The first Meet The Residents CD had the original Santa Dog as bonus tracks, and that's how I first heard it (other than the short samples of each Dog on RzWeb). This was among my first batch of Rz albums, and I distinctly remember liking Santa Dog more than the album. (I suppose I still do, but back then I know my feelings on Meet were "well, I like that piano piece in the middle but not much else." These days I like a few more songs.)
I suppose I was struck most by the sharp contrast in musical ability. Santa Dog is so much more competent, and knowing it was from a year or two earlier made me think they had taken a step backwards (this was way before I learned that much of Santa Dog is sampled, so of course the musicianship is better). I had also heard about some mysterious four unreleased albums, and I figured that's what Meet was: a compilation of the best(?) bits from those, because they had to get an album out and they had nothing. But I digress, let's talk some dogs...
"Fire" is pure and lovely, and nobody can take that away (not even if you retool it to be a theme song for a Comedy Central cartoon). Surfy goodness that's sure to please everybody. Fun fact: I was in a high school play and they wanted cast members to get on the PA system in the morning to advertise it over the course of a week, so I wrote new lyrics to "Fire" and sang it with two friends for the whole school. We weren't asked back.
"Explosion" and "Lightning" have had their names swapped on different releases, so I honestly don't know which is which. But I like them both, with the one with groovy organ to percussion to "when everyone lives in the future" edging out as my preferred track. It's very often randomly playing in my head (that and "Smokebeams" from Tunes of Two Cities seem to be my default internal soundtrack).
And as for "Aircraft Damage" - this is our first real taste of how The Residents love to play with the sounds and rhythm of language. This really appealed to me at the time, and while it's probably not responsible for my degree in Linguistics, The Residents and I were definitely kindred spirits, just separated by a quarter century of time. Oh, if only I'd known you way back when... I'd have been running your website for over 20 years now. Yikes.