Big Dog Sportswear—the clothing brand with the iconic big dog on it—is a company that subsists on nostalgia. Each sale of an XXL t-shirt with a tough-talking St. Bernard on it depends on potential costumers remembering how fun it was to wear said t-shirts when they were husky little eighth graders. That’s maybe the best explanation why, as part of their weekly Twitter trip down memory lane, Big Dog decided to share a throwback mashup of their brand and Kelsey Grammer’s beloved, high-brow sitcom Frasier. Either that or you slipped into a coma in 1998 and this is your brain’s best attempt to jar you awake.
Like the laziest of political cartoons, this blend of two pop culture properties is heavily labeled for maximum comedy. Front and center is our hero, Furrasier Cranine, reading a book titled “Pup Psychology,” which we guess qualifies as a joke. Over his shoulders we see his trusted producer Rozweiller and the radio station’s sportscaster Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe. Fans of the show will remember that that character’s name was actually “Bulldog” so, again, this isn’t really a joke.
But the most upsetting part of this post is below the fold. Martin Cranine (who, along with Furrasier’s brother Niles, doesn’t even get a fun parody name) is sitting on his trusty recliner with his dog Eddie. That’s right. Martin, a dog man, owns a smaller, non-humanoid dog. If the good people at Big Dog had had real guts, they would have followed through with the internal logic of this world and placed a small, nude, human man on Martin’s lap. The implications of this dog-owning-dog power dynamic are worse than the Pluto v. Goofy debacle going on over at Disney.