When I decided to do an episode on the classic Nicktoons CatDog, one question stood out as the hardest one to answer.
Should I be using dog memes or cat memes? Pun dog or hover cat?
Dancing dog vine or dancing cat vine? How can you choose? You know what? I am hecking bamboozled. Play me off keyboard cat!
*Awesome intro plays*
Hello internet!
Welcome to Film T heory, the show that makes videos out of all those weird thoughts that keep you up at night, like this one.
You know how keyboard cat is a cat that plays the piano?
Well, what would happen if you made a piano, that was made out of cats? Sounds ridiculous?
Well, don't let humanity hear you talking like that, because wonder no longer, internet. It already exists. It's called the Katzenklavier.
It was imagined though, never actually made, by a German scholar back in
1650.
1650! That's right, loyal theorists. Cat pianos, predate
electricity. I'm glad that scholars were working on the questions, that truly mattered, back then. But anyway,
We're here to talk today, about a big part of my childhood, that I'm pretty shocked, I haven't actually done an episode on yet, Nicktoons!
(0nLy oN niCk nIck t0onS)
Gather around the fire youngins, because old DadPat, is here to tell you of a time before cell phones, and the internet, (3000 BC) when the
greatest joy of the weekend, was waking up on a Saturday morning, eating half your body weight and Cap'n Crunch, WITH crunch berries
thank you very much, and turning on Nickelodeon, for a full slate of Nicktoons, hosted by a popsicle stick with googly eyes.
Forget your fancy youtube Flash animators. All you Jaiden's, and Rebecca's, and Domics'.
Do-Domicseye?(wut) We had ourselves a stick! His name was Stick Stickley, and we loved him!
He had a P O box that rhymed with his name. Stick Stickely P O box
963 New York, City New York State, 10108.
He taught me, that I could pick a rose, pick my nose, and oh, yeah, I could also pick Nickelodeon's shows.
Yeah, they BURNED, those rhymes into your head as a kid back then. I am indoctrinated!
Anyway, I loved the Nicktoons, and I related to all the characters in them.
I lived in a dream world, and imagined myself as a superhero like Doug, you know
my superhero didn't wear underwear on his head, because you know,
That's a little showy. No one wants to see those tighty whities!
I was the stick-in-the-mud only child, who never wanted to get into trouble like, Chucky from Rugrats.
though let's be honest with ourselves here. In retrospect
Tommy Pickles was a menace, he was a threat to all those other babies, and honestly to his parents,
and I was tormented by
other kids at school like Arnold, in Hey Arnold. Though I wasn't teased because my head was shaped like a football.
It was just because I was a dork(me too!). But one of the Nicktoons that always
fascinated me the most, at least on a theorist sorta level was CatDog
The show, if you haven't seen it is pretty straightforward.
You've got yourself an animal with a cat's head on one side, and a dog's head on the other side, and a long shared body
in between, like a big wobbly hot dog. cat is a refined intellectual,
and dog is well... He's a doggo. Hijinks Ensue. It's funny. It's weird,
Winslow: "Hey CatDo- oh..."
Winslow: "Nevermind..."
And it got me wondering, all these years later is a cat-dog creature possible?
Now, maybe I'm crazy for thinking this.
I mean it IS a kids cartoon for crying out loud.
But think about it this way. CatDog premiered back in 1998,
And since then, we've had a few massive scientific breakthroughs,
from hybrid cars, to the Human Genome Project, to discovering water on Mars!
I mean, just the other day I learned from a friend, that you can clone your dog for like
20,000 dollars. If that sounds like a lot,
remember you are literally creating a genetic duplicate, of a living creature with scientific technology.
That was only perfected in 1995!
I wonder if I can clone Skip... That would be weird youtuber merch......
*meow*
You can have a Skip of your very own! Saving one for the Holiday Collection...
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned. the only thing stopping CatDog from becoming a reality
is the limitation of our own imagination!
So, today we're gonna play a little Dr. Frankenstein to see just what it would take too make a CatDog.
It would literally be the perfect pet!
You got man's best friend crossed with mans most ambivalent friend...
Mix the two together and you get like... man's most pleasant next door neighbor? I don't know.
Now this episode is, all about the scientific possibility of creating a CatDog.
But I realized! that that starts us off with a pretty big assumption, that a cat dog doesn't already exist!
Do a quick google search, and you'll find that. yeah.
Scientists have "apparently" successfully already bred a cat dog?! Well, that was fast! Good show everybody
See you next week!
But hey! of course, then you notice that the scholarly site you're getting this information from? is called Catster.com
You can't find any record online of the scientists mentioned in their "news article"
quote-unquote and you'll realize that the picture of the cat dog hybrid... looks like it was made in
Microsoft Paint. fake news is everywhere these days! but there is something here worth mentioning.
Which is that rumors of cat dogs, go way back long before
janky blog sites a report in the French publication
Le Mercure Galant. Puts the earliest recorded instance of cat dog, hybridization in
1698 there were other well-publicized incidents from the 1930s and
1970s in which. People claimed to have cross bred, or discovered animals that were part cat, and part dog now
of course
all of these were eventually shot down, as hoaxes. Made by people looking to make a quick buck.
Speaking of people who lie to you to steal your money. It's worth mentioning PT Barnum here. Yeah, the circus guy
Oh sure
We all knew him as the guy who just had that meh movie musical man after him and us
Hardcore musical theater nerds know him as the guy who also has a meh stage musical made after him
But it's important to remember that this is a guy who got famous for doing things like sewing a salmon tail to a monkey
Skeleton to claim that he had found himself. A mermaid clickbait is everywhere ladies and gentlemen all throughout history
Anyway, my point is that the world's been begging for cat dogs for centuries
There's clearly a market for it PT Barnum and the other swindlers weren't able to do it despite what they were claiming. Otherwise
So it's my turn to step up to the plate and give the people what they want the kuppy
it's a cross between kitten puppy it actually it sounds more like a cross between
Kittens and Guppies the Kippy most logical way to create a cat dog
It would seem would be by mating a cat with a dog
Thereby creating a hybrid creature that contains traits of both animals after all that's how we get animals like mules
Ligers and Wholphins which are combo whale dolphins and yeah, all three of those things are real
I mean, it's not like you were questioning that mules were real but ligers and Wholphins
Yeah, I'm like, whoa. Those are real. And yes. Yes, they are. That's one that they don't teach you in kindergarten V is for vulture
W is for what the heck is that frickin nature?
Just when you thought you knew the animal kingdom. Am I right a big part of the reason these cross breeds exist
Is that the animal parents are genetically similar enough to make a viable offspring which we can demonstrate
Using a little bit of Taxonomy. Now
you may remember that science classifies animals in a variety of different categories
Which are kingdom phylum class order family genus species from least specific to most specific if you can't remember that just remember
Kanye prefers coke over flat grape soda because of course
He does flat grape soda is gross. So consider that to make a mule
You need a donkey and a horse which belonged to the same kingdom phylum class order family and genus
Only their species is different with donkeys belonging to equus africanus asinus and horses belonging to Equus ferus
caballus
in the
Evolutionary scheme of things horses and donkeys didn't become different animals until very recently about four to four and a half million years ago cats
And dogs on the other hand are as different as well cats and dogs
They're not nearly as similar biologically considering they only share kingdom phylum class and order then
Separate into the families Philly de for cats and candy de for dogs
Then further separate out from there the common ancestors for cats and dogs existed around
70 million years ago meaning that cat and dog DNA have had that much more time to become different and less
compatible most hybrid animals breed across species and VERY occasionally across genus and very very
very rarely across family or even order so from that very
Theoretical stance a cat dog hybrid would be feasible
But mathematically it's just not gonna happen and create a viable creature. Further adding to the complications
Is that cats and dogs have a different number of chromosomes those little bundles of DNA that mix together when we create offspring now?
I just use mules as an example
And yeah donkeys and horses also don't have the same number of chromosomes
Donkeys have 62 and horses have 64 so mules have 63 extra chromosome. There isn't gonna rock the boat too much though
It should be said that the odd number of chromosomes here means that except in extremely rare cases
Mules are gonna end up infertile. But now let's look at our hypothetical cat dog hybrid here
We're not talking about a two chromosome difference
We're talking about a 40 chromosome difference cats have 38 chromosomes and dogs have 78
Here's the scientific facts that also qualifies as a fun fact
King crabs have themselves over 200 chromosomes, go figure
What exactly would happen to this 58 chromosomes hybrid is purely theoretical
Though when you consider that damage to even a single chromosome in human DNA tends to create a lot of health problems
It's unlikely that a CatDog created this way would have any chance of creating a viable creature let alone surviving being born
All right
so even though we can't create a CatDog the
Old-fashioned way that doesn't necessarily mean we're sunk yet
A number of the show's fans note that cat dogs home town near burg is a bit of a desolate barren wasteland with no people
And only talking animals and whatever Winslow here is they have therefore theorized that it may be a sort of post apocalyptic
radioactive wasteland if so
Maybe cat dog is a mutant
And then all we need to do to create our own is find ourselves a leaky nuclear
reactor history tells us that yea high levels of radiation tends to mess with plants and animals in the surrounding area in the aftermath of
the Chernobyl meltdown local wildlife experienced a number of different mutations mutations
That I'm about to show you and that if you don't want to see now might be a good time to take a 15 second
Vacation down in the comments say hi to everyone else down there who doesn't want to use eye bleach today make yourselves a new friend
everyone scroll down who wanted to scroll down
Fantastic. So in addition to animals that were smaller thinner or misshapen in the wake of this disaster
You also got yourself some really crazy
results in particular animals that had extra body parts
Like just lamb with eight legs and to get a little bit more on-brand with cat dog this donkey with two heads
Genetics and radiation man, it gets weird reminds me of that episode of Bob's Burgers with a goat who has two months anyway
All right, comment crew you can come on back up now
so based on what some of you just saw it would seem like we have proof that radiation can create a
Two-headed animal like cat dog, right?
Well, no again and to understand why we have to get into the science of how these mutations work
You see high levels of radiation tend to damage cellular DNA
This isn't necessarily a problem because DNA has mechanisms to repair itself. But those repairs aren't always exactly right
It's like taking a shirt to the dry cleaners to sew a button back on most of the time they sew the button back on
Perfectly, which would be a metaphor for DNA successfully repairing itself
Sometimes they sewed a button on but it's slightly too high or slightly too low which would be an imperfect but still
Functional repair and then sometimes instead of sewing the button back on the shirt
They like the shirt on fire and cover it in thumbtacks
And that's how you end up with an eight-legged spider sheet at any rate
These mutations can definitely lead to some strange results, but they're not random
You might get the doubling of certain genes that create legs or even heads
but you wouldn't get an
Organism with a separate head far away from the first head besides all of the mutations that you're gonna see affect a single
Organism and to create an animal like cat dog
You're somehow gonna have to splice the cat DNA with a dog DNA which radiation and subsequent mutations
Simply can't do on their own so it strike two for our mad science experiment which leads us to our third and most desperate
Option and it's a dark one. So buckle up
Let's say you're a mad
Scientist who just can't live in a world without cat dogs and knowing that you can't interbreed cats and dogs or use radiation to create
A mutant cat dog you decide to take things into your own hands Human Centipede style by surgically
Creating a cat dog
If you are somehow able to perform the surgery so well that you could merge the two spines and internal organs such that the surgery
Itself was a structural success would this cat dog be able to live?
well
You know how when someone needs an organ transplant you have to do tests to make sure that the possible donor is a match this
Matching system has to do with similarities in the blood and tissues between the donor and the recipient
the more differences there are in those tissues the more likely the body's immune system is gonna recognize that organ is foreign which leads to
the immune system attacking it as though it was
Bacteria or a virus in order to kill it and cats and dogs. Like I've mentioned are genetically different
So it makes sense that they would reject each other, but that's not the case though
It happens only in very rare cases
Cats that have received a single blood transfusion from a dog usually live interestingly enough cats that receive multiple
Transfusions tend to reject the blood the second time which suggests that after an initial transfusion
The cat's body just recognizes it as different from its own blood. It's a weird little phenomenon
But yeah on the cat's side
it is perfectly viable dogs on the other hand have a very difficult time receiving organ donations at all cats or
otherwise because the canine immune system tends to attack any tissues that aren't
Direct relatives a dog's immune system literally acts just like a dog. It's overeager. It barks at everything
it's adorable to think about until you consider that it makes
Biological treatment of sick dogs really really hard and then it becomes really sad anyway for the first time ever
It's not the cat's fault. The cat's immune system would potentially allow it to happen
it's the dog that would make this impossible surgery even more impossible and that leaves us with um,
No, crossbreeding no nuclear fallout not even mad science is gonna create a cat dog at the end of the day
We're just stuck with the glory that is dog O's and flutes. So I ask again. What's that?
Leave us with the cartoon I guess which honestly ain't too shabby and making it even better. Is that lucky for us cat dog?
And a bunch of other Nicktoons are available for you to watch right now on Vrv
Oh, yeah
if you have a craving to revisit the simpler times of your childhood or honestly if you're too young and missed out on some of
The best shows to ever air on television ever verve has all sorts of must-see NIC splat shows dog
Real monsters Nick arcade where you actually go into a video game and shows that you won't believe that they actually showed the kids back
In the 90s like Rocko's Modern Life. Seriously, if you have never seen Rocko's Modern Life, just watch it
And remember this was meant to be a show for kids
in fact
if you watch it come back to this video and let me know what you thought about it because
Whoo?
Boy times have changed what is acceptable for kids to watch has?
Changed then VRV also has incredible nostalgic game shows like double dare
Mm global guts where spoiler alert the purple team never wins
and what is to this day still on my bucket list of life running through a game of
Legends of the Hidden Temple to pin it down in the comments. Were you a red?
jaguar, purple parrot blue Barracuda or silver snake
If you are an orange iguana or a green monkey, you need not apply if you're eager for even more nostalgia
They also have freakazoid and Thundercats all of this and more courtesy of VRV where you can get a 30-day free
trial of VRV premium
You heard that right free a VRV premium which gives you ad free access to 13 channels
including crunchyroll Funimation and cartoon hangover because seriously
Why would you not want to follow up an angry beavers binge with Dragon Ball super and my hero?
akka all in premium HD
All of it is available on verb get that 30 day free trial of Verve premium
Which includes all those shows and the ability to watch on the go with no internet connection by going to Verve dotco
Slash Matt hat. That's a VR veto /m
ATP 80
Seriously guys get yourself some nick. Nick. Nick. Nick. Nick. Nick. Nick nickelodeon
Only now in the modern age in the convenience of your pocket or computer or TV or pretty much any other digital device
Where you want to watch something now play me off keyboard cat and remember. That's just a theory
film theory and
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