Ruffus the Dog

Ruffus the Dog
Genre	Children's television series
Created by	Robert Mills and Cheryl Wagner
Directed by	Robert Mills
Starring	Robert Mills Bob Stutt Gord Robertson Fred Stinson Karen Valleau Ben Deutsch
Composer	JP Houston
Country of origin	Canada
Original language	English
Production
Executive producers	Robert Mills John Leitch
Producers	Cheryl Wagner Robert Mills
Editor	Frank Moressa
Camera setup	Multi-camera
Production companies	Radical Sheep Productions Hunkey Dorey Entertainment YTV
Original release
Network	YTV
Release	1998 (1998) – 1999 (1999)

Ruffus the Dog is a Canadian children's television series which aired on YTV from 1998 to 1999; it was created by Robert Mills, who performs the title character, and developed with Cheryl Wagner. The show was produced through Radical Sheep Productions, a company founded by Mills in 1985 that also created The Big Comfy Couch. The Ruffus character had previously appeared in the educational video series The Adventures of Ruffus & Andy in the early 1990s, as produced by the Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ontario, where Ruffus and his owner Andy learned medical lessons.

When Robert Mills left Radical Sheep in 2002, ownership and rights to the award-winning series were transferred to his new company, Hunky Dorey Entertainment. In 2010 Mills announced all of the original shows would be posted online under a Creative Commons license, and that they want to produce new episodes for online release. The first major production was a re-telling of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol with Ruffus playing Ebenezer Scrooge. Six of the show's original puppeteers, Robert Mills, Bob Stutt, Gord Robertson, Fred Stinson, Karen Valleau, and Ben Deutsch, returned for the project, as did songwriter JP Houston. Alyson Court, who played Loonette the Clown on The Big Comfy Couch, voiced the Ghost of Christmas Past.

In 2013, the Ruffus Project embarked on production of a new web series entitled: Ruffus The Dog's Steampunk Adventure.

Also in the works were a series of illustrated book titles and a pre-school web series entitled: Ruffus Rhymes.

Ruffus the Dog runs a bookshop in a small town. There, he reads a famous fairy tale to the viewers. In the story, Ruffus and several other characters portray different characters in the tale. At the end, he talks about the moral of the story to the viewers.

• Ruffus the Dog at IMDb
• Ruffus the Dog
• Ruffus The Dog's Steampunk Adventure website at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-03-04)
• Case Study of the series by Creative Commons
• Ruffus the Dog is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive