Do Dogs Really Bring Out The Best In Us Or Is The Little Girl In That Dog Food Commercial A Total Fraud?
The memory of it still haunts me.
I know you’ve all seen the commercial where the cute little girl is lying quietly in bed in a hospital room and the nurse pokes her head in and the little girl asks meekly “another treatment?” and the nurse responds brightly that “today we’re going to try something different” and in prances a full-sized dog to which the delighted girl utters a unique squeal of delight the precise sound of which has never before been emitted by a human being or otherwise heard in nature.
“Dogs bring out the best in us,” intones the voiceover, a seemingly unassailable sentiment which is, however, sometimes successfully assailed by many a dog owner whenever their four-legged friend begins whimpering for the bathroom at 3:00 AM on a January evening when the temperature is 4 degrees outside.
But — be that as it may — the commercial tugs at the heartstrings, produces a tear in the eye, and prompted me to purchase an 18-pound bag of whatever dog food it was that the commercial was hawking.
And I don’t own a dog.
And then I saw it. The same little girl in another commercial joyfully prancing about with her parents, running here and there with absolutely no four-legged friend anywhere present to ameliorate her condition, and undertaking all manner of activities short of dancing classical ballet. Unless it was that the canine therapy of the prior commercial had somehow produced a miraculous cure, I realized then and there that I had been totally, thoroughly, 100 percent had!
And Petco won’t let me take the damn dog food back.
Now I realize of course that the little girl is an actor and was never really lingering at death’s door; she’s simply a performer taking whatever acting jobs are open to her to make a living in her chosen profession. But she was such a stand-out in that dog food commercial that to me she has already become typecast, a pint-sized Jason Alexander who was so outstanding at playing George Costanza we strain to accept him as anyone else.
And recognizing that she has become George Costanza in a hospital bed, she should honor our pre-conceptions and only take acting jobs that comfortably fulfill them.
Kurtwood Smith is the actor who played the dad of Topher Grace in the television show That Seventies Show. He was a bit blustery in the role but always benevolent and decent. Yet he also plays the villain in the first RoboCop movie, a corrupt, sadistic, evil monster wicked to his very core, jubilant at his perceived demolishment of RoboCop and hell bent on nothing less than death and destruction wherever he malignantly traverses the planet.
How dare Kurtwood Smith accept such a depraved role? And if RoboCop came first before That Seventies Show, how dare he accept such a non-depraved role? Isn’t there some rule of show business or SAG-AFTRA that forbids this random and careless trifling with our television viewing and movie going predilections?
If not, why not?
Were I an actor at this stage of the game I would regularly be cast as a neurotic seventy-year-old semi-bald Jew from Philadelphia.
I would be making my fortune, or at least my pin-money, perfecting roles of this manner whenever and wherever they became available.
But should a producer one day seek to cast me as handsome devil-may-care leading man, what do you think I would say to them? I would say “what on Earth do you think of me? I have integrity. I don’t want to disappoint and frustrate those who have seen and enjoyed me in another context and I sincerely wish for them to continue to see me for all time in that self-same context.”
After which I would sign on to the part immediately.
You see, I don’t have a dog to bring out the best in me.
