Chris Evans, the former Captain America and current activist working to help improve transparency in government, had a sweet story to share last night about his dog, Dodger, and how a Red Sox fan came to have another team’s name on his beloved pet. The answer — and this is about as on-brand for an Avenger as you can get — has to do with Disney. Dodger isn’t named after the baseball team, or even after the classic Oliver Twist character…well, a little bit of that last one, we guess. The dog got his name because, when Evans first saw him, his face looked a little familiar.
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More to the point, the dog looked like Dodger from the 1988 film Oliver and Company. It was the first thing that popped into Evans’s head when he saw the dog and, when he later decided to take the dog home with him,, the actors says he did try to come up with something else to call it, but nothing fit quite as well as Dodger.
And, as Kimmel points out in the video embedded below, Evans actually has a tattoo on his chest bearing his dog’s name.
“That’s probably one of the truest relationships I have, joked Evans. “I’ll never regret that tattoo. I’ve regretted a few in my life, but not that one.”
It seems as though maybe Oliver & Company isn’t Evans’s favorite Disney movie of all time, since he says he’s a little bit embarrassed to be repeating the “Dodger” story over and over again.
“It’s a far more embarrassing story that I now get to explain every time someone asks me,” Evans joked. “There’ a movie called Oliver and Company, it’s a Disney movie, an animated movie….When I first saw hi min the shelter, I just said ‘man, that looks like Dodger from O&C. After I decided I was taking him home with me, I went through the process of trying to think fo other names, and I couldn’t get off Dodger. I was like, ‘Let’s not overthink this one.’”
Evans was on the show to talk about the launch of his new website, A Starting Point, which aims to be a bipartisan resource connecting Americans with their elected officials. He called out current and former Congressional representatives like Katie Porter and John Boehner as being some of the most impressive of the more than 100 people they talked to for the site.
