Friday, 22 May 2020

Lasagna Cat Part 1: Season One (2007-8)



Directors: Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max
Screenplay: Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max
Based on the newspaper comic strip by Jim Davis

[Note: Yes, back last year I covered this web parody series in a two part blog piece. Bluntly, this is a return to this peculiar long gestating production about everyone's favourite orange cat. Unlike last time, there will be more time on each piece of this work because, unlike the last review, I realise I should have given more thought to each piece]

How does one explain Lasagna Cat? Well, the question extends back to not even where the first "season" of this web parody series came from, as I feel the work changed as it entered its unexpected return, but to another - how does one explain Garfield? Who actually read Jim Davis' original newspaper strip when it started in 1978, and what is the appeal of a lonely guy named Jon Arbuckle, his yellow dog named Odie, and an orange cat that loves lasagne and hates Monday called Garfield? Here's the thing, even if Garfield dissipates in pop culture, for a certain generation if you say "I hate Mondays" or evoke lasagne, Garfield will be there. I grew up in an era where you did not have to read any of the strips but could see the animated tie-ins and merchandise, so the character could transcend the original strips. That they are still being published however means he is now more than the sum of his original premise. The initial idea, presumed, in Lasagna Cat is that these strips are not inherently funny, and the premise is to recreate the panels exactly, followed by a "tribute" to Jim Davis.

As the project continued, and creators Fatal Farm (Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max) found as they worked over ten years on these jokes, this initial premise has been muddled. Frankly, I have always been of the belief that a lot of popular work that is successful in the mainstream, the true mainstream of ordinary people, is not going to be understood in how it succeeds, as is underground material is not going to be understood by the mainstream, and inevitably these types of arguments of artistic merit are going to be subjective. From the panels used in Lasagna Cat, Garfield is innocuous but at times quite ward and idiosyncratic, merely slithers of it in banal humour which plays a factor in this adaptation.

For "Season One", this was only three years into YouTube's existence when these videos were uploaded in 2008, following a trailer in 2007, the site virtually alien to the dominant form more likely to be watched by kids than actual television in the 2010s. They are, in all honesty, merely basic parodies, but I have softened to them in knowledge of Fatal Farm at this point were going to develop and build to more elaborate work afterwards. The duo created work before, but it was this project that got the attention of the likes of Adult Swim, letting them on to bigger work on Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007-10), even Old Spice commercials with Terry Crews. Before however, they were doing alternative title sequences to old television. During the production of their take the Disney animated show Ducktails (1987-1990) in which Webby Vanderquack gets catfished online and kidnapped as a sex slave, they found a grotesque adult sized Garfield costume; sunken eyes, giant head, a thing perfect for a CreepyPasta of Garfield eating your soul. Certainly, for subverting the original comic strip, a natty costume like this would suffice.

For me, the recreations are the most interesting aspects of Season One, because controversially I think acting out the strips presents some fascinating ways filmed images can add to the material. I am thinking specifically of co-creator Jeffrey Max as Jon Arbuckle, who is actually providing a great performance as a naive, wide eyed individual. Having the character being acted, in a very fluffy wig and trademark blue sweater, means that facial expressions and eye movement adds to what are some frankly generic jokes in the original material, adding odd levels to them as seen as the panels themselves are shown after the recreations for comparison.


Obviously most of the fan base is about the tributes, which are effectively their versions of a trend at the time of fan made music tributes taking existing footage and editing it to music. Fatal Farm follow these restrictions fully, in that they only use the footage from the recreations, manipulating it which can get really perplexing when (set against "Suicide is Painless" from the M.A.S.H soundtrack) Garfield is depicted with a third eye and even crucified on a cross. The music is a lot of big mainstream pop hits, surprisingly with only one real case of copyright violation being raised by the short using Desperado by The Eagles1 having to be deleted officially in the 2010s.

It can be argued, even by accident, that some of the songs chosen are being questioned as much for their mainstream success as the strips. I have to think of a song like Bailamos by Enrique Iglesias and wonder is it has actually been remembered fondly, or whether it was just the chorus being stuck in your head as it did for me from Lasagna Cat. It was originally on the soundtrack for Wild Wild West (1999), a notorious cinematic flop, a detail that few would remember, and as much as a fake Garfield dancing to it with Adobe After Effects being used a plenty is a critique of the newspaper strip, it can offer a critique on these songs too. Likewise, is Ebony and Ivory, the Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder collaboration, held highly, as it sits over time over Garfield and Odie (in a ridiculous homemade costume) hug. Like Garfield itself, if people love these songs sincerely, even if it was just one person in the world, then they are loved. But the spectre of what is perceived as accepted because we have presumed so, an issue with mainstream media, as much clings to these examples. If they are mostly perceived to be great or important, that is a form of purgatory, a symbolically appropriate metaphor for a web parody series that will run with this when we get to Sex Survey Result's ending all the way in 2018.

At this stage, these are really just parody videos, released in a whole batch in 2008. Fatal Farm originally had plans to do a Garfield strip a day, only to find this was impractical, so this does work in its places a peculiar form of filmed performance art. One of the most famous, set to the score from Jurassic Park (1993) whilst increasingly low pickings in terms of reviews to Garfield (2004) and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006) are shown, starting with positive reviews for both by Roger Ebert but eventually getting to an Amazon review, is more of an extended gag than how ambitious they eventually got. This is particularly the case as, if you go to these after seeing the 2017 work, these do not really have a dynamic conclusion to any of them. The tributes do not really get ambitious later on, and the only dynamic change is the sole female cast member, hired to play the vegetarian Dr. Liz Wilson, for a single strip used about Garfield eating her handbag. What does predate where the second season would head is that Jim Davis' strip has odd touches belying it as an innocuous and for some unfunny work. The closest to a grandiose tribute is the one which uses original footage, Jon Arbuckle not having a romantic life turned into a sad monochrome tribute of his crying on the kitchen floor with the telephone receiver by him.

Arbuckle was originally a stand-in for his creator, who in the first strip was also a cartoonist, only to grow into a man in his thirties or so who is perpetually single, isolated and eccentric. Some of it is absurd, like his glee in a toaster popping which is turned into a brash USA tribute, but the romantic life one is dark humour for a very silly comic strip. If I ever did a "Books of the Abstract", I would have to cover the strange history of Garfield Without Garfield, a parody which just took original strips and removed Garfield, and anything else out the ordinary, so what was left were just Jon being insane and isolated. It is a project that Jim Davis clearly liked as the rights owners officially released the strips in paperback form, thus making it canon and adding layers to this character2.

As I will get to in the later parts, the snark and irony that has been welded to Garfield in parody, which this is the biggest example of, became paradoxically as it became a way for the franchise still to live, although it will take a while before we get to this in terms of where Fatal Farm themselves ended up being. The result here is merely a stepping stone to a bigger project, not to be dismissed but that it was the first stage to a project Fatal Farm which grew from this version's virtues and evolved into something considerably weirder. It would take ten years, but it would happen.

TO BE CONTINUED...


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1) The Big Lebowski (1998) perfectly sums this up - "The fucking Eagles..."

2) This is not to mention the likes of Garfield: His 9 Lives (1984), a collaborative comic, or any of the TV animation and animated specials which suggest that, even if occasionally, the newspaper strip's reputation for being banal belays the whole story.

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