Subscribe!Zot the Dog (1996)
Originally posted on 19 July 2026First episode title: The Tip
How familiar with the show am I?: I vaguely remembered the theme song but with the wrong lyrics, so I didn't even know it was from this show. Or, to put it another way, I didn't know this show.
Zot the Dog is about an imaginative dog and his owner, a boy called Clive, having adventures and encountering other animals. The other animals can talk but Zot just makes noises and says "Woofie!"
Clive and Zot leave their house and encounter a digging mole, who says he's hard at work and accuses the two of them of being lazy, but Clive says that they're actually busy and he and Zot move on. They travel through some farmland and greet some frogs and sheep. Eventually they reach their destination, a tip (you might call it a dump or landfill). They find an old hat which Clive claims for himself, but Zot wants a hat too. They look for something suitable and find a saucepan, so Zot wears it and the two of them dance around. But then they try to get the saucepan off Zot's head and it's stuck. A rat shows up and starts giving suggestions on how to remove it, but they're mean ones like using a hammer, and he mocks Zot's appearance. Zot gets worked up and rolls down towards a tree, which makes the saucepan fly off his head and land over the rat instead, trapping him. Clive takes the opportunity to mock the rat in turn, and suggests whacking the saucepan with a metal bar. Eventually the rat flees, still underneath the saucepan, and Zot finds an old boot to wear as a hat instead.
Zot's imaginativeness is shown through thought bubbles that appear throughout the episode, since he can't actually say his thoughts aloud. For instance, early in the episode, Clive tells Zot to be careful not to step in a puddle, and Zot imagines himself in a goldfish bowl. These thought bubbles do form some of the more interesting animation in the episode.
In contrast, there is some noticeable animation recycling, especially one particular clip of Zot waggling his eyebrows that gets used over and over again.
Looking back once the episode is over, the whole thing with the mole really amounted to nothing. Maybe it was meant to show us something about Clive and Zot's personalities, but it didn't even really do that, and there wasn't a joke or anything to the scene that would justify its inclusion.
One interesting point about the anthropomorphism levels in this show is that Zot can't talk, but when they meet two sheep, a mother and lamb, the mother mentions specifically that the lamb can't talk yet. No-one acknowledges that Zot would probably be expected to talk in a setting like this, unless dogs are some kind of weird exception.
All of the characters are voiced by the same adult man. This means that Clive doesn't sound very child-like a lot of the time. Occasionally, when he laughs, his voice goes weirdly high and squeaky like the guy is really struggling to do a plausible child laugh.
Why are rats always evil? This one is wearing a broken pair of glasses, I guess because he lives in a tip. He also has strangely sharp teeth for a rat.
Oh, and at the end, Clive makes a joke about eating "rat-atouille", a dish that's probably almost more famous for making rat-based puns about than for actually eating.
Well, this show hasn't got a lot going for it, unfortunately. It wasn't terrible, but not a lot actually happened to hold my attention.
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