Dog Man Unleashed

Flippy is the first antagonist Pilkey introduces in Dog Man Unleashed. When he first appears in Chapter 2, he is just an ordinary—if ill-intentioned and selfish—“[b]utterfly fish.” The female pet store employee explains that he has tried to steal all the plastic treasure chests, take over all of the miniature castles, and bully the other fish. He ends up becoming the Chief’s birthday present because Dog Man has no money to pay for a different fish, and the store employees want to get rid of him. When Flippy accidentally ingests most of the Chief’s Brain Dot pills, Flippy’s brain grows immensely. He develops super intelligence and telekinetic powers, making him into a much more capable adversary for Dog Man and part of the story’s exploration of The Struggle Between Good and Evil.

Flippy is innately evil, immediately choosing to use his newfound intelligence and telekinetic powers to make himself mobile and rob the pet store of all its plastic treasure chests. He is not as aware of how the world works as he needs to be; however, he believes that these chests are valuable and can be used to purchase a real-life castle. This ridiculous plan helps support the text’s theme of The Importance of Creativity and Silliness. Flippy shows determination to get his way when he pivots and decides to steal Petey’s Treasure Tank 2000 and disregard for the safety of others when he continues to bombard the tank with heavy objects, trying to dislodge Flat Petey and Feeva.

Petey the Cat is Dog Man’s main antagonist in the early books in the Dog Man series. Petey is an anthropomorphized orange cat with black stripes. He walks on his hind legs, and he thinks and speaks like a human being. He is unintentionally responsible for the creation of Dog Man in Dog Man when he blows up both Greg the Dog and Officer Knight, leading to their surgical fusion into Dog Man. In these early adventures, Petey often has evil intentions, but his plans never turn out as he hopes they will. The ironies inherent in his far-fetched and ultimately failed plans support the text’s exploration of The Importance of Creativity and Silliness.

In Dog Man Unleashed, Petey discovers that Flippy is impersonating him and breaks out of jail to find the evil fish. Petey is very clever—he comes up with the Flat Petey ruse to break out of jail, can build the Treasure Tank 2000, and has created a Love Ray—but he does not always think his plans all the way through. His use of the Love Ray to make so many people fall in love with him and give him treasure to fill the tank with is only successful to a point; it does fill the tank with treasure, but it also creates crowds of people determined to marry him and kiss him. He ends up returning to jail just to get away from all the people who are in love with him and is unable to catch Flippy. That his manipulation of people into loving him—and his betrayal of their feelings to enrich himself—ultimately results in his defeat is part of the story’s exploration of The Power of Friendship and Loyalty. Petey the Cat’s appearance in the story is relatively brief—from Chapter 5 to Chapter 7—and his main function in this adventure is to create and then abandon Flat Petey and the Treasure Tank 2000.

Flat Petey is another antagonist in Dog Man Unleashed. He is an anthropomorphized paper cut-out made to look like Petey the Cat. Boog E. Feeva’s Living Spray brings him to life. His silly creation story and name make him an allusion to the Jeff Brown character Flat Stanley, a boy who becomes flat after a bulletin board falls onto and flattens him. This helps to support the book’s metafictional motif and its thematic exploration of The Importance of Creativity and Silliness. Because the Living Spray has the side effect of turning things evil, Flat Petey, like his namesake Petey, has bad intentions. As soon as he is brought to life, his first thought is that his flatness can be used to his advantage; when the EMTs say they are taking him back to the jail, he says that he will slide out from underneath the bars. When they try to physically prevent him from leaving, he knocks the two EMTs unconscious. He tries to get a T. rex to “destroy Dog Man” so that he can steal the Treasure Tank 2000 (125), and he tries to leave several people on an icy mountainside to freeze to death.

Flat Petey has a dark sense of humor. He makes a joke about rock, paper, scissors before he knocks out the EMTs with a rock. He is also boastful and mean, taunting people cruelly when he believes he has them at a disadvantage. He is manipulative, turning the Obey Spray around on Feeva and then using Feeva as a tool in his evil plans. He is also ungrateful—although Feeva’s assistance is important in his plot, Flat Petey claims to have done everything by himself and kicks Feeva off the tank on the mountainside, calling Feeva “a mooch.” When the scissors Feeva brings to life finally chase him away at the end of the novel, his downfall illustrates what happens to the disloyal and selfish. This helps to support the book’s thematic exploration of The Power of Friendship and Loyalty and confirms that good will always triumph in The Struggle Between Good and Evil.

The Chief is Dog Man’s boss. He is an excitable person, enthusiastic with his praise when Dog Man succeeds and brash in his criticism when Dog Man does something of which he disapproves. He does recognize Dog Man’s abilities, however, calling Dog Man his best officer and sending him on the pet store robbery case right away. After all of the story’s villains are vanquished, the Chief makes sure to tell Dog Man that he is a “good boy” (184). The Chief is grateful when his team remembers his birthday and is very pleased with the gift of Flippy the fish. The Chief’s relationship with Dog Man and with the rest of his team is a part of the text’s consideration of The Power of Friendship and Loyalty.

The Chief’s function in the story is also to provide comedic relief and set the main plot in motion. He is the object of humor when Dog Man repeatedly bowls him over early in the story, with hyperbolic illustrations demonstrating the silliness of his tumbling around. His rapidly cycling emotions and his tendency to be forgetful are played for comedy when, on his birthday, he gets insulted and irate over the gift of the memory pills and then instantly forgets about having already received them. It is the Chief’s innocent decision to leave Flippy’s bowl near the bottle of Brain Dots that sets the story in motion when the Brain Dots tip into Flippy’s bowl.