Today’s Zippy:
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The Doggie of (the alliterative) Doggie Diner is a repeated character in Zippy, seen most recently on this blog here, in connection with compounds in face, like face work and Facebook. From Wikipedia:
Doggie Diner is a small fast food restaurant chain serving hot dogs and hamburgers in San Francisco and Oakland, California that operated from 1948 to 1986, owned by Al Ross. The first location of Doggie Diner was opened in Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue during World War II and grew in popularity. At one point in history there were 30 locations around the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly concentrated in San Francisco. The chain went out of business in 1986 after trying to compete with big chain restaurants such as McDonald’s and Burger King. Its founder Al Ross died in 2010 at the age of 93.
The most notable feature of the Doggie Diner chain was the 7 ft tall fiberglass sign, of a large rotating head of a grinning dachshund dog, wearing a bow tie and a chef’s hat. These famous dog head signs were designed in 1965 or 1966 by Harold Bauchman. After the Doggie Diner went out of business, all the large dog head signs were taken down, many were resold to private parties. One of the dog signs is currently located at Sloat Boulevard at 45th Avenue on a median strip near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and the San Francisco Zoo in the Outer Sunset neighborhood, restored and refurbished by the city of San Francisco. On August 11, 2006, the Doggie Diner dog head became a San Francisco landmark No. 254.
Popular culture: In December 2000, The Doggie Diner head was featured in Zippy The Pinhead comics as “the doggie” in grassroots effort to save the heads. Zippy frequently participated in his long-running conversation with the giant fiberglass doggie mascot. In 2004 Laughing Squid, a San Francisco website sponsored three of the dog heads, named Manny, Moe & Jack, as the ‘Holy Dogminican Order’ to take the dog heads cross-country for an art show in NYC. In 2013, Yarn artist Olek crocheted bright colored yarn over three of the dog heads as an art piece.
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(And then there are the pop food references, beyond Doggie Diner: Poppin’ Fresh, Mister Softee, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.)
July 9, 2021 at 2:33 pm |
[…] a repeating character in Zippy, and the two are usually quite loquacious with one other — in my 12/27/13 posting “Doggie Diner”, they are in fact in a relationship — but so far in this strip, […]