Uncatty Resemblance



There's a saying that pets tend to look like their owners. Whether this is true in reality is obviously very debatable, but the magic of fiction allows this to be very true in Media.

Advertising

 * An ad campaign for Cesar dog food was based around this.
 * A commercial did this with people's cars.
 * A series of cholesterol meds did it with food.

Anime and Manga

 * Slayers Revolution had an episode with animals groomed to look like their owners.
 * Many minor characters of the day in Pokémon are obviously designed to look like their Pokemon.
 * Also played with in the North American ad for Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire.
 * In Nekotalia all the cats look just like their owners.
 * Not a physical resemblance, but Mai's puppy in Nichijou seems to be just as big a Troll as Mai herself.
 * Esmeralda, the Sixth Ranger fourth penguin from Mawaru Penguindrum, has markings that mirror her owner Masako's heart-shaped face.

Film

 * Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians evokes this a lot; see the page pic.
 * The new version of The Shaggy Dog showed comparisons of the cast with animals that resembled them.
 * Pirates of the Caribbean: Davy Jones and the Kraken

Literature

 * There's a children's picture book called It's Easy To See Why in which a girl enters her dog into a dog show and is the only owner there who doesn't bear a striking resemblance to her pet. Her dog wins, though... because he looks just like the judge.
 * Lord of the Rings: Treebeard says something similar to this in The Two Towers about Ents and trees becoming more like each other.
 * Possibly unintentional, but Harry Dresden is a pretty big guy, who by one means or another has acquired a cat (Mister) and dog (Mouse) that are equally ginormous for their respective species.
 * Grace Lockwood from the A to Z Mysteries book The Falcon's Feathers looks very much like a falcon when she reads an issue of Falconry Today in a picture at the end of Chapter 5.

Live-Action TV

 * In a variant, a murder victim on Bones who'd owned a chicken-processing plant somewhat resembled the chickens he worked with, due to a poultry-borne fungal infection which deformed his sinuses.

Newspaper Comics
"Garfield: I thought fat people were jolly..."
 * Dilbert and his dog Dogbert both wear the exact same set of glasses and have the same mouthless faces.
 * A Kit 'n' Carlyle comic.
 * There was a Garfield comic strip where Jon and Garfield commented on this trope, with increasingly bizarre lookalikes. This culminated with some guy who looked like a bird in a suit and his pet canary.
 * Another one had Garfield deliberately doing this himself to people walking in the park by following them around and mimicking their mannerisms. This went sour when one fat guy caught him in the act, though:


 * In Dennis the Menace (US version), the fur on the top of Ruff's head resembles Dennis's hair.
 * In Dennis the Menace (UK version), Gnasher's spiky fur resembles Dennis's hair.
 * The Beano, the comic Dennis appears in, loves this trope. There's also Rasher, a pig covered in spiky bristles; Pup Parade, featuring the pets of the Bash Street Kids; Roger the Dodger used to have a pet called Joe Crow with the same tuft of hair/feathers; and, in the silliest example, Cuthbert Cringeworthy, the Bash Street school swot, looks like Teacher. Because he's the teacher's pet.
 * (This troper never got that joke and always thought they were trying to imply that he was Teacher's illegitimate son)
 * Desperate Dan, the cover character in sister-comic The Dandy had a dog which shared his prominent chin.
 * This was most noticeable in Footrot Flats when The Dog went to a dog show and saw heaps of dogs who resembled their owners. Although The Dog doesn't resemble Wal at all, there is a degree of resemblance between Wal and Major the pig dog (possibly coincidental) and also between the 3 Murphys and their dogs Tiger, Wolf and Cream Puff.
 * In Beetle Bailey Sgt Snorkel and his dog Otto look markedly similar, down to Otto wearing a uniform and walking on his hind legs.

Tabletop Games

 * A 2008 board game is called "Do You Look Like Your Dog?".

Toys

 * Charmy Kitty.

Video Games

 * Not exactly a pet, but close enough. In the Sci Fi chapter of Live a Live, the main character, a robot named Cube, is always wearing a baseball cap and glasses, that its owner also wears, this has the side effect of making it very cute (although this chapter is so unrelentingly bleak and moody that Cube's appearance actually provides some small relief).

Web Comics

 * Many of the Lusii in Homestuck resemble the trolls they're the guardians of, especially in horn shape. This is most obvious with Tinkerbull, Tavros' guardian who shares his horns, and the Virgin Mother Grub has Kanaya's horns and lips.

Western Animation

 * Looney Tunes does this in multiple episodes.
 * In Charlie Dog's debut cartoon "Little Orphan Airedale", he plays with this trope by mimicing the faces of people passing by until he sees Porky Pig, showing that both of them have similar faces.
 * In Rugrats Angelica's pet cat Fluffy is designed to look like her. One Nickelodeon UK advert narrated from Spike the dogs perspective lampshaded it.
 * In the episode of Doug where everyone goes to the dude ranch, the horses assigned to each character have an unnerving habit of resembling them. Of particular note are Romulus and Remus, a pair of purple, bespectacled horses for the purple, bespectacled pair of Al and Moo Sleech.
 * In Handy Manny, Mr Lopart's cat, Fluffy, has brow-whiskers stretching across her forehead in the same manner as his combover.
 * In an episode of Dexters Laboratory, Dexter finds a stray dog. At the end it is reunited with its actual owner, who looks (and acts) very similar to it.
 * Scruffy has a scene displaying this.
 * The Simpsons: "People That Look Like Things"
 * In the Classic Disney Short "Mickey's Polo Team", the Disney characters played a game of polo with various caricatures of movie stars of the day, and everyone's mount looked exactly like their riders. Donald Duck, however, had a donkey that didn't look much like him but had his cantankerous personality, while Harpo Marx rode an ostrich, which did look like him.
 * In his last TV shows, Mr. Magoo had a pet bulldog that not only had his jowly face, but also shared his distinctive disablity.

Real Life

 * Hitler's cat. Although he actually preferred dogs.
 * Lots more cats who look like Hitler.
 * Rhea, the second-largest moon of Saturn, is the only moon in the Solar System to actually have rings around it. Guess which planet it actually resembles!
 * Similarly, Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, is also the largest moon of Jupiter, the Solar System's largest planet.
 * The moon Triton is blue like its parent planet, Neptune.