Thursday, April 27, 2006

Meauman's Chinese Theater


I'm going to get conceptual here for a moment.

Sometimes Garfield does gags where the premise is to describe something outlandish happening off-panel. This is most often just Garfield watching a weird movie on TV, recounting something horrible he did to the mailman, or Jon describing how his date went wrong earlier that evening. In the arts, we call this "weak" as a narrative technique, and in the case of jokes, the joke can only be as strong as your ability to write vivid and absurd images.

Since there is an animated feature called The Brave Little Toaster...
Since there are any number of singing household appliances and furniture in Academy Award winner Beauty and the Beast...
I see Jon saying he loves animation, but has he ever seen any? None of this sounds like particularly "weird" content for a cartoon.

Q: Is horror the proper reaction? Is the theater empty because the movie is bombing, or so the Paws team doesn't have to draw a crowd? Why did they leave Odie at home? Is this some kind of joke about the dancing animals in a conga line during the Garfield and Friends theme song?

3 comments:

Ryder Ripps said...

Also note that garfield originally was a toaster. Named "garfield the toaster".

Anonymous said...

Indeed: A yodeling toaster and a conga line of kitchen appliances seems a relatively mundane element in an animated movie. That's the joke, and the strip made me laugh, so it must be quite funny: They're staring wide-eyed at something that is normal ... except that it isn't normal, it's weird; why aren't we always shocked by the absurd goings-on in animated movies?

Bird of Paradise said...

BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER AND FRIENDS TO BROADWAY