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| From https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/022/199/lasagna-cat.jpg |
Directors: Jeffrey Max and Zachary Johnson
Synopsis: In 1978, cartoonist Jim
Davis created an orange cat who hated Mondays and loved Lasagna. Skip
forwards to the 2000s and two men who would found Fatal Farm, Jeffrey Max and Zachary Johnson, would find a ghastly
looking Garfield costume and, inspired by its discover, decided to replicate
old newspaper strips for a YouTube parody series in 2008. Time passes without
any new content until 2017, with the curious request for fans to call a number
and provide their name and number of sexual partners.
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| From https://3m3cna178rlp1rclw43v482p-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/images/garfield.jpg |
Prologue (01/14/2008):
Your eyebrows will be raised high
at that title. Some will even cry blasphemy as, (gasp!), this is not a film I'm
covering but a web parody series found on YouTube and its own official sight. That
poses an issue, as it uses copyrighted material and digital preservation is a
fraught idea online despite its advantages in uncovering obscurities. (More so
when one has to worry about litigation or new copyright laws attempted to be
passed for online sites). Yet I am covering this work alongside the entirety of
the material that came before under the belief that, part of the idea of moving
images in general as with cinema, web videos deserve a chance even if this will
become a historical chronicle of my viewing experience.
And Garfield is a character
iconic enough to have a parody. It effectively immortalises a figure when,
alongside the infamous The Disneyland
Memorial Orgy poster first published May 1967 in The Realist, among other examples, a parody exists which takes a
character and does transgressive material about such a figure. (That Garfield's copyright owners have been
okay with Lasagna Cat baring one
video is itself an advantage as, unlike other attempts to censor such parodies,
it makes a company look great). Jim
Davis' creation is one everyone to this day probably recognises, even if
they've never read the original newspaper strips. We have live action films
where the character is voiced by Bill
Murray, animated series and specials, and merchandise like a picture I
owned, in a blue frame, of Garfield being a bastard and using a chainsaw on
John Arbuckle's computer. There is enough knowledge of the orange cat to make
such a parody work for many.
On the same day, 14th January
2008, Season 1 was all uploaded at once on YouTube.
An actor, who I will compliment in recreating the character perfectly, plays
John Arbuckle, matching blue shirt and black trousers, another actor in an
adult size Garfield costume, and they recreate original newspaper strips titled
after the day they were originally published. Canned laughter is played over
the end of each strip, followed by the original newspaper comic for comparison.
Garfield is usually superimposed as smaller in a cheap effect, the aesthetic
and backgrounds meant to fully replicate the original strips. Garfield's actual
costume is creepy, a head like a partially rotting Jack-o-Lantern, but the
actor doing the voice does a commendable replication of his sardonic voice.
Odie, the yellow dog, is very shortly introduced with an adult sized costume
you could credibly sell on the high street without scaring children. For one
short, out of the entire two seasons, they briefly have the character of Liz,
played by a young woman, for one strip about Garfield eating her handbag.
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| From http://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/ wp-content/uploads/2008/01/jon_and_garfield.jpg |
If Lasagna Cat had only been the original 2008 videos I wouldn't have reviewed any of this. How it turned into a Twin Peaks and abruptly returned in 2017, after nearly ten years, with a four hour and forty minute conclusion is when the series gets interesting. The original 2008 videos aren't. The videos are average parody videos which are antiquated already. I believe videos uploaded to YouTube have the potential to be art, or at least preserved for future generations, but we can slide the conventional parody videos like this alongside all the Let's Plays which aren't about obscure videogames with interesting hosts narrating. There's little to the humour that's actually successful. The music videos that follow after each recreation, to conclude each video, are mostly tedious for me, between an extended piss take of Garfield the Movie (2004) as a masterpiece to a compilation of Americana images set to Alan Jackson's Chattahoochee not sustaining a lot through them even if there was an occasional chuckle. The use of licensed music, from Johnny Mandel's Suicide Is Painless to the Jurassic Park theme, can be inventive but it's not enough, alongside the obvious issue that, whilst they include the name of the artists always as part of a "Jim Davis Tribute Album", they are fraught for copyright problems. [As of 2018, the only original video pulled from their official YouTube page has Desperado by The Eagles. The fucking Eagles to quote Jeffrey Lebowski.]
The mocking nature of these
videos to Jim Davis, whose picture
appears at the end of each video, is an issue that crops up again and again
throughout Lasagna Cat.
Unexpectedly, whilst Season One is entirely about viewing Garfield as utterly unfunny, the recreations are the best moments
of the entire series of videos. Yes, one about John accidentally brushing his
hair with the cat brush is not a comedy classic, but a) these are family
friendly strips made per day of a newspaper, which would suck the creative juices
dry, and b) making the parodies like Arbuckle in Goth makeup trashing around to
Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails, as in that example are
incongruous to the strips themselves.
There's also the fact, knowing
their autobiographical nature from Davis,
that he was already predating the anti-humour, weird parodies long before they
came, some of the strips replicated here being worthy enough in their live
action remakes themselves without any mocking humour. John's generally strange
behaviour, like cheering each time the toast pops out (12/03/1991) or being daring by sleeping with his socks on (08/14/1986) already have enough
weirdness to them, and that's before you get to a couple where John's viewed as
a lonely, desperate man, predating the Garfield
Minus Garfield parodies where everyone else is erased baring John off
original strips, suggesting he's in the midst of psychosis. The irony is that
half my humour was found in Davis' work re-enacted, not through Fatal Farm's original material itself.
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| From http://splitsider.awlnetwork.com/ wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/02/lasagna_cat.jpg |
Three Colours: Blue (02/06/2017)
Time passes, nearly ten years in
fact. Jeffrey Max and Zachary Johnson build a reputation
professional working on Adult Swim
programming, working on segments for Key
& Peele and their infamous contribution to -- fan remake of Our RoboCop Remake (2014) where they
went far and beyond the bar expected from them with additional exploding
penises. They had worked on segments on Lasagna
Cat during this gap only for them to be gathering dust on a hard drive
(hard drives?), decided it was now or never to release them or not. They
planned it out with promotional trailers on the 6th February 2017 only to then
release a more bombastic trailer on 9th February 2017. The noticeable increase
in production value was immediately seen, money invested into material that Fatal Farm cannot gain profit from, such
as which means a huge sacrifice was done for the project to have actual camera
movement, special effects and budget even for a one scene Terminator joke with Garfield
with a glowing robot eye.
Some of these new videos are
memorable. Most of the Lasagna Cat
entries, before Sex Survey Results,
are family friendly but a few aren't. One of the 2017 entries, following a
strip where John is going to try every shampoo he has in his arms, parodies a
Japanese bukkake video. For those too innocent to know what that term means,
imagine John knelt between Japanese actors in a paper walled set who have
shampoo bottles, censored, placed in a very specific place by their crotches
whilst shaking their contents out on Arbuckle, who coquettishly talks in
Japanese. I wonder what it is was like to be one of those Japanese extras
having to even act out this segment, the look of bafflement mid-take as they
were taking par. It has to be asked, as is an issue with the entirety of Lasagna Cat, to what ends for humour or more the video is
actually getting at, but its memorable in a life scarring way as much for being
funny.
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| From https://1835441770.rsc.cdn77.org/splitsider.com/ wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/02/lasagna_cat-1.jpg |
Unfortunately, as with the original videos but worse due to the higher cost involved, most of the Season Two videos are undercut by their humour merely being pop cultural references without any further joke or a substantial enough one. As back as Season One, the first ever video a Final Fantasy parody, most of project especially in the 2017 videos is scuppered by the fact that, without the reference recognition, they are entirely without anything else to latch on to. The first of the Season Two videos underlies this major issue immensely, in that it's a full replication of a scene from the pilot episode of Miami Vice (1984-1990); whilst it tries to connect back to an original strip of Garfield mistaking Odie in a picture frame as his own reflection, it's a convoluted six degrees of separation from Michael Mann's eighties TV series to a parody involving Garfield and Odie and Crockett and Tubbs, with an off-key rendition of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight, and if you don't get the joke it makes less sense even for intentionally nonsensical humour.
Most of the humour is, aside from
the references, the same type of "wacky" music videos as Season One
only with a budget and a diverse soundtrack between Kraftwerk to the videogame EarthBound
(1995). One video worked - Odie's rise as a fashion icon due a paper bag
over his head, set to Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, with a tragic ending of
celebrity scandal, suicide and Hell full of John Arbuckle/scorpion hybrids.
Some are amusing - Kenny G soft jazz over
shots of sunshine and John on the phone. Some waste production value above them
- the one video Garfield's rights
owners asked to be pulled, because it includes their address and they didn't
want to be hassled, has an elaborate model suburbia entirely made from
breakfast food, with John waving to his bagel neighbour, only for a cheap joke
about Deep Blue Something's Breakfast at Tiffany's having lyrics
changed to being about Garfield. Many just vanish from memory or never succeed.
[Continue on to Part II]
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| From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o0Lv8irN66U/hqdefault.jpg |
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