is a Russian film series starring Belka and Strelka - yes, those two, the first living creatures to orbit the Earth and live. Technically, the frainchise includes two TV series, not just three movies, but they are too inconsistent with each other to plausibly take place in the same continuity, so I'm only proposing Belka's movie version. Oh, yeah, Belka is the main protagonist, of course.
Oh, and one more thing: if you watched the English dub of the films and notice that some things I say don't exactly lone up, it's not me making stuff up — I'm just following the Russian script of the films (the second movie, for example, was so heavily altered in the English dub it might as well be a whole different one), since the only movie I watched in full in English is the first one (watched all three in Russian, though).
Who's the hero? What has she done?[]
Belka used to be a circus dog. She had it all - fame, adoring public, lots of friends, even her own dressing room. If only she could conquer her fear of fire and perform that circus trick...Well, one day the circus director had her perform another trick - flying a rocket. All went well, until Belka hit gas instead of breaks and flew out of the circus. Crashing somewhere within Moscow, she met with a stray dog Strelka and her rat friend Lenny. She didn't start off on good footing with them, even got into a fight with Strelka, but soon after the three had to flee from three other stray dogs. After a few more misadventures, Lenny and Strelka got captured by a dogcatcher, and Belka tried to save them, but got caught as well. All three were put on a train and delivered to...they didn't even know where and why they were brought. All they knew was that the next morning, their commanding officer, a German shepherd named Kazbek, had them and other captured dogs train until they sweat blood. It turned out that they were in the space center, to be used as test subjects for a space flight. Belka hoped going to space will make her so famous, her friends from the circus will know for sure where to search for her, but Kazbek declared he'd make sure she wouldn't go into space. Two of the girls' enemies from the streets, Mulya and Bulya, arriving to the center and sabotaging other cadets, also posed a trouble, but by working together with Strelka and Lenny, Belka managed to pass all challenges and go into space. All went well until Strelka steered Sputnik-5 further into space instead of towards Earth (long story), Kazbek revealed that he stowed away on the spaceship, and then there was a meteor shower and a fire...Belka took command and had others put out the fire, while she jumped through the ring of fire to the control panel and steered the spaceship through the meteor shower, saving everyone. Kazbek then confessed that he didn't hate Belka, and only wanted to protect her, as no other dog ever returned from space before. Well, now they will. Back on Earth, Belka came back to the circus, married Kazbek, and in two or three years, they had a son named Pushok, who was given to JFK by Khrushev as a gift, became familiar with the president's pets and told them his mother's story.
Much time later, Belka lost contact with Kazbek, and some unknown force began to abduct Earth landmarks and other random objects and pull them towards the moon. Strelka's bag and Lenny went missing, and while the girls were searching for the latter, a black Volga pulled up to their location. This turned out to be state security, who took the space dogs to the Plesetsk cosmodrome, where they were interrogated on whether Kazbek, who was on the Moon and believed to have defected to the Americans, was in contact with them. The two escaped, but when Belka learned the authorities were going to send a team to the Moon that would kill Kazbek, she and Strelka stole the space rocket and went there themselves. After a literal space race against the Apollo spaceship piloted by the American chimp Bonnie, a fight with an alien robot who was the true culprit behind the abductions, and reunion with Kazbek, Lenny and Pushok, the heroes discovered that the robot in question was piloted by an alien kid who lost his parents and needed to send a distress signal. The animals joined efforts to help him activate the device, the aliens came, took their child, returned everything he stole back to Earth, and the animals went back home as well.
By the third movie, Belka and Strelka had become deep space explorers. After retrieving valuable samples from Enceladus, they headed back to Earth, where their commander assigned them a new task - go to Cuba and examine a mysterious vortex sucking up all water in the Atlantic Ocean. Belka and Strelka weren't exactly getting along well: the latter's negligience almost jeopardized their early mission several times, and yet the commander made her the head of the new operation, so the girls argued all the way until a freak lightning brought their spaceship down. While Belka was rebuilding it into a submarine, Strelka explored the sea and encountered a gang of pirates, who captures the dogs. Belka tried to convince the pirates to release them and claim reward for having saved them. When it didn't work, she tricked them into revealing their location to their commander. The pirates argued whether they should kill the dogs or hold them for ransom, and when it seemed like they'd do the former, Lenny arrived with his uncle Yasha and new girlfriend Maria, saving his sisters. Too bad the vortex sucked them in, to the bottom and into a strange alien ship. Yes, the alien are behind it. The leader, Croakagy, wants to steal the Atlantic Ocean and use it to replace the water of his home planet, which lost it in an asteroid collision, while his partner Pumbary just wants to keep his flowers safe. Croakagy wasn't cooperative and locked the Earth animals up, but Belka and Strelka convinced Pumbary to free them, promising to solve their grievance with a gift from Enceladus. Belka and Strelka returned to the trash depository, where they had to work together to retrieve the case with samples, but when they brought it to Croakagy...it was empty. Oh, and Maria was actually a thief who held everyone at gunpoint, plotting to steal and sell alien tech off, but accidentally broke the ship's control panel, threatening to sink it. Belka had everyone work together to make the ship surface, which they achieved by ejecting all the stolen water. Before the aliens left, Maria gave them the only surviving sample Belka and Strelka were looking for, which, it turns out, had enough water to save their planet. Nevertheless, the commander was angry at Belka and Strelka for losing the samples and letting the water thieves escape. While Strelka pleaded guilty, Belka insisted that she was also to blame for violating her orders, so the two were punished by being redeployed to a Cuban base, which turned out to be not that harsh of a punishment, to be fair. Too bad that, judging by the ratings and the box office, we'll never get a fourth Space Dogs movie, so the franchise canonically ends with our heroes in prison (or close to it) yet again.
Admirable standards?[]
I'd say Belka passes them with ease. In the first film's climax, she leads Sputnik-5 out of the meteor shower and prevents it from being destroyed, saving the lives of everyone on board (Strelka, Lenny, Kazbek and about a dozen (sapient, but silent) mice, who hid away when the fire started, but something's telling me they would've died without others' help anyway). In the second, she helps an alien reunite with his parents, which also ends his threat to the Earth. And in the third, not only she prevents the Atlantic Ocean from disappearing, which according to Strelka, could mean the end of life on Earth, but helped Croakagy and Pumbary refill their own planet with water, potentially saving billions (or what was the number Croakagy mentioned in his rap?) lives. Yes, it was Maria who handed them the sample, but Belka and Strelka were the ones to come up with the idea.
Corrupting factors?[]
Belka may've started off as spoiled, but even when a circus star is all that she was, arrogance was not one of her vices. Nor did she gain any after her trip to space. What she has trouble doing, however, is keeping her tongue in check so as not to offend others. In the first movie, she was quite a jerk to Strelka, mocking her for believing that her father lived in space, calling her a "mongrel" (or a "flea-ridden cat" in the Russian version. Well, she doesn't seem to have anything against cats otherwise, or else I might've had to add "xenophobia" to the list and it would boot her off), getting into fights with her, though eventually the two got along and began treating each other better. This didn't disappear completely, though, as in the second movie they still start a fight over a petty argument, and later, when the two encounter Kazbek on the Moon and he orders them to give him a former rapport on the incident, Belka gets mad at him for thinking about that while their son is alone, and brandishing a car lever to threaten him with. Sure, her concern for their son is understandable, but the lever thing was uncalled for, domestic abuse is bad either way, remember it. In the third movie, her being mad at Strelka is sometimes justified due to her recklessness creating problems, but not all her jerkish moments are justified. For example, when she discusses the terms of release with the pirates and Strelka jokingly suggests offering them an autograph, she tells her to shut up, and them immediately asks one of the pirates: "Would you care for an autograph?" Later, when Strelka gets stuck in a diving suit and scares her by accident, she calls her a "misfit dog" in anger and never apologizes, despite it not being her friend's fault. So yeah, while she does learn to value her friend more, I hold the belief she doesn't subvert her jerkishness entirely.
Another moment from the first movie involves her refusing to jump through a ring of fire, making the director get angry and chase after her, until the two trigger weights that launch the director through the ring, and it ends with them bowing to the audience while the director's tail is still smoking. I mean, Belka did have a phobia, she gets along with the director otherwise, and it's implied that they do this regularly, so this may all be part of the show, so I'm personally not counting it.
Verdict?[]
Yes.