Category: Pug Lovers

The Pug Dog

As many of you know, Hack lives in a van parked behind the Shakey’s pizza restaurant on Laurel Canyon Blvd. in Los Angeles. Once when the van was impounded, Hack was forced to sleep on his cover artist Jonny M.’s floor and he couldn’t help but notice Jonny’s pug Boris’ obsession with food (especially when Boris tried to eat his face as he slept one night). The experience inspired Hack to write this gothic epic poem about a ravenous pug, which only after it was published did he realize was a transparent rip-off of Poe’s The Raven. Hack was sued for copyright infringement and had to pay a massive settlement, which surprised legal experts because Poe died in 1849 and the poem had been in public domain for 150 years.

The Fiendish Pit of Dr. Fug Manpoo

Hack has long been a fan of English author Sax Rohmer’s supervillain Dr. Fu Manchu, a stalwart role of horror actors like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee (Karloff’s 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu is particularly fun, with a pre-Thin Man Myrna Loy as the doctor’s evil daughter Fah Lo See). The character’s popularity has fallen out of favor in recent years (last being seen as a leading role in Peter Sellers’ film farewell The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu in 1979, although Nicolas Cage revived it for a section of the 2007 cult classic Grindhouse) due to its racist attitudes and “yellowface” casting.

That didn’t stop Hack from adapting Fu Manchu into a Korean pug supervillain named Dr. Pug Manpoo who craps into a massive pit in his castle and tortures his enemies by suspending them over it with the threat of dropping them in. Variety reports that Nicolas Cage is in talks to play the role in a film version.