Greyfriars Bobby - Books and Films

Books and Films

• The book Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, which greatly embellished the story, and made John Gray a shepherd, known as "Auld Jock". The 1961 Walt Disney film Greyfriars Bobby: The True Story of a Dog was based on this book.
• The Illustrated True Story of Greyfriars Bobby by John Mackay.
• The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby, Another film, was released in the UK in February 2006 starring Oliver Golding and Christopher Lee (released elsewhere in 2005 under the alternative title Greyfriars Bobby). The Edinburgh Castle scenes in this film were actually shot at Stirling Castle, whilst many had reservations on casting a West Highland White Terrier as Bobby, and for adding new characters while leaving out one of the later major characters in Bobby's life, John Traill.
• Challenge to Lassie (1949), an earlier film based on Atkinson's book, but replacing Bobby with Lassie.
• In the 1945 film The Body Snatcher, Boris Karloff's character (incidentally named Gray) digs up bodies from graves. One of these bodies is that of John Gray. Bobby tries to stop him from taking the corpse, but is struck over the head by Boris Karloff's character, and killed.
• In the PBS kids' series, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, Patty Larceny put a collar on the statue of Bobby and walked him away in the Season 3 episode Little Dog Gone.
• Scottish-Canadian Celtic-Punk band The Real McKenzies wrote a song as a tribute named "The Ballad of Greyfriars Bobby" that appeared on their 2008 album, Off the Leash.
• There is an anachronistic reference to the character in the 2010 British black comedy Burke and Hare.
• In "Jurassic Bark", the seventh episode of the fourth season of animated comedy Futurama, Seymour - the adopted dog of Philip Fry, a man accidentally cryogenically frozen and revived in the far future - is revealed to have waited for the remaining years of his life outside the pizza delivery restaurant where Fry worked, vainly awaiting his master's return. It is considered an unusually emotional episode for the series and animated sitcoms in general.