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Get Fuzzy is an American daily comic strip written and drawn by Darby Conley. The strip features the day-to-day adventures of Boston advertising executive Rob Wilco and his two anthropomorphic pets: cat Bucky Katt and dog Satchel Pooch. Get Fuzzy has been published by United Media Syndicate since September 1999. It appears in over 200 newspapers nationwide. It is also in the developing stages of becoming a movie.
Characters
Main
Satchel Pooch
A simple, friendly, and easily amused dog. His father, a Yellow Lab, is a retired guide dog. His mother is a Shar Pei. Satchel's parents live in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia.
Satchel is kind, gentle, and sympathetic. These traits, coupled with his naïvete and gullibility, make him a natural target for the scheming Bucky. Although he often seems oblivious to his own exploitation, Satchel occasionally expresses frustration towards Bucky and his hostile attitude. He seems to have forgotten that dogs are traditionally the natural aggressor in relationships between dogs and cats, and in fact, intimidation appears to be completely alien to the affable and easygoing dog. He has only threatened Bucky with violence once, and that was due to Bucky insulting Satchel's friends, rather than anything aimed at Satchel directly.
Satchel's jokes tend to deliver either a pun comment or the strip's punch line Both are usually preceded by his laughter. His jokes often involve him not fully understanding an idea.
Satchel's personality serves as foil to that of Bucky's: easy to please, optimistic to the extreme, and perfectly content to peacefully coexist with everyone. He is good friends with Bucky's nemesis, Fungo Squiggly.
True to his character, Satchel takes a neutral position in the ongoing sports feud between professed New York Yankees fan Bucky and rabid Boston Red Sox fan Rob. Satchel says he likes the Chicago Cubs. Satchel is also very proud of his Canadian heritage, taking the time to watch Queen Elizabeth II whenever the monarch is on television. He is a Harry Potter enthusiast, and was once the flustered victim of a spoiler filled conversation between Rob and Bucky regarding Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. As a fan of the Harry Potter series, Satchel displays a Hufflepuff poster in his room, a house affiliation that naturally suits the loyal and friendly, but not too bright, dog. Naturally, Satchel is also a supporter of animal rights.
Although Satchel cannot tell time, he wears a watch he calls "Handy." Though the watch was destroyed in an accident with a bicycle, it was later found and repaired by Bucky. Satchel then received a digital watch for Christmas that he named "Dingy" (then called "Beepy"), though he is still unable to tell time with it. In addition to the watch, Satchel names everything from the carpet to a lamp after what they are.
Bucky Katt
An incredibly egotistical Siamese cat. Bucky is selfish, cynical, and lazy. Bucky's personality is demonstrated by the fact that his ears are nearly always laid back flat on his head in a defiant and aggressive manner. This appearance is intentionally drawn by Darby Conley. Rather than having his own room, as Satchel does, Bucky lives in a dresser located in the hall closet of Rob Wilco's apartment.
The name Bucky has several possible origins. Bucky has only one upper cuspid. It has been mentioned twice that Bucky actually knocked out his own tooth in a fight. Rob's friend Joe Doman has mentioned, however, that sports fanatic Rob named him after legendary baseball player Buck O'Neil. Others believe he is named after the legendary Yankees player Bucky Dent. However, this may be somewhat unlikely, since Rob is a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, who would probably not name his cat after one of the "Stinkin' Yanks".
Bucky is frequently depicted as possessing an abundance of disagreeable feline traits, such as his antisocial tendencies, delight in random destruction and violence, hostility, and self-centeredness.
Bucky continually finds ways to antagonize and annoy Rob and Satchel. For instance, Bucky claims to be a fan of the "Yankers" (Yankees), only because Rob Wilco is an ardent Red Sox fan. He taunts Rob when the Red Sox play poorly, but knows little about baseball. Although he professes a lack of interest in the Harry Potter series, Bucky has read the books, and even took part in a spoiler-filled discussion of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with Rob regarding the allegiance of Severus Snape. Bucky seems to like Slytherin because Satchel is a fan of Hufflepuff House. In addition, Bucky fits the house qualifications of being an ambitious and cunning pure blooded (siamese) animal.
Bucky delights in trying to deflate Satchel's rosy outlook on life. He seldom succeeds, because Satchel is not sharp enough for his withering sarcasm. Satchel is also often unaware that he is being insulted.
Three obsessions dominate Bucky's life: trying to kill Fungo Squiggly the ferret who lives next door, his desire to eat a monkey, and wanting a movie made about him. None of these goals has any reasonable rationale behind it, and he fails brilliantly in his repeated attempts to fulfill them. Fungo routinely disrupts Bucky's schemes, and the single encounter he had with a monkey resulted in the chimp trying to peel Bucky like a banana.
Bucky owns a plastic bear named "Smacky". Bucky obtained his plastic bear after refusing to exchange toys with Satchel at a McDoodles resturaunt, even though they each had the toy the other had wanted. It is one of the few objects to which Bucky seems to care for. In one story line, Fungo Squiggly demanded possession of Smacky to guarantee the safe return of Bucky's autobiography, which the ferret had previously stolen. Bucky tried to trick Fungo by giving him a "fake" Smacky, but instead of getting back the book Bucky was writing, Fungo gave Bucky "The Collected Works of Ira Gershwin" book instead. Bucky owns two other bears called "Cracker" and "Punk," but they do not appear often.
Bucky also owns a ragged doll named "Ms. Pretty". She has only been seen once, but is occasionally mentioned. Bucky carries the doll in a backpack when he goes outside.
Despite his lack of sensitivity, Bucky cares deeply for Smacky and Ms. Pretty. He was also distressed when Rob washed his blanket, and when Rob threw out his dead piscine friend, Smell E. Fish.
In addition, although he feels the need to maintain an 'alley cat' image, Bucky occasionally reveals a kitten-like nature; in one strip, Rob flips on the light during the night to discover Bucky 'snuggling'. He once voluntarily fixed Satchel's watch. After the September 11 attacks, Bucky was badly shaken; while Rob and Satchel left to donate blood, he decorated the apartment with thankful balloons and signs, and baked some cookies for them to show his appreciation.
Bucky often calls Rob "Pinky," referring to Rob's shameful lack of fur and skin color. At other times he calls him "Robert", "Robbo", and "Wilco," rarely using his preferred title, "Rob."
Very little has been revealed about Bucky's birth and early life. Rob once mentioned that he found Bucky huddled on a trash can, while the cat only a few weeks old, in Hackensack, New Jersey. While Bucky's father has never been mentioned, Bucky gave his mother's maiden name on a credit card application as "Tricky Woo", possibly after a canine character in All Creatures Great and Small. One comic shows early "baby pictures" of a young Bucky clinging to Satchel.
Bucky's and Satchel's personalities are extreme stereotypes of cats and dogs. Bucky is cruel, self-centered, and aloof, while Satchel is sweet, trusting, and at times quite naïve (Bucky once sold Satchel his own Nerf football by writing "Sooper" above "Nerf" to make it a "Sooper Nerf"). Rob, the middleman, is often frazzled from dealing with them, or more specifically, from dealing with Bucky's destructive nature and overall nastiness.
Rob Wilco
"Owner" of Satchel and Bucky. Works in advertising, but not proud of it. Vegetarian, Leo Kottke fan, and a Boston Red Sox fanatic. He's also a big rugby union fan, a fact that's quite interesting, considering the sport's relative obscurity in the US, and Rob's rather un-rugby-like physique and personality. Rob also enjoys video games. He serves as the straight man between Satchel's goofy naïveté and Bucky's cynical hostility.
Rob is portrayed as a bit of an everyman: a mediocre performer in a job he dislikes, not particularly successful romantically, and an all-around relatively quiet guy with a bad haircut and chronic lower back pain. His passions, which often border on obsessions, include sports (particularly the Boston Red Sox and rugby), video games, and books. Rob is often shown reading, usually while in bed. He is also a vegetarian due to what he feels are too cruel methods of killing the animals (he occasionally lapses from time to time, and he ate meat much more often in the beginning of the strip). He seems to particularly like the Harry Potter series, as does Satchel.
Many of Rob's interests are displayed visually rather than mentioned. From the t-shirts, hats, posters, and books variously seen in the strip, it can be assumed that Rob also likes the New Zealand rugby union team, South Doyle High School Track (Knoxville, Tennessee), Irish Rugby Team, Québec Nordiques, Otago, New Zealand NPC rugby team, MXC, science fiction, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Marine Corps, and the music of Leo Kottke, Green Day, Ween, Pink Floyd, and Sprouts (a reference to Darby Conley's brother's band).
Rob's back has put him out of commission for two extended periods in the strip's history. On both occasions, Bucky used the opportunity to steal Rob's wallet and establish his own dominion over the household.
Despite having love troubles of his own, Rob has helped Satchel deal with his own love problems.
Rob is a sports fan, and it is alleged by his friend that he named both pets after stars of baseball's Negro Leagues – Buck O'Neil and Satchel Paige. Coincidentally, Bucky also has only a single fang, his "buck" tooth. An alternate theory is that Bucky is named after late 1970s New York Yankees outfielder Bucky Dent who hit a game-winning home run against the Boston Red Sox in a tie-breaking playoff game to determine the American League Eastern Division champion in 1978. This would make sense, since Rob is a Boston Red Sox fan and Bucky is Rob's constant foil. However, this has not been explored in the strip, but it should be noted that at one point Bucky damaged a Taylor Guitar, causing what Bucky called a "Bucky dent". Rob has been rumored to be named after two friends of Conley's graduating class at Doyle High School (now South-Doyle High School) in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Supporting
Other characters that appear occasionally:
Joe Doman
Rob's friend and co-worker, one of the few people who actually gets along reasonably well with Bucky. He also watched over them for a few occasions in the comic. Occasionally he compliments Bucky. He once stated that Bucky was a sort of athlete because of the reckless destruction he caused.
Francis Wilco
Rob's father, a retired firefighter who reluctantly "babysits" Bucky and Satchel from time to time.
Roger Wilco
Rob's brother, who visited to help Rob when Rob injured his back in 2005. He had made a previous, silent appearance in the strip shortly after September 11, 2001, when he was shown with Rob and his father at a memorial service for firefighters killed in the attacks. His name is a pun on "roger, wilco", a phrase from 1940s naval radio code meaning "message received, will comply."
William (Wilco?)
Rob's cousin, who lost a leg in the Iraq war. An uncharacteristically serious story arc showed Rob meeting his plane when he returned home.
Fungo Squiggly
A neighboring ferret whom Bucky intensely dislikes. The two frequently engage in fights which leave Satchel, Fungo's friend, in the middle. The fighting (which Bucky instigates most of the time) once resulted in the cat suing Fungo on the Judge Judy show.
When a new family moved into the apartment next door to Rob, they introduced Fungo as their pet. The amiable Satchel made friends with the newcomer easily, but Bucky immediately regarded him as a mortal enemy. Although he whispers in Satchel's ear on occasion, Fungo does not speak audibly in the strip.
Bucky's attempts to defeat and/or humiliate Fungo almost invariably backfire rather badly. For example, Bucky once tried to trap the ferret in a crude snare. Fungo yanked on the rope, causing Bucky to smack into a wall and lose two teeth: his trademark cuspid and a smaller tooth. To add insult to injury, Fungo wears the smaller tooth on a necklace. (Bucky's "fang" was reattached at great expense, and a gold tooth inserted to replace the other.) Other plots have had similarly unintended consequences, such as Fungo's kidnapping of Bucky's beloved toy Smacky (twice). One memorably misguided attempt involved Bucky throwing a baseball at a ferret he took to be Fungo; the ball struck Fungo's mother and knocked her down a laundry chute. Another instance was when Bucky destroyed a large portion of a wall in an attempt to get Fungo once and for all. However, all that Bucky got was a chunk of plaster to the head.
No explanation is ever given for Bucky's intense hatred for Fungo, save that Fungo seemed a bit aggressive in their first meeting. Bucky may mistake the mustelid for some sort of rodent, or the enmity may be as inexplicable as his desire to consume a monkey. Perhaps it is simply another by-product of Bucky's boundless hostility towards the world in general. In any case, many (but not all) of Fungo's aggressions toward Bucky are simply reactions to the cat's attempted assaults, as Fungo does not seem to go looking for trouble.
Chubby Huggs
A portly cat who believes that positive reinforcement, mostly through hugs, solves all problems, and one of the few beings that scare Bucky.
Laura
A character that appeared early in the strip's history. Sweet, friendly, and far too optimistic in anything related to Bucky, she served as a love interest for Rob, but vanished from the strip early on.
Books & Treasuries
Books:
- The Dog Is Not a Toy (Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 15, 2001; ISBN 0740713922)
- Fuzzy Logic (Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 1, 2002; ISBN 0740721984)
- The Get Fuzzy Experience (Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 2, 2002; ISBN 0740733001)
- Blueprint for Disaster (Andrews McMeel Publishing, October 1, 2003; ISBN 0740738089)
- Say Cheesy, A Get Fuzzy Collection (Andrews McMeel Publishing, May 28, 2005; ISBN 0740746634)
- Scrum Bums (Andrews McMeel Publishing, March, 2007; ISBN 0740750011)
Treasuries: (contain two books in one binding with some color strips)
- Groovitude (Andrews McMeel Publishing, September 2, 2002; ISBN 0740728946) - contains The Dog Is Not a Toy and Fuzzy Logic
- Bucky Katt's Big Book of Fun (Andrews McMeel Publishing, April 2004; ISBN 0740741365) - contains The Get Fuzzy Experience and Blueprint for Disaster
Other: There is a variety of gift books, calendars, wall calendars, etc available.
Reception and awards
Initially appearing in 75 newspapers nationally, the strip grew in popularity very quickly.
Conley received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 2002 for his work on Get Fuzzy.
Negative reactions
Pittsburgh
Many residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania reacted angrily to an October 30, 2003 strip. When Bucky asks a travel agent for suggested destinations "based primarily on smell," the agent promptly produces a brochure from the Pittsburgh board of tourism. This was originally intended as an "in-joke" jab at a friend who lives in the Pittsburgh area. Conley later confessed shock over the large volume of hate mail and even death threats he received in response, and Pittsburgh city officials publicly denounced the strip.
An apology promised by Conley took a rather unexpected form. The November 17, 2003 strip questions why the Pittsburgh joke caused such an uproar and archly notes that several protesters rather hypocritically stated that New Jersey smelled worse than Pittsburgh. Satchel closes the strip by explaining that the original strip "should have made it more clear that it was (nearby borough) Sewickley Heights that smells" . Unsurprisingly, this "apology" failed to appease many of those who had complained.
Bob Lobel
A strip published on May 13, 2005 resulted in legal action. In the original strip, Rob, Bucky and Satchel are watching television. Satchel asks "Is this sportscaster... drunk?" Rob replies "Lobel? Who knows. He's like some TV outreach program or something." This is despite the fact that it has been reported elsewhere that Lobel is known to drink and has appeared on air in an intoxicated state.
Less than a week later, Boston sportscaster Bob Lobel filed a libel lawsuit against Conley, United Features Syndicate, and the New Bedford Standard-Times newspaper. (The New Bedford paper was named specifically because it did not censor the strip as several other Boston-area papers did, including The Boston Globe; most either refused to run the strip or substituted "Him?" in place of Lobel's name.) The lawsuit claimed that the strip was both personally and professionally damaging, especially given that his contract was under negotiation for renewal at the time.
On Nov. 16, 2005, a brief article in the Boston Herald reported that Lobel and Conley had settled the suit out of court. Conley made a public apology to Lobel, saying the strip was not intended to imply that he had been drunk on the air. Further details of the settlement were confidential, but the Herald quoted an unnamed source as saying Conley had made a substantial donation to charity.
Notable storylines
- In May 2002, the strip featured a range of absurd characters "From the Rejected Characters File" in a non-narrative, single-panel format (e.g., "#8: Norton, the Self-Conscious Skunk" and "#26: Snatch McGrubber, the Klepto-Manatee").
- During July-August 2002, Bucky took Fungo to court on the Judge Judy show for breaking his tooth (a baseless claim, since the injury had occurred while Bucky was attempting to trap Fungo). After several weeks of leadup to the trial, Judy made short work of Bucky's claim in her trademark caustic style, and Bucky re-broke his tooth when making a lunge at Fungo afterward.
- During the week of April 17, 2006, Conley "plagiarized" the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. The Get Fuzzy storyline showed Conley mistakenly receiving a week's worth of Pearls strips drawn by Stephan Pastis. He then pasted stock images of the Get Fuzzy characters over the characters in Pearls and ran the strips as his own. The week ended with Conley blocking Pastis' number from his cell phone.