12 Insane Early Movie Roles By MCU Actors

In the years before he became the headline star of the MCU, Robert Downey Jr. had a pretty varied career. He had his ups and downs and blockbusters and oddities. He scored an Oscar nomination for blacking up even though it was 2008. He did nothing as weird, though, as his debut movie when he was five years old back in 1970.

In Pound, an avant-garde oddity written and directed by Robert Downey Senior, a group of abandoned animals wait to be euthanised in a New York dog pound while a serial murderer known as The Honkey Killer terrorizes the city.

An existential, allegorical comedy adapted from an experimental off-Broadway play, Downey's film has all the animals (amongst the dogs, there's also a tuxedo-clad penguin for some reason) just played by human actors. So the hyperactive "hairless Mexican" dog is just a bald guy in a poncho.

A deeply surreal affair, the human-dog characters swing between eloquently lamenting their probable fate and growling, dry humping, butt-sniffing dog behaviour. Meanwhile, their caged existence is occasionally broken by trippy reveries of life outside.

The director's son and future Tony Stark plays a cute puppy who gets adopted when the pound is robbed and the thieves are told that the pound has no money, only dogs. "They're all gonna die," he says sweetly of his companions as he leaves, one of only two lines he gets in the film.

The film was a box office failure with investors hoping that they might have got something "Disney-esque" struggling to comprehend how they ended up with what amounts to a canine Waiting For Godot instead.

Nobody would have imagined either that the kid asking the hairless Mexican "have any hair on your balls?" would one day command a $75 million fee for a single movie, but such is the power of Marvel.