Rod Taylor The program faced stiff competition on Wednesday evenings from NBC's "Wagon Train", hence lasted for only one season. He voiced Pongo (a Dalmatian dog) in Disney's animated feature "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" (1961) and also guest-starred on Marilyn Maxwell's short-lived ABC series "Bus Stop" around the same time. In 1962, he starred in an episode of NBC's "The DuPont Show of the Week" ("The Ordeal of Dr. Shannon"), an adaptation of A. J. Cronin's novel "Shannon's Way". Taylor starred in Alfred Hitchcock's horror/thriller "The Birds" (1963), along with Tippi Hedren, Suzanne Pleshette, Veronica Cartwright, and Jessica Tandy, playing a
The Birds (film) as they carefully escort Melanie to the car past a mass of birds nearby. The car slowly makes its way through a landscape in which thousands of birds are ominously perching. Residents in the town of Capitola, California awoke on August 18, 1961 to find sooty shearwaters slamming into their rooftops and their streets covered with dead birds. News reports suggested domoic acid poisoning (amnesic shellfish poisoning) as the cause. According to the local "Santa Cruz Sentinel", Alfred Hitchcock requested news copy in 1961 to use as "research material for his latest thriller". At the end of the same month,