Paramount to mine the unexplored comedy riches of YouTube's "Ultimate Dog Tease" video

By Sean O'Neal | February 14, 2012 | 7:31pm

Aux Features Film

Paramount to mine the unexplored comedy riches of YouTube's "Ultimate Dog Tease" video

Combining Hollywood’s loves of the zeitgeist, talking animals, and jokes that don’t require a bunch of college-boy explanations, Paramount is developing a feature film based on the YouTube hit “Ultimate Dog Tease,” according to Variety, which is already calling the prospective comedy a “canine romp.” Not that there’s much “romping” in the actual video: As you can see below, “Dog Tease” is just over a minute of an off-camera man taunting a Dutch Shepherd mix with all the delicious meat he found in the refrigerator, while an overdubbed voice conveys the dog’s dismay upon discovering that he won’t get to eat it. “But then what happens?” asked America, who would also no doubt like to know more about the dog’s origins and its owner, the location of this refrigerator, and its clearly friction-filled relationship with this as-yet-unseen cat.

Fortunately, that back-story will soon be teased out by former Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm (and Eurotrip) writers Alec Berg and David Mandel, who have surely spent the last few days staring with increasing self-doubt at the below video while sitting in the offices at Paramount’s low-budget label Insurge, which most recently produced the surprise, in-spite-of-itself hit The Devil Inside. And while (like Berg and Mandel are hopefully doing) some may question the wisdom of attempting to pad out a one-joke, minute-long video into a feature film, consider that “Ultimate Dog Tease” has already racked up over 94 million pageviews, so 94 million x average $8 ticket price = a bajillion dollars, approximately.