Dogbert
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Dogbert is Dilbert's anthropomorphic pet dog from the Dilbert comic strip. He is a megalomaniac; one of his dreams is to conquer the world and enslave all humans, and he has achieved this status several times through methods such as hypnosis and masquerading. However, he often quickly relinquishes his post due to boredom, someone foiling his chance, his conviction that people do not deserve to have him as leader due to the ongoing peace that results, or his desire to go nap on a soft pillow.
Despite this dislike for humans, he is known to protect and help Dilbert when he falls victim to sinister motives. For example, he has saved him from Mr. Tidy, the robber-disguised-as-a-cleaning-man, by having Bob the Dinosaur flush Mr. Tidy down the toilet, prevented Dilbert from being executed by Catbert, and rescued Dilbert from the trolls in accounting several times. In the cartoon show, Dogbert tells Dilbert that he fills a special place in his life: Dilbert blocks the light from the lamp when he sits on the couch, eliminating glare from the TV that Dogbert watches.
He often walks in the park with Dilbert, generally stealing the girls Dilbert is trying to attract.
Dogbert has made many ventures into the business world, often as a consultant who hypes new trends to the Pointy-Haired Boss, which he enjoys because of the opportunities for conning and insulting people. In these positions, he typically takes advantage of stupidity and gullibility. For instance, when hired as a consultant to create a new company logo, Dogbert proposed using a piece of paper with a circular stain from his coffee cup as the Brown Ring of Quality, and then charged a large consultancy fee. (The ring may have borne a certain sneaky similarity to the Lucent logo.) He wags his tail when someone falls for one of his schemes.
Dogbert has several similarities to Dilbert (glasses that don't reveal pupils, lack of visible mouth). However, Dogbert's lack of visible mouth is revealed to not just be a lack of detail on the artist's part, but something that is also noticeable to people of the comic strip (Dogbert himself has said that he has no "visible mouth").
Dogbert apparently hates opera, as revealed in Always Postpone Meetings with Time Wasting Morons. Once, he was successful in getting it banned.
In one episode of the animated series, Dogbert was a passenger on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
In another episode, a publisher makes the reference that Dogbert was the agent "Deep Throat" during the Watergate Scandal.
Before the strip was syndicated, Dogbert's name was "Dildog". Editors noted that any printing error obliterating the g in that name would wreak havoc, and the name was changed to Dogbert.
Creator Scott Adams created several strips about Dogbert's origins, including his rivalry with another dog named Bingo. The strips were never syndicated because Adams felt that this would make Dilbert too much of a "cartoonist cartoon."
[edit] Alter egos
An alter ego of Dogbert is Saint Dogbert, the patron saint of technology, Dogbert's religious form. Dogbert created this form as a method to eliminate the "demons of stupidity", and he also (sometimes) uses it for tv ads, and for a group that includes "buzzword-spewers", "clueless morons" and "people who press an extra button to do the job" (Ctrl-Alt-F4-Del, instead of Ctrl-Alt-Del, the soft reboot, for example). Saint Dogbert wears a mitre and carries a scepter in his left paw. His right paw heals broken technology, and the scepter exorcises the "demons of stupidity."
Saint Dogbert
Another alter-ego is Nostradogbert or Nostrildogmas, a parody of Nostradamus. Here, he is a psychic, albeit an evil one. For example, he created a chain e-mail curse that, if read and sent to others, would turn both the reader and sender into a dog, but if that letter was not read, the person would die (most people chose the curse over death). In the late 1990's, Nostradogbert briefly became a doomsday prophet so he could "scare gullible people." His logic for saying the world would end in the year 2000 was that "It's biiiiiiiig and rouuuuunnnd." His nemesis is John Stossel.
[edit] External links
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