Kids love animals. That’s a fact. How many kids wish for kittens and puppies on Christmas and birthdays? Even a show about ill-tempered beavers did well in the mid 90s (foreshadowing?). “CatDog” tapped into that market with a lovely little show about a cat and a dog living together. Adorable isn’t it? You want to know where they messed it up?
They smashed them together and created some kind of weird mutant! Pair a neurotic cat with a dumb dog and you have at least 5 quality seasons coming. When you sandwich them together you get 3 seasons and a lot of unanswered questions. How do they produce waste? How were they born? Were they even born? Why does that weird blue thing live with them? Who built there really sweet house? So many questions that I don’t recall being answered and the internet certainly seems to echo that sentiment.
Now if anyone other than PETA cared about animal violence or weird experiments, this show may have had an issue. Instead we just got stereotypical animals. Now that’s assuming that traits assigned through imagery situations can be construed as stereotypical and that the ramifications of such would result in adversity. Was that last sentence to verbose? I’m talking about a kid’s show right?
Ignore me. LOOK HOW CUTE!
Cat is a refined being. He refuses to eat mice as he’s supposed to and believes himself to be an intellectual. He likes to read and is generally disappointed with those around him. Sounds like another animal that America is more familiar with?
Who's characters do you have to steal to get a hit show around here?
That answer is Matt Groening.
Dog on the other hand is what everyone imagines when they wish their dogs could talk. I’d imagine the Great Dane in my life would be just like Dog. Did I mention their names are just Dog and Cat? All the other animals have real names. The other dogs call him Dog. It’s confounding. But he is just a dumb eating machine that is pretty much always happy. He speaks like a little kid with a slight mental deficiency but has heart of gold. That’s cartoon world. Smart is bad and stupid is good. Right SpongeBob? Tom Kenny really has his niche.
Cat and Dog would likely live in harmony despite their differences if left to their own devices. Sadly some weird little blue rodent named Winslow lives with them. He’s a lot like the fat couple from “Yes, Dear”. They don’t contribute anything, sponge off of their friends and acted entitled the entire time. He sounds like he’s from Brooklyn but now lives Nearburg. He has expressed concern that Cat might eat him. If I lived with someone 10 times my size who might eat me, I wouldn’t try to ruin most o his days. Not a wise move.
Dick
Like most Nick Toons, “CatDog” ran a lot longer than I thought it did. They lasted well into my teens ending their run in 2005. Granted season four had 7 episodes and started in 2001, so that run is a little misleading.
Cat and Winslow are kind of antagonistic, but this cartoon has a real villain trio. They are the Greaser Dogs and they live to pound on Cat. They’ll take a swing at Dog too, but they of course hate Cat the most. They bullied a lot of people, but their xenophobia leads them to attacking CatDog more often than not. Here’s an artist rendering of the criminals:
Get it? Of course it's an artist rendering. They are cartoons
There is of course a whole host of side characters. We’ve got anthropomorphic dogs, cats, rabbits and more cats. Rancid Rabbit lives to harass CatDog as well, but since he’s voiced by Billy West he gets a pass.
#snappydresser
Eddie the Squirrel is another antagonist that holds little weight. He wants to be a Greaser but since he’s a stupid squirrel he can’t. There is also a pig and weasel that Wikipedia claims were CatDog’s best friends, but I don’t EVER remember them existing. Google confirms that they’re real, but I couldn’t even begin to fathom what they looked like. (No, I’m not putting a picture)
“CatDog” ended like a lot of once popular Nick Toons do. They start on a somewhat steady schedule. Once they get popular they over produce and drive it into the ground. They then start to advertise specials, a few episodes come out here and there, then eventually let the show crawl to an end. What an apropos way the end considering our protagonists have paws.
