Paw Patrol is an animated series about adorable canine paramilitary group that effectively acts as law enforcement, public safety and social services in the town of Adventure Bay. It’s universally beloved by toddlers in large part because in each episode the “pups,” as they’re called, ride out in colorful tacticool vehicles with sirens blaring to fight crime and rescue turtles and help the incompetent adults of Adventure Bay perform simple tasks, like picking up a crate of oranges that tipped over or whatever.
It’s universally hated by parents for precisely the same reasons.
We’re currently living through “the biggest moment in Paw Patrol history,” according to the editors of the Paw Patrol Wiki (a fan site which, inexplicably, boasts 9,580 pages of content): Paw Patrol: The Movie was released last week, marking the Pups’ first adventure on the big screen. As such, I thought I’d revisit one of the topics that’s preoccupied me ever since my kids started watching the show: the shocking disparities in how the pups are treated by their human owner, disparities that, in my view, are an existential threat to the entire ethos of the Paw Patrol, which is best summed up in the catch phrase “no job too big, no pup too small.”
There are six core pups in Paw Patrol: Chase, a German Shepherd dressed like a cop; Marshall, a Dalmation firefighter; Skye, a Cockapoo-type thing that flies a helicopter; Rubble, the bulldog construction worker; Rocky, a junkyard mutt who drives a garbage truck; and Zuma, a chocolate lab with a hovercraft. The pups’ overseer is Ryder, a 10-year-old human who is evidently both parentless and infinitely wealthy, constructing elaborate fortresses and acquiring powerful high-tech vehicles and gear to aid his pups in their rescues.
The structure of each show is as follows: somebody in Adventure Bay does something stupid, like getting a pumpkin stuck on their head or losing a cake. This hapless idiot calls Ryder, who assembles all the pups at their base. Ryder responds to each situation, no matter how trivial, with overwhelming force. The stuck pumpkin, for instance, might require Rubble’s bulldozer, Marshall’s medical expertise, and Chase with a bullhorn to scream at gawkers to stay away. Ryder and whichever pups he selects for the mission — and it’s almost always a subset of pups, rather than the whole group — hop on their vehicles and go roaring off into town to save the day.
This is where the brutal iniquities of Ryder’s iron-fisted rule come in. You only need to watch a few shows to realize that some pups get called out on assignment far more than others. It seems like Chase is always put on the case, firing up his SUV and burning untold gallons of fossil fuel in order to complete tasks as simple as setting out a single traffic cone. Zuma, on the other hand, rarely gets called on, even in situations that would seem to require his gear and expertise. My four-year-old once noted, with dismay, that in one episode Zuma got passed over for a water rescue in favor of Rocky, a dog who’s entire personality is that he hates water.
One of the wild things about the Paw Patrol wiki is that not only do they maintain separate pages for all 400-some-odd individual episodes in the show’s run, but each of those pages also contains a detailed accounting of which pups Ryder calls on to complete the mission: “first responders,” in Paw Patrol wiki parlance. Thanks to this careful data collection, we can see if our hunch regarding Ryder playing favorites with his pups is correct. Spoiler alert: it is.
The results imply a strict hierarchical structure within the Paw Patrol, with four tiers. At the top is Chase who, for reasons unknown, is the crown jewel of Ryder’s kennel. Tier Two consists of Rocky and Skye, utility players with skills (making new items out of garbage, and flight, respectively) that are useful in nearly any rescue. Tier Three is Marshall, the fire dog, and Rubble, the construction pooch. Not as versatile as a flying Cockapoo, perhaps, but still useful in certain situations.
And then, at the bottom, we have Zuma.
The chocolate lab who specializes in water rescues has been called on fewer than half as many times as the crypto-fascist German Shepherd at the top of the Paw Patrol hierarchy. In part this is because Zuma’s gear is only useful in certain situations — there’s no need for a hovercraft when you’re trying to coax a pet chicken off the roof of a shed, for instance. But as the qualitative evidence (and every parent who’s watched the show has reams of it) suggests, Zuma even gets the shaft in cases that are seemingly tailor-made for his skillset. In the episode Sea Patrol: Pups Save Puplantis, for instance, Ryder inexplicably taps Rubble and Rocky for an underwater mission to stabilize the structure of a submerged city while Zuma simply joins that episode’s other backbenchers in waiting on the beach.
Time series analysis suggest this wasn’t always the case. Back in Season 1, Zuma was a solid middle-of-the-pack player, tied for fourth in overall deployments along with Rubble. Since then, however, he’s been the least-utilized pup in every single season, bottoming out at just 6 first response calls in Season 4. He’s rebounded somewhat since then, although that’s largely an artifact of an alteration to the show’s structure: starting in Season 5 the show began running periodic “ultimate rescues,” involving all six pups deployed on massive vehicles reflecting one specific pup’s skillset. The biggest beneficiary of that change has been Zuma, who otherwise has been called on infrequently in recent seasons.
Is this inequality getting worse over the run of Paw Patrol? To answer that question we can employ a statistical tool called the Gini coefficient, which is used to measure how concentrated a given quantity is across a given distribution. While it’s typically applied to things like wealth concentration in a country, here we’ll use it to measure the concentration of first response calls among the six pups.
What this chart shows is that pup deployments were relatively equally distributed in Season 1, but became more concentrated in the paws of a few pups (Chase, Rocky) as the show went on. Following a rebound toward equality in Season 5 the concentration has continued, reaching new heights in the episodes of Season 8 that have run so far. The post-Season 5 rise in inequality is perhaps most alarming in light of the equalizing effect of the Ultimate Rescue episodes, without which the numbers would doubtless be even worse.
The release of the Paw Patrol movie was an opportunity to hit the ‘reset’ button and to give Zuma the space to explore his full potential. But that opportunity was squandered. The chocolate lab was given barely any lines of dialogue and allowed to shine briefly only near the very end of the movie, rescuing a family in a submerged mini-van. Zuma’s showcase happened on the very margins of the main conflict, which resolved with Chase regaining his courage and Skye blowing up a rogue weather monitoring device. A core member of the team, relegated to a mere footnote.
To paraphrase William Carlos Williams’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus:
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Zuma drowning