The Case of the Talking Dog

The path of the Media-Saturated Porn Geek is not an easy one. At any moment, the past comes back to haunt you. And not just porn, either. Stuff from 15, 16 years ago that you've suppressed suddenly comes back and bugs the hell out of you. You have to go online to verify that the things you remember even existed. I do this on a daily basis.

Peter Boyle was in my dream last night, and I know why he was there. Last night I was reading a list of the 13 worst ideas for TV shows ever, and I was strongly disagreeing with it. For example, Quark and Bosom Buddies were on it, but Tequila and Bonetti and My Mother The Car were not.

I then did a web search on the cop/talking dog series Tequila and Bonetti and found that there was not only the extremely horrid 1992 CBS series, but the entire damn thing was remade in 2000 for Italian TV. It reminded me of a doomed TV series pilot I saw in 1990 about a cop (Boyle) who is killed in the line of duty, but his soul goes into a stray dog. He then searches out the dead cop's former partner and they solve crimes together. It was called Poochinski, because that conveniently was the dead cop's last name. Poochinski actually talked to his partner, but it's not fair to say that Tequila (the dog) talked to Bonetti (the cop). You could hear what Tequila was thinking, and a lot of the humor came from the fact that he was a black dog, had a big Mr. T-sounding voice, and spoke fluent Jive. Oh, you thought that Bonetti was the dog? Not in TV land, my friends.

T&B apparently ran 12 episodes, with Nick Jack Scalia (who also starred in the 2000 Italian series) as the cop, Brad Sanders as the dog, suicidal actor Charles Rocket as the police captain, WWF wrestler Terry Funk as Sgt. Nuzo, and Jayne Mansfield's daughter Mariska Hargitay (later of Law and Order: SVU) as officer Angela Garcia. Despite her character's Hispanic-sounding name, Hargitay's father was born in Hungary and her hot, yet dead, mother was born in Pennsylvania. Did I mention that Charles Rocket was a member of the 1980-81 Saturday Night Live cast and promising comic who nearly destroyed his own career by saying "fuck" on live TV? After a career of guest-spots and missteps (It's Pat: The Movie, the Max Headroom series), he killed himself in a bizarre fashion in 2005. Oddly enough, he played David Addison (Bruce Willis)'s brother, Richard, on Moonlighting, and later played a character named Charlie Addison on Cybill Shepherd's sitcom Cybill.

These are the thoughts that go through my head, my friends.

Constantly.