Old Yeller Dog Food

Every movie has a one- or two-line precis that people — whether they've seen the film or not — can use to sum up 110 minutes of plot in four seconds. Indiana Jones is where the guy with the fedora and the whip loots ancient ruins. ET is where the wrinkly alien eats Reese's Pieces. Battlefield Earth is where John Travolta finally wins his lifelong battle against his own career.

And Old Yeller is the movie where they shoot the dog.

That's it. Dog. Gun. Blam. No more dog. Dog dead. Kids in audience crying. Lesson learned: Don't ever love anything, because it will die, or, worse, you will actually have to kill it yourself.

Those who have seen the film or read the book can speak up for the movie's warmer moments, such as when the dog fights the bear, or the kid loves the dog, or the dog starts the hedge fund or whatever else it was that the dog did exactly.

But try suggesting that your relationship with your grandmother is a lot like that of the kid and the dog in Old Yeller. People won't remember the bond of respect and love that united Travis and the scrappily lovable mutt; they'll think you're planning to take Grandma out behind the barn to ease her passage into the netherworld with the help of a 10-gauge shotgun.

Therefore: You should not name your dog food "Old Yeller," even if your company owns the merchandising rights, and you're stumped for other things to do with the name. (The Old Yeller line of energy drinks? Not a massive commercial success.)

The crux of the problem is this: We like to imagine our pets will be with us always, to the point of assuming that they'll be considerately stored for us by God in Heaven, having them freeze-dried, and, in our dystopian times, having them cloned.

But how can someone possibly purchase Old Yeller brand dog food without thinking about taking their own beloved pet — Scrappy or Macintosh or Professor Sparks or whatever — behind the garage for a gunpowder assisted dance with the reaper?

And how can such a morbid line of thought possibly be good for sales of dog food?

It probably can't be. The official press release announcing the brand's creation sort of skipped over the whole dead animal thing:

Implied, but not actually said by Mr. Vance: "Also, we are really, really hoping that no one remembers how the movie ends. Or that anyone thinks the dog food is actually made of dogs who met sad endings, as exemplified by Old Yeller himself. But that second scenario seems like kind of a weird stretch."

Cannibal dogs, the inevitable mortality of everything we love, and the cruel necessity of deadly violence in an imperfect world: all good elements of a distinctive but not entirely successful brand of dog chow. Here's to Old Yeller dog food, as long as it manages to stick around on God's green Earth.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)