Once called the “friend of every insomniac in Southern California,” Cal Worthington haunted the nether regions of broadcast programming for more than sixty years. Judging by the frequency of his appearances, their consistency, and their longevity, Worthington might have been the biggest television star in the history of the West. That makes him as much a deity as anything California culture has seen in its short history. But he wasn’t an actor or a journalist or a politician. His church was a chain of car dealerships and his prophesies a series of madcap advertisements. For better or worse, everyone who lived in Southern California had to reckon with him.
Worthington’s long-running series of self-produced spots never deviated from a formula. The slender cowboy—six foot four in beaver-skin Stetsons and a custom Nudie suit—always preceded his hyperactive sales pitch with a gambol through the lot of his Dodge dealership, accompanied by an escalating succession of exotic animals. Originally it was an ape, then a tiger, an elephant, a black bear, and, finally, Shamu, the killer whale from SeaWorld—each of which was invariably introduced as Cal’s dog, Spot. Not once did he appear with a canine. The banjo-propelled jingle (set to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”) exhorted listeners to “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal,” a catchphrase that became the basis for the most infamous mondegreen in Golden State history. To this day, Pussycow remains a nostalgic code word exchanged among Californians who came of age in the era before emissions standards.
Worthington himself became a figurehead for the omnipresence of advertising in modern life; for some, he personified the new, invasive capitalism of the television era. The ads always began with the same hasty introduction—“Here’s Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!”—as though he was always there, hiding behind the curtain of commercial breaks, waiting to ambush us and sell, sell, sell. When Worthington died last month, at ninety-two, it wasn’t shocking because it was sudden but rather because, for the great majority of Californians, Worthington wasn’t someone who appeared on television—he was a character who seemed to live inside television. (...)
In one of his infamous columns for the Los Angeles Free Press, Charles Bukowski pined for his hometown while on a trip to Utah. “No transport, no racetrack, no beer, no Cal Worthington,” he griped. “The general calm madness of Hollywood and Los Angeles will have to wait.” Around the same time, Frank Zappa skewered Worthington in his fifteen-minute rock opera, “Billy the Mountain.” He later said in an interview, “People in fifty years’ time should have documentation of monsters like Cal Worthington.”
A monster? Worthington’s commercials were incessant, but they weren’t insidious and ruthless in the manner of contemporary corporations. “My dog Spot” wasn’t the result of computer-generated market research. Worthington was an improviser who kept a running notepad of ideas on him at all times (presumably it contained a long list of animals), and he broke all of the New York advertising industry’s imperious dictums. His commercials repudiated well-groomed tacticians like David Ogilvy, who once wrote, “It pays to give a product a high class image instead of a bargain basement image. Also you can get more for it.” All told, Worthington sold half a million autos with his personal vision of Western absurdism. Could an Ogilvy idea have done better?
by Sam Sweet, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
