After thousands of years of wars, pollution, undrinkable water and silly cartoon shows, humans are forced to leave Earth and move everything and everyone to a new planet: New Earth. But not everything goes to plan when the Dogstar, a giant space ark containing all of the world's dogs, becomes lost in space. On New Earth, the evil Bob Santino makes his fortune selling canine replacement units, Robogs, and plots to ensure the Dogstar is never found. But the Clark kids desperately miss their real dog, Hobart, and begin a quest through space to find the Dogstar - with Bob in hot pursuit.
Not to be confused with the rock band which the man, the myth, and the legend was the bassist.
Tropes:
- Absent-Minded Professor: Ramon Ridley. He frequently neglects to put on his trousers before teleporting somewhere.
- Air-Vent Passageway: After Boombah locks the crew of the Valiant in their cabins in "Robbie", Simone has to crawl through the vents to reach the bridge.
- Asteroid Thicket: The Valiant is halted by one in "The Quick and the Dog".
- Big Bad: Bob Santino, the Corrupt Corporate Executive bent on destroying Dogstar, as a plan to replace the normals with Robo-Dogs.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Bob Santino has secretly installed chips in his robogs that allow him to spy on his customers (and take remote control of the robogs if he wants to).
- Bizarchitecture: Bob Santino's private satellite is shaped like a giant Robog.
- Bounty Hunter: Baba Ghanoush
- Bulk Buy Only: In the first episode, Mark Clark unwittingly agrees to move an entire Pacific island to New Earth. This includes a huge amount of bananas. After he damages their sacred statuary in transit, the Islanders pay him with the bananas. This results in the Clark eating nothing but bananas, prepared in increasingly unusual (and disgusting) ways, throughout the episode.
- Captivity Harmonica: Played by one of the Sirrians when Glenn and Lincoln are locked up in the Pound in "The Beagle Has Landed".
- Child Prodigy: Lincoln and Fenwick have IQs of 300.
- Cartoon Dog Breed: Hobart is an ambiguous cartoon dog who's yellow with darker yellow spots, and a single spot over one eye. All the other dogs in the series seem to be specific breeds, making him stand out.
- Companion Cube: Glen's Planet-Man action figure.
- Continuity Nod: In the second season, Simone reveals that she saved the translator collar from the episode "Pedigree" in the first season. Putting it on Boombah is still a bad idea.
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: Gran. Her 'traditional' recipe for hotdogs involves snail glue and tripe.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Bob Santino is the corrupt CEO of SRC (Santino Robotics Corporation).
- Cosmetic Catastrophe: Happens when Gran decides to help Gemma 'look pretty' for the opening of the Dogstar museum in the first episode of series 2. Gemma wastes no time in wiping off the make-up as soon as she is out of sight of Gran.
- Doom It Yourself: In "The Quick and the Dog", Zeke attempts to fix the food synthesizer. It results in him and Alice being drenched in dog food.
- The Dragon: Dana to Bob Santino.
- Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: Happens several times.Gran: He says "You're very brave". Either that or he wants to know the way to the station. It's a tricky language.
- Evil, Inc.: Bob Santino's company SRC (Santino Robotics Corporation) is devoted to the global domination of as many markets as possible. Its actions have included accidentally triggering a planet-wide Robot War, blowing up Pluto as a demonstration, creating a product so pointless that it then attempted to inflict the population of New Earth with a stupidity virus so they would become dumb enough to buy it, and attempting to destroy the ark carrying all of Earth's dogs.
- Gender Equals Breed: Hobart's puppies. The girl puppies look exactly like their mother Lady, while the boy puppy looks exactly like Hobart.
- Gladiator Games: Gladiatorial death matches between enslaved robots are a feature of the Robot Republic visited by the crew of the Valiant.
- Improvised Microgravity Maneuvering: In "Twice the Excitement", Simone is trapped outside and drifting away from the Valiant. Gemma throws a rock that opens the valve on Simone's oxygen tank, propelling her back to the ship.
- I Need to Go Iron My Dog: The children make-up excuses to avoid Gran's terrible cooking in the "Titanium Chef" episode but Glenn can't quite come up with anything.Glenn: I can't think of an excuse but I have to go too.
- Is This Thing Still On?: Happens in "The Quick and the Dog" when Captain Rex of the Beagle calls to thank the crew of the Valiant and then turns to his science officer and tells him it was a good thing that humans never realized that they were the ones who stole all of the dogs from Earth. The science officer then calmly informs him that the comm screen is still on.
- Literal Split Personality: Happens to Gemma in "Twice the Excitement", with one embodying all of Gemma's positive personality traits, and the other all of her negative traits. And neither can throw a rock with the skill that the original Gemma possessed.
- Little Professor Dialog: This is Lincoln's normal way of speaking. He frequently has to dumb it down so the rest of the crew of the Valiant can understand him. Fenwick has a similar role for the bad guys.
- Lizard Folk: The Gavinians, Gemma's native race.
- MacGyvering: This is a specialty of Ramon Ridley. Amongst other things, he once constructed a functioning radio telescope out of an old satellite and a toaster.
- No Waterproofing in the Future: The reason the Dogstar launches early and goes catastrophically off-course is because Hobart pees on a electronic panel and shorts out the ship's entire control system.
- Parasol Parachute: Gran's cyborg arm includes an umbrella which she sometimes uses as a parachute.
- Pants-Free: In "Robot Revolution", Hank the newsreader objects when the servo-bots attempt to remove him from the studio for two reasons: firstly, it's his studio and secondly, he's not wearing any pants. When they physically haul him out from behind the desk, his is indeed not wearing pants.
- Percussive Maintenance: In "The Quick and the Dog", after Zeke's Doom It Yourself attempt to repair the food synthesizer, Alice is able to fix it with a single well-place thump.
- Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: In "Mensamania", Fenwick creates a stupidity virus which Bob Santino unleashes on Mensa, the most intelligent planet in the galaxy as a test run. If it works there, he intends to use it on Earth to make the population stupid enough to buy his latest product.
- The Pig-Pen: Ramon Ridley. A cleaning robot self-destructs after attempting to calculate exactly how much filth he has on him.
- Pluto Is Expendable: Bob Santino blows up Pluto in order to demonstrate the power of the Santino Laser Cannon. He then offers to blow up Mars so the sound will reach Earth sooner but is stopped from doing so by Fenwick.
- Projectile Toast: In "Father's Day", Ramon Ridley builds a radio telescope out of an old satellite and a toaster. He comments that it still makes an excellent toasted muffin and to prove it, fires a muffin that hits Glenn in the face.
- Red Wire Blue Wire: In "The Greening of Gavin", Lincoln instructs Fenwick on how to disarm the Tesla cannon and tells her to cut the red wire. Fenwick then points out that both wires are red and asks what idiot would do that. Lincoln looks embarrassed.
- Rival Science Teams: Lincoln Clark vs. Fenwick.
- Robot Republic: The crew of the Valiant visit a planet where the robots had overthrown the human government and exiled (or executed) all humans.
- Robots Enslaving Robots: In the aforementioned Robot Republic, the robots had thrown off their human overlords, only to establish a new hierarchy with the nobles free and all other robots slaves (including gladiatorial death matches).
- Rock Beats Laser: Gemma is an expert with thrown rocks (as are most of her race). In "Persuasion", she destroys an entire space station with a single, well-thrown rock.
- Scale Model Destruction: One of Bob Santino's evil plots is to replicate the Dogstar from the original builders plans and destroy it in deep space, causing the protagonists to believe they had found the lost ship for nothing, and cease looking. He demonstrates this to his son Dino with a model, confusing him no end by destroying it.
- Shout-Out:
- One episode is named Relative Dimensions in Space. Yes, it involves time travel.
- Another is named "Reach Out and Touch Somebody's Paws", referencing the chorus of a popular Australian rock song
. - In "Puppy Love" the family encounters two guys named Jason and Donovan.
- Side Effects Include...: One of the Robog ads concludes with "Not suitable for children or other idiots".
- Son of an Ape: The Sirrians always refer to humans as "hairless monkeys", and have great trouble telling humans apart.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: Fenwick keeps doing this to Bob Santino.
- Stern Chase: The Clarks are chasing the Dogstar, and Bob Santino is chasing the Clarks.
- Subliminal Advertising: In "Persuasion", Bob Santino plants subliminal messages in his robog ads to cause people to regard the Dogstar as a threat and try to destroy it.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: The Primes attempt to flush Alice and Zeke out of an airlock in "Titanium Chef". Their plan backfires and they end up being cast into space instead.
- Too Dumb to Live: Zeke, a malfunctioning robot who thinks he is a human, often strays into this territory. In "Rockin' in the Flea World", he chooses to ignore an alarm telling him that the Dogstar is flying into a black hole on the grounds that machines sometimes make mistakes.
- Torches and Pitchforks: Carried by the angry mob when they storm the television studio in an attempt to lynch Ramon Ridley. Especially odd as it is set in a futuristic mega-city and they have no reason to have either flaming torches or pitchforks.
- Translator Collar: In "Pedigree", Lincoln Clark creates a 'voice-box' for dog-scent sniffer-cat Boombah. They quickly discover that Boombah has nothing interesting to say, and that Simone has been lying about being able to talk to the cat.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: In "Rockin' in the Flea World", the Dogstar is nearly sucked into a black hole. It is depicted as a giant black sphere hanging in space.
- Urine Trouble: The reason the Dogstar launches early and goes catastrophically off-course is beacuse Hobart pees on a electronic panel as he is boarding the ship, shorting out the ship's entire control system.
- Vehicle Title: The series is named after the space ark containing all of the Earth's dogs.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Bob Santino
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Dino
- Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: After the ad for servo-bots airs in "Robot Revolution", Simone says "What kind of idiot would buy something like that from a crook like Bob Santino?". The scene then cuts to her father arriving home to announce he's bought two.
