This town ain't big enough for two dog puppets

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Speaker 2 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal and Gadigal people.

Speaker 2 G'day, Matt Bevan here. So we're currently in between two episodes about AI.

Speaker 2 We looked into the dot-com boom of the 90s, and in particular, the meteoric rise and fall of one tech company called Pets.com.

Speaker 2 On Thursday, we're going to be looking at the current AI boom and the infrastructure involved and whether the investment is worth anything.

Speaker 2 It was during the investigation into Pets.com that supervising producer Cara Jensen-McKinnon came across this very strange court case between two dog puppets, and she is here to tell us all about it.

Speaker 2 G'day, Cara. G'day.

Speaker 5 I am so excited.

Speaker 5 It's taken everything I have not to just send so many images and videos to you already and to keep this secret from you until right now. And so I am so ready.

Speaker 2 Amazing. I'm very excited about this.

Speaker 2 I actually have to apologise to you, Cara, because I wrote the outro to last week's episode and I should have credited you as a co-writer because at the moment we're working on a big secret project that will be coming out early next year.

Speaker 2 And that involves me spending like two and a half days a week trying to deal with that. And it involves Cara and Adair helping me a lot with the research and the writing.

Speaker 2 But the problem is that, of course, you doing the research and the writing means that you get sucked into.

Speaker 5 I get sucked into the hellscape, exactly.

Speaker 2 Which is, you know, great for me. Yes.
Potentially a bit unhealthy for you.

Speaker 5 I've been sucked into the puppet vortex and I'm ready to drag you in.

Speaker 2 I'm so excited about that because, you know, while writing it and reading about pets.com and e-toys and these companies that went bust, I came across a lot of court cases and there was a lot of pretty dodgy stuff going on during the dot-com boom.

Speaker 2 Yes. There was a court case that came out of the collapse of e-toys that went on for 14 years

Speaker 2 after e-toys existed, but none of them involved any of the puppets. Yes.
You've got a puppet story for me.

Speaker 5 I've got a puppet case.

Speaker 2 Please tell me the puppet story.

Speaker 5 So I want to rewind a little bit to the, I guess, birth. Is a puppet born? I don't know.
A puppet is sewn.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 5 The sewing of this puppet. We have pets.com.
They needed a mascot. They needed to set themselves aside from the couple of other pet store websites that were starting to pop up.

Speaker 5 And so they commissioned an advertising firm called TBWA Worldwide to come up with a mascot for them. And these

Speaker 5 had gotten super famous because they had come up with the Apple advertisement.

Speaker 6 Here's to the crazy ones.

Speaker 6 The Misfits, the Rebels.

Speaker 5 And they also had come up with the

Speaker 5 Taco Bell Chihuahua.

Speaker 2 You're getting hungry.

Speaker 2 Very hungry.

Speaker 6 Feed your late-night craving with Gorditas.

Speaker 5 Which has since been cancelled, I think, for racial stereotyping. But at the time, that Taco Bell Chihuahua was very popular.

Speaker 5 And so these were the guys that you went to when you needed ads that cut through.

Speaker 5 So they were approached and they said, hey. We've done this dog for this Taco Bell company.
How about we do another dog for you guys? But it's a sock puppet dog, this time instead of a real dog.

Speaker 5 And they come up with this sock puppet that actually doesn't have a name. It's just called the sock puppet dog that pets.com have.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was looking around for whatever the name of this sock puppet dog name is, but no.

Speaker 5 This nameless dog.

Speaker 2 Unnamed dog.

Speaker 5 But I wonder if you can just describe this unnamed sock puppet dog.

Speaker 2 I can. Oh, what type of dog is that? I'm terrible with dog breeds, you know.

Speaker 5 It looks kind of like a Jack Russell, maybe.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, is it a Jack Russell Terrier? He's got sort of white and brown fur. He's got button eyes.
This is, I mean, it's clearly a puppet, but it was recently a sock.

Speaker 2 Certainly not a realistic puppet, but it does have arms, and in one of the arms, one of the hands, is a microphone with pets.com, except a microphone appears to be taped to

Speaker 2 the dog's hand.

Speaker 5 Yes. And his arms are also socks, which I thought was weird.
Okay. But a very lo-fi

Speaker 5 puppet. So anyway.
They wanted to make some ads and so they commissioned a person called Michael Patrick Chan, who was on MTV at the time, which was a very popular music channel at the time.

Speaker 5 He had a sketch show called The State that he was on with another guy called Michael Ian Black, who has since gone on to become obviously a very famous writer and comedian, but at the time was just like a up-and-coming dude who was on a sketch show.

Speaker 5 And so Michael Ian Black agreed to be the voice and body slash arm slash hand of the puppet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's got on

Speaker 2 the American version of Have I Got News for You at the moment. He's doing pretty well for himself.

Speaker 5 He's, yeah, he's crushing it. So the stakes were high because Pets.com, as we kind of covered in our episode, they were spending millions of dollars on these ads.

Speaker 5 So they wanted a big campaign that was really going to work.

Speaker 2 We're talking $30 million.

Speaker 5 We're talking big bucks here. Yeah.
And so I've got this grab here from Michael Ian Black on the podcast, Go for Broke, describing what it was like on the first day when they were shooting.

Speaker 7 Before we shot the first thing, the first commercial, I remember an executive saying something along the lines of, this has to be a home run.

Speaker 7 Like, I didn't know, like, the whole thing was like hanging in the balance about whether, like, I could make a good joke about a frisbee. Like, I didn't know.
Thank God I didn't know.

Speaker 7 I would have, I would have blown it.

Speaker 2 That's

Speaker 5 extremely high stakes.

Speaker 5 But also, like, a very familiar executive style of meeting where the boss just basically says, this has to be the best and most viral thing you've ever made. Otherwise, you're fired.

Speaker 7 So, here is the ad today we're coming to you from one crazy dog park he's got a stuffed thing i love stuffed things this is the happiest day of my life come on job jump

Speaker 7 got it pets.com because pets can't drive oh yeah oh this is my kind of party

Speaker 2 It's uh, it's it's good. It's funny.

Speaker 5 It's good. It's good.

Speaker 2 But it's so lo-fi though. It really is very lo-fi, which is so interesting because of how much money money they were spending on it.
But clearly, they wanted it to look like this.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Because at the time, ads were kind of really scripted, really big budget.
And this was like a massive departure from the advertising at the time. And I think that's why people loved it.

Speaker 2 It feels kind of TikTok-era.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it feels modern.

Speaker 2 I also love that the dog has a microphone that he holds up to his mouth, having a microphone for a mouth that doesn't actually make any noise.

Speaker 5 So, this ad first aired in August 1999, and it was more successful than literally anyone could have imagined. Like it was a massive hit.

Speaker 5 People lost their minds over this dog because this was like, I mean, we both grew up in the 90s. There was nothing to do.
Like that was what it was like for us.

Speaker 5 Like if a dog puppet was on the TV, you needed the dog puppet. So that's August.
By November, they had a Macy's parade float of the dog. Multiple stories high.

Speaker 5 There was a few months later in January, a Super Bowl commercial for the dog. The dog even wrote a memoir.

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 5 I'm doing air quotes here called Me by Me, which was a kind of tell-all about this meteoric rise to fame.

Speaker 2 We should note that for context, Pets.com didn't launch on the stock market until February 2000.

Speaker 5 Yes, the next year.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So this ad campaign from August through to January at the end of 1999, going into 2000, was basically to drum up hype

Speaker 2 for their stock market launch because that was the only way they were going to be able to fund anything because they were selling their products at a loss.

Speaker 2 Every single product was being sold at a loss.

Speaker 2 And not just because of the marketing budget, like they were selling it below cost and then also spending $30 million on the sock puppet dog for a business that would have been losing money even without that.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So they needed it to work and it was working.
Yeah. They were on top of the world going towards their launch on the 11th of February, 2000.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So this is a dream run for any launching company.
And it's because of this fame that a lot of people started noting that this puppet dog bore a striking resemblance to another famous puppet dog.

Speaker 5 And that is Triumph, the insult dog, who's a regular dog and guest on the Conan O'Brien show, who was created by a comic called Robert Smigle. This is Triumph.
Can you just explain what this is? Okay.

Speaker 2 So Triumph is a very rubbery looking puppet. He's reflecting the light because he's so slick and

Speaker 2 he looks like the hand inside is very sweaty. And he's sort of like a pit bull looking dog.
He's wearing a golden bow and he's got a cigar in his mouth.

Speaker 5 Exactly. And so, Triumph was like really famous for just absolutely roasting people.

Speaker 8 There's Jessica Simpson, a real original. She's being told what Britney is doing so that she can rip it off.

Speaker 8 AJ,

Speaker 8 you're a backstreet boy. Why did it take so long for you to get it pressed?

Speaker 5 There's videos of him going to like the Oscars and the Tony Awards, MTV Music Awards. He's on Conan.
He roasts the guests on Conan. Right, right.

Speaker 5 The dog was so good at roasting people that by 1999, which is the same time as Pets.com is coming up, he's the most popular character on Conan O'Brien. Everyone loves this other dog.

Speaker 5 So popular that the guy Robert, who is the voice and hand of the dog, started developing a TV show for Comedy Central about just puppet animals, Triumph being one of those animals, but just other puppet animals, and had determined basically that there was like enough room only for one puppet dog in Hollywood, and it was going to be Triumph.

Speaker 5 And so a lot of people were kind of starting to throw shade at the pets.com dog for copying Triumph. It starts, news starts getting around that they have a bit of a beef.

Speaker 5 And so Jon Stewart says, I want Triumph to come on the show so I can interview Triumph about being ripped off. And Triumph does that.

Speaker 5 He goes on the daily show and basically accuses the pets.com puppet dog of stealing, like basically cutting his grass.

Speaker 2 This is very funny in the context of knowing the guy who is behind pets.com, Greg McLemore, who of course, just a year earlier, his previous company had been taken down. by these Swiss artists

Speaker 2 who had accused him of stealing their name. Exactly.
And they basically destroyed his multi-million dollar company. And now,

Speaker 5 a year later. It's happening again.

Speaker 2 It's happening all over again.

Speaker 5 He's triggered.

Speaker 2 He's being attacked by the strangest people.

Speaker 2 You know, this guy was just going, how can this be happening again?

Speaker 5 So Triumph and Robert send a seasoned assist letter to pets.com basically saying,

Speaker 5 you got to stop this. You've got to stop it with this puppet dog.
This is our stuff.

Speaker 5 That letter hasn't been published, but we basically know that pets.com, because they were hemorrhaging so much cash and this sock puppet dog was the only thing they had that was making any money, they needed to protect their IP.

Speaker 5 And so they decided to launch a defamation suit against

Speaker 5 Triumph the dog

Speaker 2 for...

Speaker 5 defamation and trade libel demanding $20 million in damages.

Speaker 2 So effectively, they were trying to fund their their failing company

Speaker 2 by soaking Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in court. Fantastic.

Speaker 5 Exactly. And so this court document is truly so funny.
So here is the complainant section, which I'm just going to have you read out.

Speaker 2 Amazing. This looks exactly like the indictment of Rudy Giuliani.

Speaker 5 It's like a serious court document.

Speaker 2 Paragraph eight. Line 14 reads, the sock puppet is white in colour with black spots, made of a cotton sock and resembles a friendly dog.

Speaker 2 The sock puppet has a distinctive voice, attitude, and personality.

Speaker 2 The sock puppet is an advocate of pets, the voice of pets, and often interacts and communicates directly with other animals or with humans in order to convey to pet owners how pets feel about various pet-related issues.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 this is obviously the good guy because they've written the document. Now here's the defendant, which obviously they also penned, the bad guy.

Speaker 2 Triumph is a rubber dog that interacts with various live animals as well as with people, regularly uses vulgarity, insults both the humans and other dogs around him, and often conducts physical attacks of a sexual nature on female dogs.

Speaker 2 In an attempt to harm the sock puppet's audience appeal and market share, and to increase Triumph's popularity through a public controversy or scandal, the defendant has claimed on national television, the internet, and in print media that pets.com stole the idea and creation for its sock puppet from Defendant and that the Pets.com's sock puppet is a rip-off of Triumph.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 this didn't go down very well.

Speaker 5 It went down, in fact, so badly that Michael Ian Black was mortified by this and he actually recounted what it was like for him on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which is a podcast on NPR.

Speaker 6 I was in the camp of Triumph far more than us. I mean, you know,

Speaker 6 I'm never going to, you know, side with the, you know, the corporate masters in any creative dispute.

Speaker 6 And then when Pets.com started taking it seriously, they literally had me hold a press conference as the sock puppet.

Speaker 6 And it was one of the most degrading things I've ever done.

Speaker 5 So were you visible or were you just like behind the puppet?

Speaker 6 No, I was like underneath a podium or something and my arm would be up and I would be

Speaker 6 speaking to the press. And there were press there about this ludicrous lawsuit that pets.com had filed.

Speaker 2 This is extraordinary. I'm so happy about this.
I mean, I can't wait to hear what Triumph's response to this was.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it just doesn't bode well when the literal guy who is your mascot is against your cause.

Speaker 2 He still did the press conference, though, should be noted.

Speaker 5 I mean, he was probably financially obligated to do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wonder what he was getting paid for this

Speaker 2 off a $30 million marketing budget. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So, unfortunately, I couldn't find this press conference footage.

Speaker 5 I did really look hard, but what I have found is that Triumph went on Conan and did an opposing press conference in response and fully didn't hold back. This video is so funny, but so inappropriate.

Speaker 2 You and I watch it. We'll see how much of it we can put on there.

Speaker 5 Yeah, there's a few lines, but it's so funny.

Speaker 8 People, come on,

Speaker 8 come on, take a look at, take a look at this lawsuit. Now I know why human beings wipe their ass.

Speaker 8 In conclusion,

Speaker 8 I would like to address the sock puppet personally.

Speaker 8 Every joke you take,

Speaker 8 every rip-off you make,

Speaker 8 every rule you break, like a dot-com fake, I will poke on you.

Speaker 5 So that's the response.

Speaker 2 I can't wait to hear when listening back to this after we put it out how much of that we were able to put.

Speaker 5 Maybe we'll put the full link in the show notes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.

Speaker 5 Obviously, everyone was gearing up for this to be the trial of the century.

Speaker 5 But it never happened.

Speaker 2 It's a shame. I would have loved the puppets to be there

Speaker 5 with their puppeteers at the bench.

Speaker 2 Maybe a puppet lawyer on each side maybe a judge puppet it never happened because pets.com went bust

Speaker 5 and one month after they shut their doors and liquidated all their assets the court case was dismissed that's a shame that's sad and then since then obviously triumph has gone on to be a very successful dog just still roasting people on the street as recently as this year um whereas the pets.com sock puppet dog was sold off to a car loan company called Bar None for $125,000 in 2002.

Speaker 5 And their slogan was, Everybody deserves a second chance. And then they went out of business as well because they were apparently super corrupt.

Speaker 5 And then that was that's goodbye to Saki, the sock puppet with no name.

Speaker 2 What an excellent story. RIP to the sock puppet dog.
Yes. But everyone else seems to be doing all right out of it.
Everyone else has really made it. Cara, thank you so much.
Bye.

Speaker 2 We'll be back with very serious matters such as, you know, electricity and water usage of the AI industry and whether or not the AI industry is going to be worth any money and whether that bubble's about to pop on Thursday.

Speaker 2 So we'll see you then.