Dug Days arrived on Disney+ on September 1, 2021, five episodes long, and it belongs to a very specific tradition at Pixar: the spin-off that refuses to overstay its welcome. Bob Peterson created, wrote and directed the series, and he also voices Dug, the Golden Retriever who stole Up in 2009. Ed Asner returns as Carl Fredricksen, the 78-year-old owner who moved the pair to a new house in the suburbs after selling the Spirit of Adventure dirigible to pay for it. All five episodes premiered the same day.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Ed Asner’s Last Performance
Asner died on August 29, 2021, three days before Dug Days premiered. That makes the series his first posthumous release, and it is dedicated to his memory. He recorded at least one session in person a month before COVID-19 lockdowns pushed the rest of the cast to remote work, according to Collins. The performance carries no visible strain of that arrangement. Carl is still the same wary, soft-hearted man from the film, and Asner plays him without reaching for sentiment.
Peterson reprises Dug with the same earnest interior monologue that made the character work in Up. The shorts set everyday backyard events through Dug’s slightly distorted eyes, and the humor comes from the gap between what Dug understands and what is actually happening.
What the Shorts Do
The premise is deliberately small. Dug and Carl live in a house and a neighborhood, and the series stays there. No adventure, no airship, no South America. Each short takes one ordinary event and lets Dug misread it.
That restraint is the point. The series was announced in December 2020 at Disney’s Investor Day, and Peterson pitched it after his work on Forky Asks a Question. The animators built new rigging, textures and hair to update character designs that had aged since 2009, and most of the final animation work was finished from the crew’s homes during the pandemic.
One production note deserves attention: unused archive recordings of Jordan Nagai as Russell appear in the episode “Science,” because Nagai had retired from acting before development began.
| Element | Dug Days | Up (2009) |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Five episodes | Feature film |
| Setting | Suburban house and neighborhood | Paradise Falls |
| Dug’s role | Lead | Supporting |
| Carl’s arc | Everyday domestic life | Grief and moving on |
The Sixth Episode
Dug Days did not end on Disney+. Carl’s Date, the sixth and final episode, premiered in theaters as a short attached to Pixar’s Elemental on June 16, 2023. That is an unusual path for a streaming series, and it says something about how Pixar regards this material.
The shorts drew generally positive reviews for voice work, messages, role models, humor and emotional depth. The audience score sits at 7.4 out of 10 across 546 votes on TMDB.
Here is the order that matters most:
- Ed Asner’s performance — the reason to watch
- Peterson’s writing and direction — consistent, never padded
- The animation updates — necessary, not showy
- The suburban premise — the limit of the whole project
Dug Days is a small thing done well, and its real value is Asner. A series built on a talking dog could coast on cuteness; this one gives its human a proper send-off instead. The five episodes are slight, and the format never builds to anything larger. But Asner’s Carl is the emotional center, and the decision to keep the scale domestic is what makes the final performance land. Worth watching for him.
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