Friday Cat Blogging: Funnies and the "Turner and Hooch Rule"

There's an unwritten rule in Hollywood filmmaking that I call the "Turner and Hooch Rule." The rule is quite simple: Don't kill the dog.

The rule is named after the 1989 Tom Hanks comedy, Turner and Hooch, in which Hanks plays a cop who becomes the reluctant owner of Hooch, a Dogue de Bordeaux. Hooch is one of those homely, drooling beasts that only true dog lovers can appreciate. Hooch is killed while being a hero in this film, and the filmmakers took no end of crap about it, which Hanks joked about on the late-night talk shows. The film ends with the Hanks character now the proud owner of a puppy sired by the late Hooch, but no matter: They Killed the Dog. Interestingly, a similar and far inferior movie that came out the same time, K-9, had a German Shepherd recover miraculously from what should have been a life-ending gunshot, and that was OK.

For those of us who will do things like watch toilet paper commercials just because of the cute puppy in them, the Turner and Hooch rule is reassuring. It allows us to rest easy when the Heroic Dog or Cute Kitty is in danger. For me, this was a huge help just a week ago, when Vincent, the yellow lab on LOST was paddling out to follow the raft designed to take some of the castaways off the island. Because of the Turner and Hooch rule, I knew Vincent would have to turn around.

But for all that Hollywood has adhered pretty strictly to the Turner and Hooch rule, the newspaper comics haven't. Comics have become pretty serious business of late, with political statements coming from such unlikely sources as Hi and Lois:



A number of years ago, Lynn Johnston, creator of the family strip For Better or Worse killed off Farley, the Patterson family's Old English Sheepdog. It was easy to see it coming, there were plenty of references to Farley's age, and what better way to send him off than to have him die heroically rescuing a child?

Farley's death was so groundbreaking in comics, because he was such a beloved character, that it seemed to rock the entire world of continuity funnies. In fact, there is even a foundation named for Farley that helps sick and injured pets that belong to low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

Now it looks like another family strip, Sally Forth, is about to go the same route. While less important to the strip than Farley was in his, "Kitty" is well-known to cat owners for his highly characteristic cat behaviors. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I've always laughed at the kind of people who write letters to the editor complaining about the serious tone of the funnies. Most of them just seem to have an axe to grind. But when you read these every day, these pen-and-ink drawings become almost real, and sometimes the animals are more real than the people. The highly stylized family in Rose is Rose isn't nearly as compelling, nor are the characters as well-developed, as is the family cat Peekaboo. Sure, you can worry when Funky Winkerbean falls off the wagon, but just like in real life, the fates of animals are usually in control of the people who are their guardians.

It's still a day early, but where the fate of Kitty Forth is concerned, well, I don't have a good feeling about this.