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Show Notes
Amy Hobby and Anne Hubbell revisit Poodle Power, their decade-long quest to make an animated film about the real Alaskan poodles who ran the Iditarod.
Joined by animator Kent Osborne, they unpack the original deck, wild development history, brutal notes, and the strange optimism of resurrecting it with AI.
Show Transcript
Films Not Made
Episode 2: Poodle Power
Amy: Welcome to Films Not Made, where producers, writers and directors pull old, never-made projects out of the closet, and we attempt to resurrect them using some very questionable AI.
Avi: I'm Avi Zev Weider.
Amy: And I'm Amy Hobby. Today we're diving into a project that Anne Hubbell and I spent almost a decade to get made. It's an animated film about a team of standard poodles that run the Iditarod in Alaska.
Avi Weider: Also joining us is my really good friend, Kent Osborne, a longtime animator and director with credits including SpongeBob and Adventure Time.
Amy Hobby: Welcome to Films Not Made. Let's talk about Poodle Power.
Anne Hubbell: We learned about John Suter, who ran poodles in the Iditarod, and eventually optioned rights around his story.
Amy Hobby: We first explored live action, then pivoted to animation because of scale, weather, and production reality.
Avi Weider: We looked back at the original deck, years of emails, and development materials, then fed everything through an AI pipeline to create a new deck and trailer.
Kent Osborne: The old materials felt more personal. The AI outputs were interesting as experiment, but often generic.
Amy Hobby: Even after all the false starts, I still think the core idea is strong: poodles running the Iditarod as a big outsider story.
Avi Weider: You've been listening to Films Not Made. Check out YouTube for visuals, subscribe on Substack, and follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
Note: This on-page transcript is a cleaned, condensed version based on the full production transcript provided for Episode 2.