The Chow Hound Dog (Looney Tunes)

The Dog (Chow Hound) "What, no gravy!?" Gender: Male Type: Needlessly Mean-spirited Gluttonous Bully Species: Dog Portrayed by: John T. Smith Status: Presumably deceased Media of origin: Looney Tunes

The Dog is a one-shot character from the Looney Tunes short film series who made his only appearance in the 1951 cartoon Chow Hound. He serves as the main antagonist of an unnamed cat and mouse duo in said cartoon.

Why He Intentionally Did Forget The Gravy

1. To write down the first problem, his only defining trait is his gluttony, as he's always hungry for meat non-stop, and even greedily eats them with no control whatsoever.
2. To start off, he bosses around an innocent cat and a mouse into getting food for him.
3. While yes, he is intentionally made to be a despicable and unlikable villain for us to see him get his comeuppance, but unlike most of the other Looney Tunes villains/antagonists of the time such as Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote, he doesn't have what makes the beloved characters stated above, to be "love to hate" type of villains that the viewers don't need to necessarily hate to like them and these iconic characters are still lovable as villains who the viewer wants to see defeated for their schemes, nor does he have any humorous qualities or comedic moments in his villainous actions, which is a certain amount of charm and enjoyability that he lacks in, even more so than Chuck Jones' later incarnation of Claude Cat.
4. He is incredibly lazy and dependent on others as he doesn't even bother to get food himself. All he does is send in the cat and wait until he comes back with a steak.
5. He is so obsessed with gravy that whenever the cat that he's picking on forgets it, he yells out "What, no gravy!?" and gives the poor feline a nasty beating.
   • Speaking of which, his gravy obsession doesn't make any sense whatsoever, as every time the cat he picks on gets food from his owners, none of them come with gravy. At first, it may originally seem that the dog desperately needs gravy to eat with his steaks, but once he purchases a meat market, clearly none of the meats sold there come with gravy which he didn't even complain of at all, and once the cat and mouse attempt to force-feed him with gravy at the ending he desperately urges them not to do so, meaning that the dog is clearly dishonest and doesn't mean it when he needs gravy with his steaks and is just being mean and abusive towards the cat for no reason whatsoever.
6. He is ungrateful whenever the cat brings him a steak, due to the previous reason listed above.
7. When the mouse tries to stand up to him, he knocks him out with a tiny hammer.
8. He holds the cat hostage for weeks to the point that his three owners and the zookeeper could post reward offers for the cat's return to them on the newspapers, pretends to return the cat to his three owners, and yanks him away with a string at the last moment, and even pretends to capture him as a saber-toothed cat, just to get money, which proves that he's also sleazy and greedy.
   • Speaking of which, when he returns the saber-toothed cat to the zoo, he even forces the mouse to dress up as a Zulu native which is an offensive racial stereotype of Africans, and even the mouse laments how humiliating his role is.
   • He also doesn't even care about feelings of the cat's three owners in the slightest whenever he held their cat hostage for weeks and steal the cat back from them, instead only focusing on the reward money which they'd pay him and nothing else, hence making him incredibly selfish, greedy and heartless, almost as bad as Daffy Duck during the De-Patie Freleng and Seven-Arts eras.
9. Following that, he then uses his ill-gotten gain to buy an entire meat market and lets his hunger and gluttony get the better of him when he proceeds to eat all of its contents.
10. Even though he deserved it, his fate at the end of the short is quite disturbing for a Looney Tunes cartoon, as he, while morbidly obese to the point that he is immobilized from the massive amount of meats he has consumed, gets force-fed gravy by the cat and mouse he has been bullying as revenge and presumably dies after the iris-out closes.
    • On that topic, his morbidly obese appearance is horrible and scary to look at for a younger audience.
11. Overall, he is one of the few dogs in the Looney Tunes series to be portrayed negatively, after Shep and Charlie Dog due to being excessively greedy and unsympathetic.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite how unlikable and unsympathetic he is, he is, surprisingly a very threatening and effective villain, perhaps even more so than most of the Looney Tunes villains, so much that the unnamed cat and mouse he frequently antagonizes are incredibly afraid of him until the ending.
2. Ignoring the dark subject matter of it, he does get his comeuppance at the end of the cartoon, and the comeuppance he receives is extremely satisfying.
3. His design isn't bad, at least before he became morbidly obese by the ending.
4. John T. Smith does a good job voicing him.
5. Being the greedy, gluttonous and abusive villain he is, he's clearly supposed to be hated as such.
6. "What, no gravy!?"

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