Fear works in mysterious ways, and some instances of logo-induced cold sweats are somewhat easier to rationalise than others. If you squint, then it isn't hard to suppose why The S From Hell, the fiendish combination of abstract, alien animation and the screechiest, tinniest synths around should have inspired such unbridled terror among a young generation of unsuspecting Monkees viewers. But how about a logo pivoting around a tender moment of heartfelt bonding between an endearing pet and their doting owner? Can that too be transformed into the building blocks of a few extraordinarily uncanny nightmares? Oh, logophobia finds a way. Here we have the case of Ubu, the frisbee-toting Francophile labrador. Our ears told us that he was a good dog, but our eyes sure as heck didn't see the evidence.
Ubu Roi the dog (so named for the Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi) was the beloved companion of television producer Gary David Goldberg, whose credits include such series as Family Ties, Brooklyn Bridge and Spin City. In 1982, Goldberg formed his own production company, Ubu Productions, named in honor of his faithful pooch, and Ubu's likeness graced the ending of all associated programs. The image, which showed Ubu standing in a park with a frisbee clasped between his jaws, was taken at the Tuileries Garden, near the Louvre Museum in Paris, while Goldberg was embarking on an extended hitch-hiking trip across Europe with Ubu and wife Diana, a journey detailed by Goldberg in his 2008 autobiography Sit Ubu Sit: How I Went From Brooklyn To Hollywood With The Same Woman, The Same Dog And A Lot Less Hair. The Goldbergs, both card-carrying members of the 1960s hippie movement, had set out on the trip when Richard Nixon's being voted into office left them feeling alienated by the shifting cultural mood of the US, a disillusionment which Gary was later able to convert into prime-time mirth when he returned and created Family Ties, the early 1980s sitcom that gave a pre-Back To The Future Michael J Fox his big break. Apart from those select European motorists who had the privilege of having Ubu ride upfront with them back during the Goldbergs' days of wanderlusting, the world knew the dog as only a static image that appeared at the end of Family Ties and successive productions, accompanied by a disembodied voice (courtesy of Goldberg himself) commanding the dog to sit, and subsequently praising him just before the dog barked in affirmation. In an interview given by Goldberg in 2007, he explained what the image of the frisbee-gnawing Ubu, by now a familiar icon to anyone who paid heed to the chattering cyclops over the past two and a half decades, had always signified to him personally:
"We were hitchhiking up to Brussels and Diana had snapped that picture. I just thought, you know, I want very little distance between who I was that day and who I am now. I just don’t want a lot of distance there. So it was really nice to have that logo to always remind you who you are."
No doubt that there is an awful lot of love in that logo. And in theory it's all very charming. The man was so infatuated with his dog that he not only named his production company after him, he immortalised him in a logo in which he informed the world what a great dog he was. In practice...it's a little spooky. I think the eeriness of the logo is rooted in the disconnect between what we hear and what we see. Ubu is depicted as a motionless image; ergo he does not actually obey the commands of the offscreen Goldberg (who praises him regardless). The sounds suggest life, motion and interaction, but the visuals give us only inertia, and that leaves us with this unsettling, almost sickly sensation. Ubu's apparent disobedience has provided inspiration for parodies, including an episode of Robot Chicken in which an offscreen Seth Green loses his cool with the unresponsive dog and puts a bullet in him, followed by the sounds of a dog whimpering.
It will not surprise you to learn that Ubu is by now long dead, having passed away in 1984. He enjoyed an enviable afterlife in this production logo, but perhaps there is something vaguely haunting about it too. Much like Sassy the cat, doomed to hang in there in her nightmarish struggle against gravity for all eternity, Ubu remains suspended his is state of inertia, and by extension disobedience, subject to the commands of his master but unable to act on them. We have only the image of a deceased dog, so stiff and stationary that he might as well be a work of taxidermy, and the sounds of a loving moment of interaction between master and pet that once might have been. There is no starker reminder that Ubu is gone and haunted images are all that remain. Time has distilled Ubu, the dog who once hitch-hiked across Europe and played frisbee outside the Louvre, to a flat image and robbed him of his ability to demonstrate that he is indeed a good dog. But maybe there's something heartening about it too. After all, the disembodied voice of Goldberg doesn't care whether or not Ubu can actually make good on his commands to sit. He loves him regardless. Ubu is a dog with absolutely nothing that he needs to prove.
Goldberg himself passed away in 2013, aged 69. So this truly is a haunted logo. We have an image from a bygone era, set to the sounds of two departed souls interacting as they would have done some time long ago. Goldberg said that he set out to preserve a sense of who he was on the day that picture was taken and to stay connected to it no matter where he ended up in all subsequent chapters of his life, and that moment continues to echo within the collective psyche of a generation of TV viewers. But of course, we're only onlookers. We can't actively participate in the moment. All we can do is filter it through our own (slightly nonplussed) cultural memories, and bask in the uncanny knowledge that, for decades, our prime-time viewing habits were haunted by the lingering presence of a spectral labrador with the unsettling inability to ever lower his behind.
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