10 Doctor Who Characters Who Appeared Outside The Show
6. K9 In American Dad
Who’d have thought that, of all the characters in a show about all of time and space, one of the most enduring would be a little robot dog.
K9 was part of the Fourth Doctor’s entourage and travelled alongside his master in several classic adventures. He returned to the show alongside Sarah Jane Smith in 2006, and played a key role in her spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures.
In between keeping the universe safe and fetching Sarah Jane the morning paper, K9 has also found time to appear in an American animated sitcom.
In the episode of American Dad called Hayley Was a Girl Scout, Stan gets involved with a troupe of the titular cookie-sellers, and they build a robot to enter the National Robotics Convention. The contest is modelled after a dog trial, so of course it features a cameo from the goodest boy in the whole galaxy.
K9’s ultra-brief appearance in this episode (see the bottom-left of the image above) betrays creator Seth MacFarlane’s deep-seated nerdiness. This is the guy who made his own Star Trek spoof. Of course he was going to cram a Doctor Who reference into one of his shows.