At a Glance
- The 1997 live-action Dilbert pilot never aired and featured a mechanical Dogbert puppet
- Scott Adams hated the puppet, joking it cost “upwards of $20, $25”
- The only surviving footage appears in a 2022 episode of PBS’s Nightmare Theatre
- Why it matters: It’s a bizarre piece of TV history that shows what happens when network meddling meets comic strip adaptation
The 1990s were filled with media about alienated office workers, from Office Space to The Drew Carey Show to even Fight Club. But the figure who arguably started it all was Dilbert, the newspaper comic by Scott Adams that was adapted into an animated TV show and nearly became a live-action show. Adams died of cancer this week at 68, a few years after setting his career on fire by turning into a wildly racist right-wing pundit. But Adams’s passing seems like as good a time as any to remember a weird TV artifact that humanity never got to see in action: The Dogbert animatronic.
The Live-Action Pilot That Never Was
The live-action TV version of Dilbert was envisioned even before the animated version became a reality. Adams talked about the failure of the live-action Fox show in interviews promoting the animated UPN program that actually made it on the air. Dilbert debuted as a comic strip in 1989, and Adams told the Chicago Tribune in 1999 that the live-action show seemed like the “obvious idea” since other comic strip adaptations like Hazel and Dennis the Menace had been made with live actors.
Fox bought a pilot in 1997, but Adams told the Chicago Tribune that there was pressure to “make Dilbert good looking. He was given stylish glasses. They ended up casting someone who could have played a (romantic) leading man.” Dilbert, for anyone familiar with the character, is not a romantic leading man. He’s a nerdy engineer with an unathletic physique. That’s kind of his whole thing.
The Nightmare Dogbert Puppet
Then there were problems with Dogbert, the talking dog character who’s always making quips. Perhaps smarter than Dilbert (and way more cynical), Dogbert’s bleak and calculating view of everything helped inject some justice and revenge into the Dilbert universe. When Dilbert was struggling and put upon, Dogbert was there with a quip. When Dilbert was at his most oppressed and dejected, Dogbert could prove his loyalty through ruthlessness.
The dog is creepy to say the least, with a vibe more in line with haunted taxidermy than a wisecracking sidekick. The TV pilot is apparently lost to history, though it’s unclear whether a tape may be sitting in some TV executive’s attic somewhere. The only image we have related to the show is a Dogbert puppet that was displayed on the May 9, 2022, episode of Nightmare Theatre. The 4-minute segment from the episode where they talk about the puppet has been uploaded to YouTube.
The show never explains how the Dogbert puppet was acquired, and details about how it worked seemed to be speculative in the segment. The presenters turn the scruffy thing around to show that it contained mechanical components that presumably allowed it to be operated to talk. The hosts talked about how there was a “remote control that probably operated the head,” though that seems to be a guess, and they don’t have details on how it actually worked.
Adams’s Disappointment and the Animated Alternative
Adams told the Sioux City Journal in 1999 that he was disappointed with the Dogbert creation, joking, “I think they spent upwards of $20, $25 on it.”
Part of the problem with a live-action version of the show in 1997, as Adams saw it, was that he wasn’t involved enough in its creation, something he was hoping to rectify with the 1999 animated series. “We just stepped back and asked ourselves, ‘Should we try to tweak that or start from scratch?’ We really just looked at all of the options again, and UPN was the best option, and animation seemed to make more sense than live-action, having tried it once,” Adams told Deseret News in 1999. “I’m a lot more involved with this than I was with that, which was really minimal involvement. But I’m pretty deeply involved in this on the creative side.”
The Dilbert animated show ran for just two seasons on UPN (1999-2000) and is available to watch on Tubi.
The Final Years and Legacy
More recently, Scott Adams spent his time revealing himself to be an awful bigot and generally just a kook. The cartoonist was an early supporter of President Donald Trump and advocated for racial segregation in 2023, saying, “white people should get the hell away from Black people.” Billionaire Elon Musk predictably defended Adams at the time, accusing the media of being racist against white people.
Adams was also extremely confident in his ability to predict the future. “If Biden is elected, there’s a good chance you will be dead within the year,” Adams tweeted in the summer of 2020. “Republicans will be hunted,” he continued in another tweet, “Police will stand down.”
In 2024, he said that he was hypnotized by ChatGPT and couldn’t share the prompts that produced a psychedelic state because they were “dangerous.” “It instantly put me in a state of… bliss,” Adams said about ChatGPT. “And it could keep me there as long as I wanted. It was unfricking believable. And I know you’re going to want to know how I did it. I honestly can’t tell you, it’s too dangerous. It is way, way too dangerous. But that’s coming.”
It’s unclear what may happen to Dilbert as intellectual property, since he had no wife or heirs. But after Adams spent the past few years destroying his reputation-and getting dropped from syndication in all major newspapers-it seems unlikely that anyone will be scrambling to scoop up the IP.
If you do happen to have the unaired live-action Dilbert pilot, News Of Fort Worth would love to see it. Obviously, we expect it to be weird, if nothing else. And we love checking out weird things, even if they haunt our dreams.
