So the Paw Patrol, they should totally be dead.
In the newest movie, part of a meteor hits Adventure City,
destroying the Paw Patrol tower before crashing down into the streets.
Thankfully, the pups saved the day by clearing everyone into nearby buildings,
and in the final couple of seconds, hiding themselves behind things like newspaper stands and in the trunks of cars.
But nah, that ain't doing anything.
In reality, Adventure City would have been leveled.
See, meteors move fast, between 11 and 77 kilometers a second, about 25,000 miles an hour.
And because they have so much velocity, they are carrying a lot of energy, no matter how big they are.
In 2013, for instance, a 19-meter meteor exploded over Russia with 30 times as much energy as the atomic bomb.
Given the size of what you're seeing here in the movie, sorry, Paw Patrol, you're not just playing dead after that one.
Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that refuses to let sleeping dogs lie.
So, did you guys wait in line to pre-order your tickets to the latest Paw Patrol movie like I did?
Because let me tell you, in our family, this was the most hyped movie ever in my life.
Hold my pup pack, Avengers Endgame, the Paw Patrol Mighty Movie is where it's at.
Now, you might be thinking I'm over-exaggerating, but no, this is actually a true story.
This was my son Ollie's first official movie in a theater.
Based on the fact that he shouted,
"This movie is so awesome!"
unprompted four times throughout the film, I'd say that it exceeded his expectations.
Anyway, in case you don't know, Paw Patrol is a series about a group of rescue service puppies led by a boy genius named Ryder.
Now, in our previous series, we uncovered the dark truth hidden under this polished, merchandise-friendly exterior,
exposing the fact that Ryder is actually a cutthroat capitalist using stray pups as cheap, expendable labor to do dangerous rescue missions,
paying them in cheap dog biscuits while he rakes in the government contracts.
But one thing we've yet to touch on is just the basic logistics of this world.
I mean, forget dogs acting as police officers and firefighters, these dogs can talk.
Like, talk like normal humans.
And while I've largely ignored that fact till now, since animated show gonna animate,
the new movie threw that fact into stark focus with this one scene right here.
Oh my goodness! I can talk! I have so much to say!
Meow!
Dogs are really the only creatures that can talk in this franchise.
Every time a new pup gets introduced, bam, they can speak.
They're action figure ready and your kid just found his new favorite character.
You've got Everest way up in the mountains, Tracker deep in the jungles,
Sweetie and Claw over in Barkingsburg,
Liberty and the other dogs in the pound of Adventure City,
Rubble's family in Builder Cove.
Basically, regardless of what breed they are or where in the world they are,
all dogs go to grammar school.
But every other animal? No.
We see owls, chickens, fish, cows, goats, bears, even cats.
None of them are able to talk.
Not a single word crosses their lips beyond what you'd expect.
A hoot, a cluck, a moo here and there.
Not even a syllable from the Kitten Catastrophe crew,
the animal sidekicks of the show's main villain.
I mean, if any other animal were gonna talk in this franchise, you'd think it'd be them, right?
And yet, they're silent.
Until this new movie comes out and suddenly they're given the power to speak through a magic space crystal.
So, what's going on here?
How do we explain that?
Well, I can do it in a single word for you: aliens.
It's because the dogs in Paw Patrol aren't dogs, they're aliens.
And yeah, for all of you keeping track at home, this is the one where I officially lose my mind.
Now, for the sake of completeness, I should probably mention a few exceptions to the only dogs talk rule.
First, there are the mer-pups of Puplantis,
Puppy-fish hybrids who can't talk underwater, but can after they're magically altered into land-pups.
What's going on?
Hey! I can speak!
Actual top-sider words!
I'm a land-pup!
This makes sense to me because the merpups presumably evolved from talking land puppies
and just lost the ability to speak once underwater since, you know, underwater speech ain't the most effective way to communicate.
Also, can we just acknowledge my personal brain rot here?
I just said, this makes sense to me in regards to underwater mermaid dogs talking.
Phew, that is a big self-revelation moment.
Secondly, there's Wildcat and the Cat Pack,
a group of feline friends introduced in later seasons to help Ryder and the gang in some of the rescues.
And again, this is called out as weird to the show's characters because cats in this world do not talk.
What? You can talk?
You can talk? Of course I can talk.
And yet no one bats an eye to the talking puppies.
Why? What exactly is going on here?
Well, I think it all has to start with that clip from the Mighty movie that I showed off earlier,
where we watch as a member of the villain's kitten catastrophe crew gains the ability to speak through a space meteor.
Oh my goodness! I can talk!
I have so much to say!
The same meteor that gives the Paw Patrol their superpowers as the Mighty Pups
also gives other normal animals like cats the ability to talk.
That right there seemed like an important detail to me.
So, like the good boy that I am, I started to do some digging.
And it seemed like someone was willing to throw me a bone.
See, cats and dogs are actually very well equipped for full-on speech.
They have a lot of the necessary organs required for the job.
Vocal cords, vocal tract, even a voice box.
This is how you see those cute videos of dogs and cats sounding like they're talking to their owners.
I'm ready! Well hi!
What's holding back man's best friend and our feline familiars is actually their brains.
They just lack a more sophisticated brain that would allow for speech.
For us humans, the parts of the brain that help us to talk would be the Broca's area,
located in the left hemisphere, which enables speech and articulation,
and Wernicke's area, located in the posterior superior temporal lobe,
which helps you comprehend the written and spoken word.
So, what does this space rock do into the cat that also gives it the ability to speak?
And how can it also be given pups that are already able to speak other superpowers like flight and super speed?
One word: radiation.
Now, we've talked about this a lot before, specifically in our Magic School Bus theory,
but there's a lot of radiation out in space,
enough so that it could be deadly if you're not prepared for it.
Extended time spent in space and the resulting exposure to radiation
can cause dramatic changes to an astronaut's behavior,
potentially even altering their DNA with mutations.
And keep in mind that meteors are just bathed in radiation all day every day
for potentially hundreds of millions of years.
Most of the time, this doesn't really result in any sort of long-term changes to the space rocks.
In fact, most meteorites that fall to Earth aren't any more radioactive than boring old Earth rocks.
But, there are plenty of exceptions.
In 2022, it was reported that a special type of radioactive meteorite,
known as a carbonaceous chondrite,
might have been what actually seeded life onto Earth to begin with.
It's feasible that what's going on here is that this meteorite that we see in the Paw Patrol
is one of these carbonaceous chondrite meteors,
falling to Earth and mutating these dogs and cats.
It's actually something even called out in the movie.
There are normal meteors, but this one right here, this is one of the special ones.
It is actively called out as one of the few meteors floating around in space that has special powers.
So, there you have it, right?
We know that space radiation can mutate people and alter their behavior,
we know that meteors can be bathed in space radiation,
and we know that in this world, irradiated meteors are able to give creatures the ability to talk.
So, what's that all have to do with the Paw Patrol?
Animals that were able to talk before any meteors?
Well, I suspect that all the dogs in the Paw Patrol-verse aren't dogs at all.
I think they're aliens.
Now, before you say anything, I get it.
That sounds like a big ol' leap.
And normally, I'd agree.
But in this show, aliens are a well-established and frequently utilized part of the lore.
A pair of aliens, a mother and her child, are recurring characters across the series.
And while these two look like your typical aliens,
there's also this completely separate species of alien space rocks.
But even that's not all.
The space alien has a doll based on
a relic from the rhombozoid galaxy,
implying that there's yet another species floating around out there.
All in all, this proves that aliens come in many different shapes and sizes here.
So puppy-shaped aliens evolved by the radiation of space to speak?
It's not out of the question.
And what's more, seems like these aliens have a really keen interest in Adventure Bay,
and specifically with the Paw Patrol.
They're spotted multiple times throughout the series,
sometimes just flying overhead on the outskirts of town,
or studying the local wildlife outside of Adventure Bay,
but also occasionally stopping by to play a literal game of Frisbee with Ryder and the boys.
It kinda makes you wonder if the aliens are watching Adventure Bay specifically.
We also see them taking an active interest in dogs with superpowers.
In the episode, Pups Save Floating Friends,
we see the aliens pulling up a video of Apollo the Superdog.
A few years later, and boom!
An alien space meteor gives our faithful pups their superpowers.
Coincidence?
Eh, maybe.
All in all, I suspect that the dogs in the Paw Patrol universe started as a race of aliens,
able to communicate due to the mutations that space radiation had on their system.
At some point, representatives of the species crashed down onto Earth and spread across the planet,
diversifying and breaking out into the different breeds that we see today.
Some went on to become mer-pups, losing the ability to speak underwater,
while others tried mating with native animals, the cats,
yielding the small minority of largely non-viable genetic anomalies like the cat pack.
But at this point, thousands, even millions of years later,
humanity just accepts talking dogs as a fact of life not worth mentioning.
It's just part of how dogs, as created, operate within this world.
Except someone here knows the truth.
Someone knows that dogs are more than meets the eye,
and that someone is Ryder.
I suspect that he knows all of this, because, let me tell ya,
Ryder's reaction to all this alien stuff is incredibly strange,
strange enough that I started getting suspicious of our evil little capitalist mastermind.
See, despite everything that he's seen and done throughout his life,
Ryder is still skeptical of a lot of what the Paw Patrol encounters across their adventures.
For instance, he really doesn't believe in ghosts,
just straight-up dismissing them without a second thought.
Ghosts aren't real!
He's even hesitant to believe any stories about the mer-pups,
despite having encountered other mythical creatures before.
Well, nobody's ever gotten a real good picture of a mer-pup.
It could've been something else.
But do you know what Ryder's reaction is to hearing that aliens are around?
It's not shock, it's not dismissal, it's not even skepticism.
I found a melon that was actually an alien, and he zapped me with this cool bubble thing,
and I floated in the air like,
Whoa!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Where's the alien now?
Yeah, Ryder immediately skips past the whole,
Are you sure it was an alien thing?
And just jumps straight into,
Well, where was it?
There's no hesitation in his voice, no doubt.
It's almost like he already knew that aliens were a thing,
and he was just waiting for them to come around Adventure Bay.
And this is important because it's not like everyone else in the series just knows that aliens are real.
Mayor Goodway is shocked the first time that aliens visit the town.
There you are!
Ahhh meep!
Oh, dear.
This is not an everyday occurrence,
and Ryder is not acting normally here.
Then I noticed something else.
All the technology that Ryder makes,
and all that he has up in the Lookout,
sure does look a lot like the technology that's present in the alien spaceship,
enough so that the space alien recognizes the Lookout just at a glance,
and heads inside when his spaceship crash-lands in Adventure Bay.
And I totally get it.
When you put them side-by-side,
the only difference between the spaceship's interior and the Lookout is the color of the paneling,
enough so that you kind of have to ask:
Is this the same technology?
Even Ryder in the show says this,
The Lookout looks so much like a spaceship,
he's trying to fly it home.
There is definitely a connection here.
And listen, I know that this is just a cartoon for children about talking dogs reusing assets,
but there are just too many coincidences in this world.
Not only does the alien recognize what to do with the Lookout,
but Ryder is able to use the alien's tech without any sort of trial and error,
instantly figuring out how to open the container holding the space rock alien.
Additionally, Ryder's tech, it doesn't just look like the alien tech,
it is instantly compatible with it on more than one occasion.
The space alien's mother is able to hijack the Lookout's communication system with zero effort.
And Ryder's just able to tap into the alien communication system by putting his pup pad into
Super Long Distance Mode!
and it immediately picks up their signal,
almost as if it were specifically designed to be able to do that.
Even without technology,
when they weren't able to make radio contact with the aliens,
Ryder knows exactly how to get their attention,
making a crop circle to signal to them from space.
I mean, the only conclusion that we can take from all this
is that Ryder is somehow in cahoots with these aliens, right?
Or at the very least, that he's aware of them.
And there's a good reason for that.
You see, not only are the Paw Patrol and all these dogs aliens,
Ryder, Ryder is an alien too,
and not only are the Paw Patrol and Ryder aliens,
but every human that you see in this series is also an alien.
Aliens, aliens everywhere, aliens!
Seriously, have you ever noticed that all the humans in this world
have only three fingers and one thumb on their hands?
The fact that this is so consistent tells me that this isn't some weird regional thing
or a quirk of the people living in Adventure Bay.
No, this is a consistent trait across their entire species.
And that's when it clicked for me.
They're all aliens.
And the thing that proves that the humans in this world are also aliens?
In the Mighty Pups special,
we see a shot of the Paw Patrol planet from orbit.
And well, that ain't Earth, friends.
The continent structure that we see in this one screen grab
is unlike anything that we have in our world
or any configuration of the continents that we have ever thought to have existed.
This right here is an alien planet.
Not only are the Paw Patrol ancient aliens,
every single person you see in the series is also an alien.
That's how you get talking puppies and four-fingered humans here.
They're not humans.
That would also explain the dinosaurs.
Yeah, the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs that you could just drive on over and visit.
There's also a Sasquatch in this world.
Bigfoot, where'd he come from?
He must be an alien.
Over in Barkingsburg, there's a literal dragon.
A literal dragon.
Aliens. It's aliens all the way down.
They say all dogs go to heaven.
Ho-ho-ho, no, friends.
All dogs are aliens.
Blue's Clues, alien.
Scooby-Doo, alien.
All dogs descend from the heavens.
Who's a good theory?
You are?
Yeah!
A good film theory.
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