SPEAKER_14: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft, breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and T-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is a rebroadcast of one of our favorite episodes of all time. If you haven't heard it before, you're in for a real treat. Even if you have heard it before, you should listen again because it is really great. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On any given day, there are a few different kinds of songs rattling around in my head. Some are just classics like literal classics. Then there are songs that are just in there that are my own favorite songs that have carved out a space in my brain because I listen to them over and over and over. That's the song Solidarity by the band Scream. Oh, that song is so good. And then there's this other category of memorable songs, the ones that we all just kind of know, songs that somehow, without anyone's permission, snuck their way into our collective unconscious and now are just lingering there for all eternity. These songs aren't necessarily good, but they usually have some undeniably catchy quality to them, a hook that worms its way into our brains and never leaves. Like this one. But I think there's one song in the last 25 years that exemplifies this phenomenon more than any other. It's a song that I think nearly every one of you will recognize. It is not my favorite.
SPEAKER_14: You did not ask for it, dear listener, but today's entire episode is devoted to who let the dogs out. Don't go. I swear it'll be good because this is the story about how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains. And it's actually really complicated. And it goes back decades and spans continents. And in the end, I think it tells us something important about inspiration and how creativity spreads and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. To tell the story, we have brought in the world's foremost expert on who let the dogs out.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's an undisputed title.
SPEAKER_14: This is Ben Sisto. And about 10 years ago, Ben was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song Who Let the Dogs Out by the Baja Men. And I noticed this like missing citation.
SPEAKER_02: The Wikipedia entry said that the Baja Men didn't actually write the song, but that a British hairdresser named Keith had heard it on a trip to Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, and that he passed it along to music producers.
SPEAKER_14: But it was all very vague. And that made Ben curious, so curious that he spent the next 10 years trying to figure out the answer to what seems like a pretty straightforward question. Who wrote Who Let the Dogs Out?
SPEAKER_02: And I just kind of got this journalism bug. So I just kept asking people who let the dogs out. And here we are a decade later.
SPEAKER_14: Our story begins in the year 2000 with the release of that song by the Baja Men. I know exactly where I was the first time I heard this song. I saw a game at Pacbel Park. It was what it was called then to see the Giants play. And before the game, the Baja Men came out, played this song. I'd never heard it before. I'd never heard of the Baja Men. It might have been already a hit, but it seemed like everyone already knew it. And even if you'd never heard it before, you kind of feel you know the song already. Like it has a kind of like Jungian text kind of quality to it. So who are the Baja Men?
SPEAKER_02: So Baja Men are a really hardworking, multi-generational band from the Bahamas. And they've been playing together in one form or another since the 70s. They started off as a group called High Voltage, sort of playing resorts around the islands. And they've always been known for this style called junkanoo. And that's the music associated with like a street parade by the same name. You can think big bright costumes, hundreds of steel drums and cowbells and goatskin drums. Just like a big party. And this is kind of like the scene that Baja Men are part of. They were signed by a young A&R guy, Steve Greenberg. And he stayed with them across multiple labels and break-even releases. And Steve actually ends up being the guy who convinces them to record Who Let the Dogs Out.
SPEAKER_11: The song had a really amazing hook. And I say, one of these days I'm going to figure out how to do this. You know, do this song right. Because there's something here. And I just never forgot about the song. I knew that the Baja Men were the people who I wanted to record the song. They just made sense to me. And in fact, I used to keep a diary. And I wrote in my diary, I'm going to record that song, Who Let the Dogs Out, with the Baja Men, and have a big hit all over the world, I'm certain.
SPEAKER_02: This sounds kind of crazy in retrospect. But Baja Men were like, no thanks. The song was already a hit in that area. And they just didn't think it would be a good look to cover something everybody already knew. I didn't want to do the song.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I have to give Steve credit. I'm not going to ask you to do anything else, just one song. And hey, I said, Steve, conversation is finished. We will do the song. I'm extremely happy that we did.
SPEAKER_14: So why did their producer Steve care so much about the song? I think Steve's just one of these guys who knows a hit when he hears it.
SPEAKER_02: Steve's also given, for better or worse, he's given the world acts like Hanson. And if there's a song that's going to play well in stadiums and on Disney, yeah, he just knows. So you said the song was already a hit in the Bahamas.
SPEAKER_14: Is that where he heard it originally, Steve? Yeah, so Steve heard the song via Keith Wainwright, who's like my original kind of Wikipedia mystery guy.
SPEAKER_02: And Steve Greenberg kind of instantly knew that there was like something special about the hook. And that kind of led to him deciding to pitch it to Baja Men.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So Steve hears the song, likes the song. Well, doesn't really like the song, but likes the hook of the song. So who wrote the hook?
SPEAKER_02: To find that out, it's the late 90s. So Steve went and, as someone did in the late 90s, asked Jeeves. He went to the website and said, Jeeves, who let the dogs out. And this led Steve to a message board where people were discussing their vacations and music played at Carnival. And this is where Steve first learns that this track is cut by a guy named Anselm Douglas. I'm still amazed that after 20 years, it's still out there and playing and new kids, a new generation is growing up on it.
SPEAKER_06: If you don't know the song, who let the dogs out, you were living under a rock. Think about it. What are the songs you know been out there for 20 years and kids, every child knows it.
SPEAKER_02: So Douglas, who's actually already a known name in the Bahamas music scene. And he wanted to use his platform to write kind of a feminist anthem, like a song that could be this rallying cry for women who are fed up with the dogs, men behaving poorly on the dance floor. So do you want to, we can take a listen? Yeah, to his version.
SPEAKER_14: That is the song. That's it. Wow. I mean, that seems very clear. So Anselm Douglas like wrote that hook and that's the thing we think of when we think of this song, Who Let the Dogs Out. Although I love the arrangement actually. Yeah, I do too.
SPEAKER_02: And you know, Douglas is obviously more in like the soca calypso tradition and it's more like a, you know, take off your shirt, take off your towel, whip it at like a high BPM. And the Baja Man is this like Americanized hip hop influence. But the Baja Man version retains this like junk a new undertone, which was really important as far as crossover movements for the genre. So when it comes to the question, who let the dogs out? The answer is Anselm Douglas.
SPEAKER_14: Not quite.
SPEAKER_02: Douglas wrote doggy, but it really wasn't like his idea alone. I never told anyone, hey, I came up with the phrase never did because I didn't, you know, I know that my brother in law was the one who said, hey, you got to do the song.
SPEAKER_06: You got to do the song. Who let the dogs out? I said, all right, now we'll do it. You know, so he was the one who encouraged me to do it. So I give him that credit because he was the one who said, do the song. So Douglas's former brother in law was the host of this DJ mix show, Wreck Shop Radio out of Toronto.
SPEAKER_02: And two of that show's producers were these guys, Patrick Steffensen and LaRoy Williams, who, you know, they were like writing promos and jingles for it. And one of those jingles contained the phrase who let the dogs out, followed by the sound of dogs barking. And this is late 95, early 96. At the front of the office, I used to go, who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_05: And Maurice would be out there and he'd go, who let the dogs out? And I'd go, who let the dogs out? And you'd hear the warehouse go, who let the dogs out? And then we brought that and Patrick was like, put that all together. That's how that vibration came out. It was very hard to track these guys down, but after years of begging and calling and DMing, they eventually produced these original recordings.
SPEAKER_02: Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, so that's really it. That's the chorus right there. That's it. Wow.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, that's the hook. But this part kind of gets a little fuzzy because, well, one, it's 20 years ago, but people involved have different accounts. The long short is that Steffensen and Williams, kind of on a handshake agreement, told Douglas, like, okay, like, use this, write a song, go down to Carnival. But they didn't think it was going to become a big hit and they didn't really know much about, like, protecting publishing rights at the time. We were so in love with doing the music and being creative, but we were passionate about creating and not taking care of the business.
SPEAKER_08: And the business bit us in the end.
SPEAKER_14: Wow. So they, like, sort of handshake deal allowed Anselm Douglas to make this Carnival song of who let the dogs out called Doggie. And then it's the one who gets licensed to the Baja Men to make Who Let the Dogs Out. So did Steffensen and Williams know anything about the licensing to the Baja Men?
SPEAKER_02: Not until they heard it on the radio. Oh, that's rough. Yeah. I mean, for a song so happy, it's a very dark moment. Oh my God. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_14: I'm going to a Jamaican restaurant and hearing this record that we did, the hook, and I'm hearing it on the radio.
SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah, we wrote that. And other people are making so much money off this thing. That was, it was just like, yeah, it was, it was hard after you found out that someone else was making money off your idea. So there's no official ruling, but Douglas signs an affidavit, asserting that Steffensen and Williams were the original authors of the hook that his work was based on.
SPEAKER_02: That gives Douglas the rights to move forward with his own version and licensing. Okay. So, so let me try to get this all straight.
SPEAKER_14: So when it comes to who let the dogs out, there's Steve and the Baja Men who made the super popular version that most people know. There's Anselm Douglas who made the version from the Bahamas called Doggie that was directly covered and licensed by the Baja Men. And then there's these DJs who, you know, had this brilliant innovation of bearing a rhetorical question with the dogs barking. And so that's an incredibly complicated set of people and versions and rights and rights holders and people fighting. It's just kind of stunning.
SPEAKER_02: Well, actually there's more. So what is that? That is a remix of a song called You're a Dog, which is by a group called 20 Fingers featuring the singer Gillette. And that came out in 94. It was a follow up single to their global kind of mega hit Short Dick Man. Do you remember that song?
SPEAKER_14: No, it doesn't. It doesn't leave immediately to mind. Well, I mean, as I kind of just implied, Short Dick Man was in fact huge and this big global hit.
SPEAKER_02: And yet people were paying attention to these artists and stuff coming out of the Chicago scene. They were sort of like Douglas. They wanted a way to like make a fun record that hit back against some of the like misogyny that was going on in dance music at the time. Manny Moore, who is part of the 20 Fingers writing and production team, just felt very frustrated by all that. So that's kind of where You're a Dog comes from.
SPEAKER_14: So this song was released in 1994. Does that mean that they are like the legally the authors of the song who let the dogs out? So here we kind of need to maybe shift gears and talk about copyright for a sec.
SPEAKER_02: Okay. When so when you're considering a copyright infringement claim, there's two areas you really want to focus on and they're access and similarity. The latter similarity is pretty straightforward. It's like do these things look or sound the same? But even if two things seem very similar, which of course is subjective, courts will recognize there's a finite number of ways to arrange notes and words. So you also have to consider this concept of access, which in short means was the alleged infringer aware of the plaintiff's work? Like what's the line between copying and coincidence? Okay.
SPEAKER_14: So did the Canadian DJs, did they hear this song by Gillette?
SPEAKER_02: Steffensen and Williams claim to have never heard of the song or anything about 20 Fingers. Based on Gillette's charting and billboard and stuff, I find that a little tough to believe, but I have to take them at their word.
SPEAKER_14: Right. And so legally does Gillette and 20 Fingers have a case that their copyright had been infringed?
SPEAKER_02: I think they did, but at the time their label didn't want to pursue it. You know, there's a joke about copyright being the right to be held up in court until you're bankrupt. And if you're like an indie label or something like that, you might not have the resources and assets to sue a major label who can just kind of treat their legal expenses the same way one might like marketing costs. So it's kind of all the same pot as long as you have like a net positive result. Okay.
SPEAKER_14: That makes sense. So I guess the DJs are the ones with the legal claim to the song because they weren't challenged by 20 Fingers, but 20 Fingers can say that they are the original authors of the song. Not so fast, Roman.
SPEAKER_02: Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who? Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who? Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who? Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who? Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_14: That's for these people.
SPEAKER_02: This is Miami Boom Productions of Jacksonville, Florida with their song Who Let the Dogs Out, which was written and recorded in 1992. Oh my goodness. This duo is Brett Hammack and Joe Gonzalez. Their stage names at the time, Be Nasty and Miami Jay, who are basically just like cool teenagers and they want to write, produce, and perform Miami based music. That was it. That was everything to them. I actually had someone call me and they're like, hey, I heard you and Joe's song on the radio.
SPEAKER_03: And I was like, no, you didn't. He was like, oh yeah, I swear to you, who let the dogs out? I just heard it on the radio. We flipped it on and I'm just thinking somebody ripped off our track.
SPEAKER_14: Wow. So this is another set of people completely blindsided by hearing the Baja Men to let the dogs out on the radio. Completely.
SPEAKER_02: And there's actually this kind of amazing story of where they came up with the hook. So these guys are, they're driving around Florida in their parents' Chevy Astrovan. They've taken the back seats out to make room for extra speakers. And they're blasting this album Kings of Bass by Bass Patrol. On that album, there's a song called Da Mad Scientist. And very, very low in the mix. Like you can barely hear it if you're not looking for it. There's a sample and Brett and Joe didn't know what it said. They're making up lyrics. And at some point they just said, who let the dogs out? And it kind of stuck. I just started throwing my arms out. Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_04: He was trying to annoy me driving. He didn't take me as mocking him. He started doing it too. So we're jumping around, hopping around, singing this song we just made up. And I looked at him and I said, that's a pretty good hook.
SPEAKER_02: That sample is actually saying, who's rocking this dog's house? And it comes from Pump Up the Party by Hassan. We should take a listen to this one. It's not exactly the same. I would argue the Miami boom stuff is transformative enough to be considered a new work. But you can really hear the seeds of it.
SPEAKER_14: So this is the thing that Miami Boom heard and turned it into their version of who let the dogs out. Correct. You can see how it's a progenitor, but it does seem like the leap between the two versions is greater than this one, as opposed to a lot of the other ones that we've heard today. I would say this is more an instance of influence than copying.
SPEAKER_02: Right. Okay, so Miami Boom wrote this song in 1992.
SPEAKER_14: And was it released? Did other people hear it? Very few. And I only became aware of it because they had posted it to YouTube,
SPEAKER_02: which isn't really great for copyright dating purposes. Because, it's like, who knows when it was recorded. Totally. But after kind of earning their trust over a couple years and stuff, they eventually produced a bunch of stuff like old flyers. And one of the best things they produced were these floppy disks that had the original vocals and samples from the recording session. In that box of floppies, there was even the original receipt from the Kmart where they bought them in Florida. So that was one way of dating it. Then I took those disks to a data preservation company in the UK called Cryoflux, who helped me identify the hardware that would have been used. And then I found a DJ who had this piece of hardware, and we opened them up. All the samples were there. Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_05: Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_02: Who let the dogs out? And this DJ and producer, his name's Mishna, he's also from Florida, knows a lot about Miami bass, and he kind of verified for me there was no way that this was fake. The root!
SPEAKER_05: The root! Mishna! Mishna! Mishna!
SPEAKER_14: Mishna! Mishna! Mishna! Once you determine the veracity of their song that it was out there in the world, does Miami Boom also feel like they're owed something, like in terms of the copyright of Who Let the Dogs Out? They definitely do, and I think they also want credit given to their studio engineer.
SPEAKER_02: Her name was Mamadou.
SPEAKER_03: When I think about the times making this music, it was phenomenal. It was the best times of my life. The bottom line is, I know where we believe it came from. There's three names missing from that song, and they're sitting right here. We should own that song. Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: The story is fun because the song is kind of funny and light, and it's a carnival song. But there's a real sadness to this.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's difficult as an artist to think about people who aren't given proper attribution. You know, like being cut out of a financial deal is one thing, but to be unknown when your song is known globally, I think hurts. Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: Okay, so I feel like I need to recap here a little bit, so let's go through all the versions. So first, here's the Baja Men playing the version that we all know. Who let the dogs out? Who let the dogs out? Which they got from Anselm Douglas in the Bahamas. Who let the dogs out? Who let the dogs out? Which he got from the Canadian radio DJs in the mid-90s. Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out? But before them, Gillette and 20 Fingers wrote this version in Chicago in 1994. Who let them dogs out? Who? Who? Who let them dogs out? Before that, Miami Boom wrote this in 1992. Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Who?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Roman, I hate to keep doing this to you, but there is more.
SPEAKER_05: Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out?
SPEAKER_14: So what is that?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, after I started doing some research and getting a little press, this guy, John Michael Davis from Dowagiac, Michigan, learned about what I was doing and got in touch. And he told me this story that starts in 1990 in Dowagiac. And then it was sort of like a down and out place. It had this nickname, the Dogpatch. And the town really needed something to rally around. So John tells me this like Rudy-like tale of high school football, where there's like a Hail Mary pass and he just starts chanting, ooh, ooh, let the dogs out. And then the whole stadium starts chanting it. And then, yeah, it just happens. I should preface and say that's how he remembers it. Other people from this football team don't remember it that way. Some people told me a guy named Keith the Funky Bus Driver came up with it. It's kind of a mystery, but what's important is this team blew up. They won the state champion. And this chant was their motto. So as part of the research, we visited Dowagiac. And just like locals were like, oh, what are you guys doing here? Oh, we're researching who let the dogs out. And people just start giving us VHS tapes and like old silk screens. And there's just all this stuff there with who let the dogs out on it from 1990. This team's coach was named Bernard Thomas. And he was so beloved, they called him Saint Bernard. His players were like his dogs. And it just like, it just made sense.
SPEAKER_14: So is the assertion that they're making, is that this football chant traveled down to Miami to inspire Miami Boom?
SPEAKER_02: I think they're not sure where it traveled to next or how, but get this. Joe from Miami Boom is originally from Michigan until he was like eight years old or something. So I plotted this Google map of all the places the chant appeared in Michigan after the Chieftains, the Dowagiac Chieftains had this great victory year. And that map formed a near perfect circle around Joe's hometown. So I was like, are you kidding me? So it just like was so clean. So I got in touch with Joe and he verified for me that he was there that summer visiting family. But he says he's got absolutely no memory of hearing the chant. But also when I pressed him with the evidence, he wasn't like overly defensive about it.
SPEAKER_07: I feel like I'm never allowed to be publicly say, I wrote that song you know called Who Let the Dogs Out.
SPEAKER_04: What I can say is in 1992 I wrote a song called Who Let the Dogs Out.
SPEAKER_02: If you want to hear it, it's on YouTube. Yeah, well what do you know, that's all I can ever say. So as it turns out, who let the dogs out, let the dogs out, let some dogs loose. These are all phrases that actually pop up here and there in regional high school sports. Right. Long before someone recorded a song, before Stevie B. So I'm scouring like all these old newspaper archives. The earliest I've been able to find was from 1986. The Austin Reagan High School in Austin, Texas, their team the Raiders used it. Who let the dogs out!
SPEAKER_14: Holy moly. Yeah, that's from a pep rally and it's just a weird like couple of seconds embedded in this much longer video chronicling the football team.
SPEAKER_02: It's been on YouTube this whole time.
SPEAKER_14: And what year is that?
SPEAKER_02: 1986.
SPEAKER_14: I mean that sounds more like the last version, you know like the final version than even some of the ones in between. Roman, it's a wild ride.
SPEAKER_14: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. So is this, have we finally reached the bedrock of who let the dogs out? Do we actually know who let the dogs out at this point?
SPEAKER_02: Well, this is as far back as I can go. The title of the Bahamut song doesn't have a question mark in it. And after looking into it all this time, I just have to accept that maybe it's not a question. It's probably unanswerable.
SPEAKER_14: I mean, when you started this, did you think it would be this hard to determine who wrote a single song?
SPEAKER_02: No way. If I had known, I would not have done this. But you know, it was a nice surprise. And there's been a lot of nice surprises along the way. I got to meet all these cool people and producers. Maybe I would have done it again.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. There are all these sort of ways in which people borrow and they take in information. It becomes processed in their brains. Maybe they spit it out as an homage or maybe they don't know where it comes from. I mean, do you think about how a song is passed between different people? Are some of them lying? Are none of them lying? I mean, where do you sort of stand in everyone's story in this story?
SPEAKER_02: I don't think anybody in this story is lying. And I actually think people have been pretty forthcoming and open to the notion that you can hear something but it's just in there subconsciously until it's ready to come out. I think one of the big myths we tell ourselves about art is that it's made by individuals. And that myth is sort of what the art market is propped up on. I mean, from my own experience, I vividly remember being 20 at art school. I had this idea to, like, in a woodshop class to make a box. This was going to have an audio tape that contained the sound of the box being made. Just like youthful conceptual daydream or whatever. And this was my idea until, like, years later I learned that Robert Morris created a work in 1961 called Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. So it's like, I don't know, did I get the idea from him? Was it coincidence? Was it copying? Like, I just can't tell you. And I think that's what's cool about all the dog stuff is, like, it's just about the very nature of art and life. And I think that all these ideas apply to, like, every piece of creative work ever made.
SPEAKER_14: Well, that's so cool. Well, I really appreciate you taking us on this journey. And, you know, maybe we'll never know the answer to who let the dogs out, but the question is still worth asking.
SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks for having me. I'm surprised when the time people want to hear me talk about this. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thank you.
SPEAKER_14: It certainly surprised me to learn that Who Let the Dogs Out doesn't actually have a question mark, but titles that are grammatically questions without actually being written as questions are surprisingly common. More on that after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRS to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRS steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand brands need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand with Canva. You can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva dot com, the home for every brand.
SPEAKER_14: This show is sponsored by better help. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with better help. Visit better help dot com slash invisible today to get 10 percent off your first month. That's better help. HELP dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time with member areas. You can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it to. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to Squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So I'm in this video with Chris Brube and you're actually in town. I am. I'm in Oakland, California.
SPEAKER_14: That's amazing. It's so good to have you here. It's great to be here. And you helped us put together this episode on who let the dogs out. And one of the things that is kind of remarkable that is hard to convey in a podcast is that there is a kind of quirk to the title who let the dogs out. Yes. And that is, is that it isn't a question. It doesn't end in a question. Who let the dogs out is just the end of it. There's no question mark at the end of it. Yeah, it's a statement of fact, which is really strange. And actually, it reminded me when Ben was talking about the question mark.
SPEAKER_13: It reminded me of something that happened to me a year ago. So I was hanging out with my friend Liz, who's a movie producer. We watch a lot of movies together. And she's like, hey, have you seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And I tried watching it as a kid. It's really scary when you're a little kid because they're very mean to the cartoons. So I was like, you know what, yes, let's give it another try. Let's put it on. So she turns the movie on and then immediately I'm like, oh, there's something really weird about this movie. And she's like, oh, that the humans in cartoons are interacting? I'm like, no, that is fine. That is logically consistent to me. Absolutely. There is something else like right when the movie starts that really bothered me.
SPEAKER_09: It starts with a very lovely kind of jazzy low blue note. And then the movie's titles fade onto screen. It's literally the first visual of the film. And it's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Except instead of a question mark, it is phrased with an exclamation point at the end. So not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
SPEAKER_13: So that's my friend Liz who I watch the movie with. And she told me there's a very specific reason for that. And it's because the director of the movie, Robert Zemeckis, gave this interview where he said, there is a superstition in Hollywood that if you put a question mark at the end of your title, the movie will bomb at the box office. And when you think about it, there's lots of examples that back that up. So like, What's Eating Gilbert Grape? is a statement of fact. Statement, okay. But What's Love Got to Do with It? with Tina Turner is also a statement. And what's weird about it, though, is this is not a superstition that everyone follows. So there's lots of examples where they don't use the question mark, and there's lots of examples where they do.
SPEAKER_09: Say, for example, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I think it came out in 1967. It's a huge, huge hit. It's got Spencer Tracy. It's got Sidney Poitier. It's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? No question mark. And I always took that as an example of a movie. Okay, they followed the rule. Contemporaneously, you have Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Which is like Liz Taylor's huge, huge, huge comeback. Massive, massive, massive hit. You have They Shoot Horses, Don't They? starring Jane Fonda. That's got a question mark. That's a huge hit. So it's not precise.
SPEAKER_13: So you have movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? which do really well, but then you have all these other movies at the same time, which are also doing well. Right. So Liz and I were looking through all these titles in history and trying to figure out some pattern or some rhyme or reason to why you put in a question mark. And what we noticed is that there's lots of dramas that don't use question marks. So What's Eating Gilbert Grape? a really serious movie. But comedies use them all the time. So Dude, Where's My Car? That is a question. Or Brother, Where Art Thou? That's a pretty goofy film. That is also a question. And Liz's theory about this is it's really, the question mark really sets you up for a certain kind of mood.
SPEAKER_09: I would say sort of of zaniness or wistfulness. It's sort of like one or the other. So you have What About Bob? which is a question mark at the end, because it's kind of like, what about Bob? And it makes you feel kind of like cheerful and goofy. Like you're waiting for the punch line. You're waiting for the shoe to drop. It's like being told the first half of a joke. So ultimately, there's kind of no rhyme or reason to this.
SPEAKER_13: Like there's lots of movies with question marks. There's lots of movies without question marks. But what Liz explained to me, which is interesting, is it really is in keeping with how the movie industry makes decisions. That one thing does really well, and then they kind of try to guess if that thing is going to do well again. So she says it's part of this bigger pattern where people are trying to guess things in this industry where success can sometimes feel totally random. You can't fully predict how people are going to act.
SPEAKER_09: And so people get very, very into these like nitty gritty sort of, you know, like, oh, people don't like leads with blonde hair this year. That remake flopped, so we're never going to make remakes for like 15 more years. That musical did really well. So now we're going to do 30 more musicals. I mean, like these kind of superstitions are just trying to put Lightnick in a bottle and trying to like apply any kind of rhyme or reason to what is ultimately like such a multivariate and shifting public mood that will put or not put money in your pocket. That you'll latch on to stuff like question marks in the titles, which is like the equivalent of wearing the same pair of shorts for every NCAA Finals game you play in. So ultimately, there's kind of no answer to the mystery, except to say that all creativity and art is a mystery.
SPEAKER_13: And what I think I take some kind of delight in is the potential that there's these like sweaty people in suits, like really vexed over whether or not a question mark should go next to the title or not.
SPEAKER_14: Absolutely. And like, what is this telling our audience if we are telling them, dude, where is my car? As a complete sentence.
SPEAKER_13: Oh, I kind of love it. So I guess I you know, there's so much of what we do on the show is that like is to think about all the thought that goes into things.
SPEAKER_14: And often the result is, you know, like a beautiful object or, you know, a functioning street or a, you know, curb cut or whatever. And this is like truly like deck chairs on the Titanic. This is truly we don't know how this works.
SPEAKER_13: We don't know what's going on. It's probably means nothing.
SPEAKER_14: Right. But we're going to make all sorts of decisions.
SPEAKER_13: There's going to be a meeting about it. So it is a whole meeting to decide whether or not Dude, Where's My Car is a statement or a question. And if that is going to influence whether a teenager is going to go see that movie. Oh, I love it. I love it.
SPEAKER_14: OK, well, that's a mystery unsolved, but I'll now think of it whenever I see a poster and, you know, like and someone deciding that this is a declarative statement versus a query, which is awesome. Cool. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Robin.
SPEAKER_14: This episode of 99% invisible was produced by Ben Sisto and Chris Barube, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Sree Fusif, music by Swan Rial with barking from carrot riddle Rial. RIP carrot. You are a good boy. There is a very cool documentary about Ben's investigation called Who Let the Dogs Out? And it goes into a bunch of detail we couldn't fit into this episode. And it is delightful to watch. It's available now for rent or purchase on all the VOD platforms. And as of right now, September 2023, it's streaming on Peacock and Tubi. Special thanks to Brent Haji, Ali Kelly and Jocelyn Corr for providing audio from their movie for this episode. Also, thanks to Liz Watson for her story about who framed Roger Rabbit and to Avery Truffleman, who saw the documentary and insisted we do this story. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason De Leon, Martine Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivien Leigh, Basha Madon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prine, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_10: OK, carrot, lie down. Good boy, carrot. Say Stitcher.
SPEAKER_10: Good. Say Sirius XM.
SPEAKER_12: Good boy.
SPEAKER_00: It's a little things. It's a VW.
SPEAKER_07: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home or life insurance. It's empathy because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year. Amika, empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_10: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no name hotel that says no to every request? No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
SPEAKER_07: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast.
SPEAKER_10: I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay. Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast.
SPEAKER_10: Hilton, for the stay.
