Worst doggone dogfood name in the world

For Baby Boomers, Disney entertainment was full of all sorts of traumatic little bits.

Those cartoons? Absentee fathers, and mothers who are gone, baby, gone. 

There was Bambi's mother, shot and killed by a hunter. Run, Bambi, run. I don't think we're ever told where Bambi's father, the Great Prince of the Forest is off to, but he was pretty much absent from Bambi's childhood.

Even though she's called Mrs. Jumbo, there's no Mr. Jumbo around, so Dumbo's mother is pretty much a single mom. And although she ends up reunited with her little guy, she spends much of the film in a cage. 

To make up for their missing parents, Bambi had cool friends in the forest, like Thumper and Flower. And Dumbo had Timothy, a mouse. So these cartoons, I guess, got us used to the idea of being away from our parents. Which, as Baby Boomers, we were most of the time. (If there's one thing you can say for the Greatest Generation, they preferred hanging out with their friends to playing with their kids. And we preferred being with our friends, too. As a child, I rarely had a conversation with an adult other than my parents, and those conversations were seldom actual convos. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents of friends, neighbors: an adult might ask you a question, and you'd be required to provide a polite but brief response. But we mostly ran in packs of our fellow kids.)

Still, it wasn't easy watching Bambi's mother get gunned down. 

The live Disney movies were more traumatic, as they portrayed real live actual children being traumatized.

How old was Johnny Tremain when he poured molten silver over his hand? Fourteen? I watched that movie over sixty years ago and that scene where Johnny's hand is disfigured still makes me wince. (Johnny had a dead father, by the way.)

And how old was Travis when he had to man up and shoot Old Yeller once the "best doggone dog in the West" was bitten by a rabid wolf? How old was he? Early teens. 

What a terrible plot: Boy meets dog. Boy loves dog. Boy kills dog.

The only saving grace was that they didn't make the adorable kid actor Kevin Corcoran, who actually was my age (7 or 8) when this movie was made, be the one to put Old Yeller down.

All I can say is that any kid who didn't end up a weepy after poor Travis had to do away with his beloved doggo was stonehearted and/or a sadist. That or they left the movie early.

By the way, this kid "becomes a man" by shooting your sick dog was a well-used trope of films and TV shows of my childhood. And we wonder where toxic masculinity comes from.

Anyway, while Travis did have a father - he was just off somewhere being Western and manly when Travis had to take care of the home front - and while Travis did have a living  mother, Old Yeller was a trauma two-fer for us Boomers. This glorious dog that we were all in love with dies, and the one who has to put him out of his misery is a kid not much older than us.

I'm betting that if you asked 100 first-wave Baby Boomers what the most traumatic movie they ever watched as a kid, 95 of them would name Old Yeller.

And yet somehow - almost in time for the 50th anniversary of the movie's release - Kroger decided in 2005 to introduce a dog food named Disney Old Yeller.

I'd never heard of this dog food - I don't live in Kroger territory - but it made the rounds for some reason on Twitter today, where my sister Trish spotted it. 

So of course I had to find out more.

"This movie is a timeless classic that transcends generations, and we believe this brand will appeal not only to original fans, but to the millions of Americans who share the same kind of special bond with their beloved dogs," said Barry Vance, Kroger's senior corporate category manager. (Source: BizJournals)

Because ain't nothing says "special bond" like putting a bullet in your beloved dog's skull.

Disney, ever on the lookout to capitalize on its brand, was very keen on lending their name to the product. 

“This program with Kroger is especially exciting because it combines the leading grocer in the country with the world’s most-popular family entertainment brand to bring an affordable product line to market that kids will enjoy and parents will trust, ” said Harry Dolman, executive vice president of Disney Consumer Products for food, health and beauty. (Source: Chief Marketer)

"Kids will enjoy" dog food. Hmmmm.

Maybe they didn't. Maybe the dogs didn't either. It appears that Old Yeller dog food may not have been such a brilliantly winning idea, as it appears that it's no longer on the market.

No surprise there. In 2010, there was a recalled for being tainted with aflatoxin. And a one-star review on dogfoodadvisor noted that one of the product's main ingredients:

...could come from almost anywhere: spoiled supermarket meat, roadkill, dead, diseased or dying livestock — even euthanized farm animals.

If I get this straight, this means that Old Yeller, the dog food, could have contained Old Yeller, the dog. Which I guess takes us full circle to a more recent Disney thang: the circle of life in their Lion King. 

Hakuna matata!

As for naming a dog food after a dog that its human (kid) owner had to shoot? Old Yeller may have been as its theme song told us, the best doggone dog in the West, but the worst doggone dogfood name in the world. I'm relieved it's no longer with us.