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We all know Clifford is a big red dog. Perhaps the biggest and reddest of all dogs.
…but how big is he, really?
Let’s investigate.
…but how big is he, really?
Let’s investigate.
We’ll start at the beginning. The first tome about this infamously large crimson hound is “Clifford the Big Red Dog”, so that’s the subject of today’s inquiry. I’ll be showing you select pages from the text to reveal the startling discoveries I’ve made. Buckle up, buttercup.
Meet our hero, Emily Elizabeth. How tall is she? Unknown. How old is she? Unclear, but we can guess roughly 7-10 years. In 1963 when this was published, at age ten she’d be on average 55.5”, so we’ll guess she’s about 53” (4 ft 5 in). Yeah, I did some research.
Enter Clifford. Right from the get-go we can see he’s not as big as Godzilla (164 ft), an average Gundam (60 ft), or even Falkor from The Never-Ending Story (43 ft). But he’s bigger than Emily Elizabeth. How much bigger?
It’s hard to say. In this next image, Emily Elizabeth is riding Clifford like a show pony. She appears to come most of the way up his neck, so based on eyeballing it alone, he’s three Emily Elizabeths (Emilies Elizabeth?) tall (13.5 ft) and four long (18 ft).
Seems kinda small to me for the biggest, reddest dog on EE’s street. Maybe we can figure it out more exactly if we look ahead a bit. How about this next image? Here, Clifford brings back the wrong stick while playing fetch. Your mistake was not eating the cop, Cliff.
Now, I’m no math whiz.
…that’s it. All math will be wrong.
…that’s it. All math will be wrong.
I should mention that I’m staring at this nightmare dog 30 times a day for a reason. My toddler has questionable taste in literature but I can’t say no when he asks me to “read Crifferd"
If I barely remember high school trig correctly, we can figure out how big something is using triangles. There’s also SIN, COS, and TAN involved somehow? So if we use the tree in this photo, triangulated against the height of Emily Elizabeth and a sidewalk square…
Screw it, look at this big dog next to a house. He’s crouched, and is clearly slightly taller than the home. A two-story house is about 20' tall, so Clifford is at least that—maybe more like 25', given how much of his head is sticking up and the fact that he’s leaning forward.
That’s taller than we guessed earlier! BUT WAIT, now he’s sitting beside the house and he’s… still only a bit taller than it? This implies that he’s 25 ft LONG, which would make him (based on earlier proportions) only 10.25 ft tall. HOW BIG IS THIS DOG?
The mystery deepens. Here's Clifford holding a car. Setting aside the terrifying implications of his jaw/neck strength, that car looks to be AT LEAST as long as his face, which (based on average car length in 1963) means it’s 17.5 ft long, so his body has to be bigger than that!
Ok, can we figure out Clifford’s size based on food? A dog calorie calculator told me a Lab retriever needs 1700 calories per day. Here Clifford is eating 12 cupcakes and a pot of tea. Each cupcake is 243 calories, so he’s consuming about 2916 calories right there. In one bite.
Let’s assume this is just a snack. A full meal would be more like 6000 calories (2x as much), at the low end. Two per day would land him at 12000 calories. Based on the ratio between a normal-size dog (70 lb) and the red menace, that makes Clifford… 491 lbs. A quarter of a ton.
I have no idea how big this dog is. It gets worse.
Look at this nonsense: now Clifford has his own house that’s 2x the size of Emily Elizabeth’s! How can they afford this? That’s gotta be four stories tall, and while Clifford clearly doesn’t fill it up to the brim, he looks comfortably larger than the home… so 30 ft? Lying down?
Yet here he is in a swimming pool. Average swimming pool size: varies, but this one looks on the smaller side so we’ll say 10 ft by 20 ft. Clifford is a bit squished in there, and though we don’t know how deep the pool is, it’s obvious that he’s much bigger than it.
This is the last straw. Here’s Emily Elizabeth again! Based on this image, Clifford’s back to his three Emily Elizabeth size. This dog is non-Euclidean! He makes no sense! If I were Emily Elizabeth, I’d stay away from this shape-shifting canine.
Phew. At least that was the last picture in the book. Maybe we can end it there? Maybe that final shot of Emily Elizabeth hugging her beloved behemoth shows us Clifford's canonical "true size"?
AW DAMMIT, THE COVER IMAGE IS DIFFERENT TOO—HE’S BIGGER IN THIS ONE
So, how big is Clifford?
…real big I guess, who fucking knows
…real big I guess, who fucking knows
