Just saying.
Society really expects a lot from cartoon animals. I mean, look at Pinky and the Brain, the lab mice. Pinky’s portrayed as an idiot — but in a universe where animals don’t talk, he can talk. He’s no Brain, granted, but this is pretty damn impressive.
Even Algernon never talked.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think this also plays on the saying, ‘One-trick pony’. At least that was my take on it this a.m. when I first saw it.
I’m sure “one trick pony” was intended as part of the joke. but I think it just overloads it and distracts from the actual punch line.
This is where the @#$% Squirrel would actually serve a purpose.
Silly me – I thought that WAS the punch line. But then, I’ve not seen this ruh roh character, so I must be missing something.
Scooby-Doo.
I never did see the appeal, honestly.
Scooby-Doo is not looking to retire, so another dog doing a Scooby-Doo impression isn’t much use. Now, a dune buggy or a shark…that’s got potential!
(nb: I am aware that Speed Buggy and Jabberjaw had different vocal quirks than Scooby…they’re still Scooby impersonators.)
I think this can be seen two ways both of which actually do work.
1) Training a dog to say “Ruh Roh” on command is okay for for house guest but not really that spectacular for show business. They are sounds dogs naturally make (that’s way Scooby Doo *does* say it– never mind the genius that must occur for a dog to evaluate a situation and attempt to express his thoughts in english language but with dog muscles) so this is nothing more or less than a dog being taught to “speak”.
(I guess perhaps you were assuming that Rex wasn’t merely saying “Ruh Roh” a bunch of times, but was also saying “Rhah Rhrong, Rhaggy? Ru rhookh ra rirrahl rae ruuray.” and doing so in direct response to questions. Which brings me to interpretation 2)
2) This could be a joke on how impossibly picky talent agents can be. “So you made the jack of spades jump out of a brand new deck of cards with the seal not yet broken and spit cider in my ear. That’s pretty good but can you do it with orange juice and what else you got?”.
BTW, I don’t think “one-trick pony” is part of the joke.
Kamino Neko, he can probably find work as a Scooby-Doo impersonator.
After all, people are paying a lot of money to see this:
Woozy, Sky Masterson approves.
He can ALSO do Astro from “The Jetsons”.
“Pinky’s portrayed as an idiot — but in a universe where animals don’t talk, he can talk.”
You need to look at Animaniacs again. It has all sorts of talking animals… Slappy Squirrel, Minerva Mink, and the GoodFeathers all talk throughout their . The Hip Hippos talk, with foreign accents. Rita and Runt both talk, although Runt doesn’t do so impressively.
“Even Algernon never talked.”
Charly spoke for him, and rather well.
8 & Brown!
AKA
A guy has a talking dog. He brings it to a talent scout. “This dog can speak English,” he claims to the unimpressed agent. “Okay, Sport,” the guys says to the dog, “what’s on the top of a house?” “Roof!” the dog replies. “Oh, come on…” the talent agent responds. “All dogs go ‘roof’.” “No, wait,” the guy says. He asks the dog “what does sandpaper feel like?” “Rough!” the dog answers. The talent agent gives a condescending blank stare. He is losing his patience. “No, hang on,” the guy says. “This one will amaze you. ” He turns and asks the dog: “Who, in your opinion, was the greatest baseball player of all time?” “Ruth!” goes the dog. And the talent scout, having seen enough, boots them out of his office onto the street. And the dog turns to the guy and says “Maybe I shoulda said DiMaggio?”
https://justinnhli.com/posts/2007/12/roof-rough-ruth.html
A guy is driving around the back woods and he sees a sign in front of a broken down, shanty-style house: “Talking Dog For Sale.” He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.
“You talk?” he asks.
“Yep,” the Lab replies.
After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says “So, what’s your story?”
The Lab looks up and says, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.
“I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running. But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.
“I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
“Ten dollars,” the guy says.
“Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap??”
“Because the dog’s a liar. He never did any of that stuff.”
Yes, there were a lot of talking animals in Animaniacs: but did any of them exist in Pinky and the Brain’s universe?
“One is a genius, the other’s insane.”
You know, there’s a fan theory about Pinky and the Brain: Brain is the insane one. Monomania is a mental disease and he obviously has it. Pinky, secretly Brain’s “keeper”, must use his genius to safely thwart Brain’s new scheme every single day.
That theory also explains why Pinky gets top billing.
Ruben Bolling just the other day ran a version, typical of his strange reductive take, of the talking-dog-bet trope that woozy, Downpuppy, and swazoo discuss above.
swazo:
I feel bad about not laughing when my grandfather told his version of the story (slightly different):
His version was a man’s car breaks down on a country road. A horse yells “Get a horse” (oddly enough as a 12 year old child I was perfectly aware of the old trope of “get a horse” which I think most 12 year-olds at the time would not have). The man stares and the horse goes on “Cars are no good. They’re a passing fad. Get a horse” (and I had no problem believing a horse might have that opinion. I actually don’t think this was part of the original joke and I think my grandfather was hoping it would explain the “get a horse” line which I think he thought I wouldn’t understand.) The man runs to the farm house and says to the man “Is that horse for sale? I want to buy it. I could make a lot of money with a horse like that” (Then my grandfather would say as aside “I suppose the man was really being very stupid letting the farmer know how badly he wanted the horse, but I suppose that is just for the sake of the story”. I nodded because I understood that too.) The farmer looks at the mans disdainfully and says “Oh, come on, now. You don’t actually believe his story about winning the Kentucky Derby, do you?” (My grandfather would pause expecting a laugh or at least a chuckle but I looked in honest confusion “How did the farmer think the man thought he would make money on a horse that had won the Kentucky Derby?”. Somehow in my 12-year old brain I figured having won the Kentucky Derby once didn’t mean it’d win again and I had no concept of hiring a horse to stud and it was very important to me that for the joke to work the farmer had to have a viable and mundane concept of how the man thought he was going to make money.)
My grandfather thought I didn’t get it and my mother thought I was deliberately pretending not to get it because I had typical adolescent disdain. I kind of wish now I could tell my grandfather that, yes, I understood it and I really enjoyed it and that my question was meant to be a discussion of the art of joke crafting from one joke teller to another.
(Actually I once read “Mad” magazine to my grandfather. They did a Nursery Rhymes for the 60s once and I sung [to tune of Frere Jacques] “Marijuana, Marijuana, LSD, LSD; Doctors make it! Teacher’s take it! why can’t we? Why can’t we?” and I remember my Grandfather laughing uproariously over that. I hope he enjoyed that.)
=====
James Pollack.
I did a trivia night a year or so ago where the round category was “Cartoon Dogs” and the question was “What large cartoon dog was known for saying ‘Ruh-Roh'” and my answer of “Scooby-Doo” was marked wrong as her intended answer was “Astro”. My teammate thought we should protest but I really didn’t want to be the guy who argues every answer.
… especially as the reason we were doing “Cartoon Dogs” was because, as the winner of the round the week before, my prize had been to choose the category for the next week and I had chosen “Cartoon Dogs” just to be esoteric and weird. It didn’t seem like complaining would be good sportsmanship.
Well, woozy, to be fair to the triviamaster, Astro /did/ do it first.
@Downpuppy: At the risk of being That Guy, I’ve always had trouble with the punchline to that joke, because it seemed clear to me that if one was not going to accept “Babe Ruth” as the answer to “greatest baseball player of all time,” the obvious alternative was Ty Cobb.
I guess maybe the dog was just a die-hard Yankees fan.
The “Pinky is the genius” theory also explains why the one time Brain let Pinky hatch their daily global domination scheme (Pinky’s Turn, season 3), it succeeded… or was on track to do so until Brain decided that he needed to get involved.
I’m pretty sure the universes of nearly every Animaniacs character cross over with others at some point, though in most of these appearances (like Wakko’s Wish), one could argue that they are essentially actors playing roles outside of their respective universes. Most of the animals talk (Buttons and Chicken Boo, most notably, do not) but not all appear to be able to talk in a way that humans can understand. The Warners (animals?), Slappy and Skippy, the Hip Hippos, and Pinky and The Brain have all been shown communicating in English with humans. Rita and Runt can talk to each other, but are heard by humans as a cat and dog would be. I do not recall the Goodfeathers ever trying to talk to people, but it seems implied that they cannot. Minerva Mink’s universe consists of only 2 or 3 cartoons, none of which feature humans as I recall.
Shrug,
You accidentally spelled “Ted Williams” as “Ty Cobb”!
>”Astro /did/ do it first.”
Did he? That’s good to know. I didn’t know that.
But seriously, Scooby did it more. If Astro did it it wasn’t a catch phrase which with Scooby it …. basically was.
But to be fair to the Quizmaster, we got every other question right way ahead of any other team and we were on a two month winning streak which must have been getting tedious to the other players and her and we were forcing her to make up questions about *absurd* subjects, I really couldn’t blame her for trying to trick us out.
Mitch4: I also like this middle one with the horse in the bar. (Sorry, doesn’t come in separate subcomics.)
The talking horse shaggy dog story reminded me of this one from Flip Wilson:
(Skip to the 3:19 mark)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgVtTJnQr4o
I for one would like to see more Minerva Mink cartoons.
Um, no particular reason.
Winter, I keep having shifting opinions on Ruben Bolling. His long-form political / editorial satires (“Sunday” format but appear on Fridays at GoComics and released some places earlier) are good; his persona in his newsletter is very pleasant, friendly, and respectful to readers and other cartoonists he sometimes mentions; and the short-form “Super-Fun-Pak Comix”, whether assembled like this for a Tom The Dancing Bug or released individually, are generally funny, and where parodic or cynical are not as mean-spirited as some others.
BUT SOMETIMES, particularly when SFPC is parodying specific well-known strips, he strikes me as just mean, and tedious in doing the same thing over and always. It was interesting ONCE or twice to see “The Lockhorns” and its ilk deconstructed (under the “Marital Mirth” sub-series in SFPC) as merely saying “This guy just despises his wife” or “Long-married couples soon utterly despise each other”. Or Dennis reduced to “Bratty kids know no limits to their simple evil.” But after a few more repetitions, you start to want to say some words of support for those dinosaurs, and defend them from Bolling’s unrelenting scorn.
” But after a few more repetitions, you start to want….”
… apply the same critique to him?
“Aging cartoonist thinks he’s edgy by pointing out motifs in comics he despises and assuming his readers share his contempt”.
I thought Astro said “Row Roy”
Here is Bolling being a little self-conscious or “meta” about the comics world and criticism. (It’s pretty clear his target is not CIDU but certain other blogs.)