I've hit another one of those days where I just can't be bothered to watch a film.
I need to post something for cat week. So we turn yet again to short burst entertainment in the form of cartoons.
Last time I looked up a Cat themed cartoon from Japan. And I'll be damned if I end up doing that this time.
I can't have another horrible experience like that.
So this time I'll keep things slightly more domestic and look for entertainment slightly South of the Border. What cat cartoons are there in America? Well quite a bit, but I'm going to go with Garfield the most mundane of cat entertainment.
To be more pacific, I'll be looking at the first episode of 'Garfield and Friends'. I guess they figured the stories of an incredibly Melancholy cat wasn't enough held up a cartoon for a full 20 minutes. So they threw in the secondary characters who all lived on a farm and usually engage in slapstick 'comady'.
I ended up skipping this part.
If I want to experience a bunch of farm animals engaging in human activity I'll read Animal Farm. I'm here for that stupid orange cat.
The first story involves a sleep-deprived Garfield who stayed up all night watching a documentary about Q-tips.
John (his irresponsible owner) and Odie head out to the store to give Garfield a little time to rest. While all of this is happening a strange and incredibly annoying clown shows up wanting to wish some old lady happy birthday. Garfield can actually communicate with people he wants to tell him that he has the wrong address.
Garfield tries to close the door on this clown and forget about him. But this creepy jerk just won't leave them alone.
The clown precedes the break into Garfield's house and harassment him in every possible way, claiming that he needs to give this old lady of celebration dance before leaving.
Eventually Garfield just dresses himself up as the old lady and convinces the clown to leave. That is before John and Odie get home to tell Garfield they have a special surprise for him.
It's Garfield's birthday and they decided to higher the same annoying clown to wish him a happy birthday.
So the clown returns, tries to say happy birthday to a mute cat and causes Garfield to break down and run away. Only to be confronted by the clown yet again.
This clown is horrible and most likely contributed to the downfall in popularity of all other clowns.
The second story is just Garfield coming down with a strange illness that makes him want to dance like a stereotypical Hawaiian every time somebody brings up cliche of that particular culture. John tries to utilise this strange condition to win a bunch of money on a degrading television show. But at this point Garfield is cured of his element and John is left dancing on stage trying to convince his cat to do the same.
It ends with John winning the prize money and being shown as the world's most pathetic man. A win for him financially, a blow for is already destroyed ego. Not that John had much of an ego to begin with.
Overall it's not that entertaining of an episode. It's very mundane and the joke's fall incredibly flat. But that kind of works and its favour given that the entire premises based on Garfield be incredibly mundane cat. So despite the shows shortcomings it still works out perfectly for what it is.
For some reason Garfield become really popular on the internet as something of a punchline joke. It's just a bunch of people making fun of Garfield's mundane comedy and constantly making references to lasagna or one of his other cliched punchlines.
I never entirely sure if this is done out of love for hatred.
Honestly I think the whole thing gets tiring after a while and it automatically just ends up with a bunch of Internet storage data being consumed by pointless one off ''jokes''* about an already-established fictional character.
*Let's face reality. Memes aren't really jokes. At least they're not most of the time. I find that there one-off references to something that might be a joke or sometimes it's just a bottleneck statement about something that's incredibly obvious, made all the more obvious by pointless text or confusing imagery. A lot of the time they just feel incredibly lazy and I think they Zapped people of a lot of their creativity. Obviously there's some good ones in the bunch, but I think people are starting to sell themselves short just for the sake of 5 Seconds Of Fame.
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