How many times have you heard this expression?
“They don’t make them like that anymore.”
It’s an overworked statement that certainly isn’t always true, but I can think of one thing that it fits perfectly.
Cal Worthington’s dog Spot.
No one ever had as many dogs that weren’t dogs as Cal Worthington, maybe the most famous car dealer in the surreal world. He made bizarre yet entertaining television commercials for his used-car lots over roughly half a century. His gimmick was to say at the start of the commercial. “I’m Cal Worthington and this is my dog Spot.”
But the animal with Worthington was never a canine.
The first one, shortly after World War II, was a hippopotamus. Later came lions and tigers and bears …
Oh my.
… gorillas, elephants, chickens and Shamu the killer whale.
The first time I ever saw Cal was in an excerpt from one of his commercials in the 1985 movie “Into the Night.” But it was 1989 in Houston when I first saw one of his commercials — 24 times in three hours.
I was in Houston as a sportswriter, covering the Nevada Wolf Pack at the University of Houston for the Reno Gazette-Journal. It was late on a Saturday night and I was going through a quirky insomnia problem. Essentially, if I had an early morning flight, I found it impossible to sleep the night before.
So I put on the television in my hotel room. One of the local independent station had back-to-back-to-back episodes of “The Outer Limits,” and it was set up to have commercial breaks every 15 minutes. Each of those breaks started and ended with an ad for Worthington’s Houston-area dealerships.
Eight times an hour for three hours.
The same commercial. I don’t remember for certain what the animal was — maybe a tiger — but I do remember that Worthington offered a free cordless phone to everyone who took a test drive. Cordless phones were big then.
I don’t remember ever seeing another Worthington commercial, even in the 20-plus years I lived in Southern California. The two ads I remember the most from my time in Los Angeles (1990-2010) were the guy in La Habra who sold big-screen TVs (“I am the king”) and the fast food place Wiener Schnitzel (“Wienerdude alert, wienerdue alert”),
But nobody was ever better than Cal. No one showed more imagination or poked more fun at himself over as long a period of time.
He lived to be 92 and died 10 years ago.
He has been missed.