Goose

Goose appears in Marvel's 2019 film 'Captain Marvel' as an ordinary ginger tabby living in a Air Force facility, and proceeds to steal every scene he is in — first by charming Nick Fury completely, and then by revealing that he is a Flerken: an alien species that merely resembles a house cat, and that stores a set of tentacles and a pocket dimension inside its mouth.

The joke works because the film plays it straight for so long. Fury, a character defined by suspicion, is utterly disarmed by the cat, cooing at him and carrying him about, while Carol Danvers remains sensibly wary. When Goose finally opens his mouth and swallows an entire artefact — and later a good portion of a hostile boarding party — the reveal lands as both a shock and a punchline. His parting shot, a scratch that explains the origin of Fury's eyepatch, rewrote a decade of Marvel backstory as a cat-related workplace accident.

Goose is adapted from Chewie, Carol Danvers' Flerken in the comics, renamed as a nod to 'Top Gun' to match the film's aviation setting. He was played on set by four different cats — Reggie, Archie, Rizzo and Gonzo — with Reggie doing most of the acting and digital effects handling the tentacles. Reportedly, Samuel L. Jackson adored the cats and Brie Larson, who is allergic, spent much of the shoot acting opposite a stuffed stand-in.

He returned in 'Avengers: Endgame' and 'The Marvels', by which point his ability to swallow inconvenient objects had become a reliable plot device.