Cartoon dog breeds: what Scooby-Doo, Snoopy and Brian really are

Some famous cartoon dogs have a real, nameable breed. Others were drawn to be lovable and never handed a pedigree at all. Scooby-Doo is a Great Dane, Snoopy is a Beagle, and Brian from Family Guy is a white Labrador. Clifford, Blue and Odie are the honest counterexamples, shaped by a marker pen rather than any breed standard. Here is the roundup character by character, with the confirmed breeds kept separate from the guesses that only look like facts. The Disney dogs get their own honest list in our Disney dog breeds roundup.

Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, the Great Danes

Scooby-Doo is a Great Dane, and that part is settled, though he is a Great Dane the way a caricature is a portrait. When Hanna-Barbera designer Iwao Takamoto created him in 1969, he asked a Great Dane breeder what makes a prize-winning specimen, then went the other way on every point. "I decided to go the opposite and gave him a humpback, bowed legs, small chin and such," Takamoto said later. "Even his color is wrong." A show Great Dane is tall, straight-backed and square-jawed. Scooby is the deliberate opposite, which is why he reads as goofy instead of regal.

Scrappy-Doo, added in 1979 as Scooby's nephew, is a Great Dane too. His puppy proportions are cartoon shorthand for young, but the breed is the same. The real Great Dane is one of the tallest dogs alive and, contrary to Scooby's nerves, usually a calm and affectionate giant that thinks it is a lap dog.

Snoopy, a Beagle

Snoopy is a Beagle, confirmed by his creator. Charles Schulz drew Snoopy for Peanuts from 1950 and called him a beagle for decades, even as Snoopy walked on two legs, slept on the roof of his kennel and flew an imaginary Sopwith Camel. Schulz drew loosely on Spike, a dog he had as a boy, though the real Spike was a mixed breed rather than a purebred beagle.

The cues survive under the fantasy: the compact body, the round muzzle and above all the long drop ears are pure beagle. A real Beagle is a scent hound bred to hunt in packs, endlessly curious and led almost entirely by its nose, which is the one beagle trait the strip left out.

Brian Griffin, a white Labrador

Brian, the martini-drinking, novel-writing dog in Family Guy, is a white Labrador Retriever, and the show treats it as fact. He walks upright, talks, drives a Prius and votes, but on the rare occasions his breed comes up the answer is a white Lab. It fits the drawing: the thick otter tail, the broad head and the short dense coat are all Labrador, just rendered in solid white.

White is a genuine Labrador colour, technically a very pale shade of yellow, so nothing about the breed is invented even if the talking is. The living Labrador Retriever is the most registered dog in much of the world, a friendly and food-driven worker, which is exactly what makes Brian's wine habit and writer's block funny.

Odie, the breed nobody confirmed

Odie, Garfield's dopey, drooling sidekick, has no breed anyone can pin down, and Jim Davis seems to have liked it that way. In the strip Odie is a small yellow dog with big brown ears and no fixed pedigree. Fans and reference guides have called him everything from a beagle to a dachshund cross, but the comic never commits. A 2007 Sunday page even has Garfield reading through breed names, rejecting them all, and settling on "purebred clown."

The live-action Garfield films muddy it further by casting a wire-haired dachshund-terrier cross as Odie, which is where a lot of the dachshund guesses come from. So the honest answer is that Odie has no canon breed. If you want the closest look, the long ears and low, waddling build sit somewhere between a beagle and a Dachshund, but that is a resemblance, not a confirmation.

Clifford, too big to have a breed

Clifford the Big Red Dog has no breed, and that is baked into the idea. When Norman Bridwell created him in 1963, the whole point was a dog the size of a house, so the drawing serves the scale gag rather than any standard. He is a generic large dog blown up to enormous and coloured a bright red no real dog comes in. Bridwell reportedly chose red simply because it was the paint sitting on his desk.

That has not stopped people hunting for a match. The usual guess is a Vizsla, on the strength of a warm red coat and soft floppy ears, and shrunk to normal size the comparison is not absurd. But it is a guess about a resemblance. Clifford was never meant to be any breed, and reading one into him is the fun of it, not a fact about him.

Blue from Blue's Clues, a puppy of no breed

Blue, the spotted star of Blue's Clues, has no canon breed, and the show has never given her one. Blue is female, which surprises a lot of people. She is a stylised blue puppy with spots, oversized droopy ears and a shape that does not line up neatly with any real dog, because the design is built for a preschool audience, not for the breed ring.

The recurring guess is a hound of some sort, usually a beagle or a Basset Hound, on the basis of those long low-set ears. It is a fair read and nothing more. Nickelodeon never named a breed, so anyone who tells you Blue is a specific dog is filling in a blank the show left open on purpose.

Common questions