NEW YORK — While most unemployed dot-com players are putting together their resumes and scrambling to the latest pink-slip party, some of the most visible casualties of the shakeout have turned lemons into lemonade by parlaying Internet stature into full-blown celebrity status.
A case in point is the affable Pets.com sock puppet, whose just-published “memoir,” “Me by Me: the Pets.com Sock Puppet Book,” is a surprise hit in bookstores despite the fact that the Web site that spawned it went bust in early November.
“Me by Me” is designated a “Media Tie-In” on the book’s cover, and was probably conceived as an additional revenue stream for the defunct dot-com. But according to the book’s publisher, Byron Preiss, Pets.com’s demise has had little effect on book sales.
“This book is already sold-out,” Preiss told Wired.com. “We printed 25,000 and we don’t have any copies left.”
The memoir itself looks like it took about two hours and three cosmos to compile, but the Pets.com mascot laughs it off in the book’s foreword.
“You know, a lot of critics have said it can’t be done. Puppets don’t know how to make books,” he writes. “And to those critics I say…you’re right. I had no idea what I was doing.”
The pictorial autobiography roves through the dog/puppet’s world, touching on topics such as his love of Fresca, which he calls “the elixir of life”, his traumatic encounter with Scott Baio and his favorite fire hydrant.
“Me by Me” is also chock full of inspirational tips.
“Karaoke is an art form,” the sock puppet writes. “You have to play with the audience. Let’s say I’m doing the original ‘Candle in the Wind’ song and then I throw in some of the lyrics of the ‘Diana’ version to catch them off guard. That’s when the tears start pouring out.”
Meanwhile, to firm up the puppet’s mystique, both his publicist, Sandy Mendelson, and publisher, Pryce, insist that the puppet himself wrote “Me by Me” (although Preiss eventually admitted to the press that the puppet “always travels with the actor Michael Black.”)
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Notably absent from “Me by Me” is any mention of the sock puppet’s mascot job at Pets.com. In fact, the only reason “Pets.com” appears in the book at all is because the sock puppet doesn’t have a name (yet); he’s known only by his previous — and now entirely useless — Pets.com affiliation. Yet the story of the sock puppet, and of Pets.com, may warrant another book, given that the mascot ultimately proved to be the only lucrative component of the Pets.com franchise.
Introduced in 1999 as part of a $27 million advertising campaign, the Pets.com mascot’s numerous TV commercials quickly became favorites of the couch-potato set. The sock puppet beat out Tux the Penguin (of Linux.com) to win ‘Best Mascot’ award in an Advertain On-line 1999 marketing poll.
Pets.com seized on the puppet’s popularity in June of this year by hawking off-line cuddly versions for $19.99 each, selling 10,000 units in a couple of days. When Disney bought a 5 percent stake in Pets.com, the puppet started popping up regularly on Disney-owned ABC-TV, making appearances on “Good Morning America,” where he’d serenade Dianne Sawyer with such tunes as “Three Times a Lady.”
The first dark cloud on the sock puppet’s horizon appeared in the form of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a rival sock puppet with a mean streak. In the way that any pop-culture sensation tends to produce an alter ego, it quickly became apparent that Triumph was to Pets.com’s sock puppet what Christina Aguilera is to Britney Spears.
Whereas the Pets.com mascot was funny in an irreverent-but-cute sort of way, Triumph’s routine was more Rat Pack than dog pound. His regular appearances on late night TV shows such as “Conan O’Brien” featured raunchy stories and plenty of insults, particularly toward the Pets.com sock puppet.
A full-scale dog fight erupted. Last April, Pets.com filed suit against former “Late Night” head writer Robert Smigel, claiming that Triumph (who is voiced by Smigel) created an “unsavory mental association” with the cleaner image of the Pets.com sock. It was headline-grabbing news: a defamation of character lawsuit instigated by a sock puppet.
For the purposes of spin control, both personalities held press conferences, the Pets.com mascot affirming his white-bread credentials by noting that “one of my ancestors was a pair of knickers, worn on the Mayflower.” Triumph shot back at his rival through a televised dirty twist on the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” which went: “Every joke you take/ Every rip-off you make/ Like a dot-com fake/ I will poop on you.”
The threat posed by Triumph soon became a moot point when Pets.com closed shop. As it currently stands, the orphaned mascot’s future is up in the air, but the success of the book makes it clear that he’s still a bankable asset.