In Honor of The Garfield Movie, I'm Re-Running This Piece on the Lasagna-loving Fat Cat's Weird Crusade Against Cyber-Bullying
They’re real friends to me!
There are certain subjects that I am utterly fascinated by, even though my attitude towards them otherwise runs the gamut from indifference to outright contempt. Kiss is one such source of morbid fascination, as is Garfield, that lasagna-loving, pizza-pimping, Monday-hating fat cat who has epitomized the triumph of lazy sub-mediocrity for four decades.
So when I learned through a Heathcliff Facebook group I belong to (yes, I belong to a Heathcliff Facebook group; don’t judge me!) that the Garfield organization had teamed up with the Center for Cyber Safety and Education to produce a series of videos warning children about online dangers, I knew I had to experience it firsthand.
The “Garfield’s Cyber Safety Adventures” series gets off to a hypnotically terrible start with a video explaining how David Shearer, the bald, mesmerizingly boring CEO of the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, roped Jim Davis and his fictional creation Garfield into his online crusade to protect children.
The bald, fifty-something Shearer is maybe the single most boring human being in human history, but he’s Marlon fucking Brando in The Wild One compared to his good friend and ally Jim Davis, who is shown adorably pretending to still draw Garfield when it’s pretty obvious he hasn’t even read the comic strip in decades.
The “Garfield Joins Center for Cyber Safety and Education Team” video lasts well under three and a half minutes but every second is so achingly slow and painfully artificial that it feels three and a half hours long instead.
We begin on a typically kid-friendly, viscerally exciting note, with an establishing shot of the World Headquarters of (ISC)² and The Center For Cyber Safety And Education, a place that looms as large in the imaginations of small children as Disney Land or Disney World.
We then cut to Shearer ending a business meeting vowing to end a crisis and Shearer Skyping with Davis in a scene that combines the raw charisma of a boring executive stiffly reciting awkward copy with the visual dynamism of a 58-year-old sitting in a chair, looking at a laptop.
Shearer is painfully awkward. Nothing about him suggests that he should be in front of the camera, performing, yet here he is all the same. I’m not sure anyone in the world could make the lines, “Jim, I just got out of a meeting where we went over some great new research conducted by our Center for Cyber Safety and Education, and I have to tell you: I’m getting concerned. The world is in trouble, and we need to do something about it”. sound natural or organic, let alone a rank amateur pushed into performing for some inexplicable reason.
To be fair, Davis is just as hilariously stiff asking his good friend what he means. Shearer responds, “Jim when we were growing up, our parents taught us to look out for strangers who lurked in the dark, but today, we carry that threat in our pockets and invite them into our home every day.”
Davis suddenly seems very interested in cyber-safety for children; hell, even before Garfield and his squad hooked up with (ISC)² and The Center For Cyber Safety And Education, he knew that Shearer, his team, and (ISC)² are the “internet security experts.”
So when Shearer proposes a partnership between (ISC)² and The Center For Cyber Safety And Education in which noted cartoon bully Garfield teaches children about the evils of cyber-bullying and the importance of not accidentally giving NAMBLA members their home addresses and social security numbers, Davis is game.
GTFO with that fat-shaming bullshit, Nermal
Garfield doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through the endless three-and-a-half-minute video. Who needs one of the most beloved kiddie icons in the world when you can dazzle the little ones with the presence of two grayish-white senior citizens reading their lines as if they were introduced to them mere moments before filming began?
Garfield, for what it’s worth, decides to do the entire campaign in exchange for a large pizza. I’m sorry, but any way you cut it, that’s slave labor. Garfield references pizza continuously throughout the videos. You could say him enjoying pizza way too much is literally the only joke and it would be excessively generous to even deem it a gag.
Garfield is, of course, better known for his love of lasagna, but he currently is the face of a PIZZA chain in Canada called GarfieldEATS, so all of a sudden, it’s all about pizza and FUCK all other Italian dishes.
Garfield used to stand for something. True, he’s only ever really stood for eating lasagna and being an asshole, but it’s off-brand to turn him into a pizza-crazed foe of bullying and gratuitous meanness.
I don’t remember anything about Nermal from the comics, except that he was excessively cute and Garfield was always trying to murder him in funny ways, yet it nevertheless feels bizarre and jarring that, for the purpose of edification and education, “Garfield’s Cyber Safety Adventures” reimagines Nermal as a singularly unlikable combination of flaming, flagrant asshole, and total moron.
If Nermal didn’t have Garfield, Garfield’s girlfriend Arlene, and memorably terrible new characters Dr. Sabrina and Otto the Octopus to look after him, the little asshole would undoubtedly end up in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex dungeon or give out his social security number and his mom’s credit card information to hackers and cyber-criminals.
Because nothing matters more to him than likes, re-tweets, and validation on social media, Nermal posts a humiliating picture of his best friend Otto the Octopus eating four hot dogs simultaneously in a gluttonous frenzy, his face and torso covered in streaks of mustard and ketchup, with a mocking caption implicitly inviting strangers to join in his fat-shaming of his ostensible friend.
Nermal is so insufferable and cruel and fat-shamey on social media you’d think that he was Ricky Gervais.
Nermal guffaws heartily at all the fat jokes his post inspires until he learns that, actually, making fun of someone’s appearance publicly is NOT a nice thing to do. And who knows more about bullying than Garfield, who spends most of his time bullying Odie, Jon, and Nermal in every other iteration?
In the “Cyberbullying” video, Nermal learns not to be a total fucking asshole. In the other videos, his older, wiser chums keep him from using the internet as a forum to spread personal information about himself to criminals and predators.
We’re introduced to the acronym YAPPY to describe personal information you won’t want to give out online: Your name, Address, Phone Number, Passwords, and Your Plans. Nermal learns that even if the creepy strangers online like the same video game or comic book that he does, that doesn’t mean they’re not a modern-day Josef Mengele waiting to lure them into their sinister lair for sadistic experiments.
Of course, the messages that “Garfield’s Cyber Safety Adventures” convey to children are of tremendous value. Kids need to learn how to behave online, where to draw boundaries, and how to protect themselves, but it would be hard to imagine a clumsier or less convincing vehicle for that message.
Garfield is not Sesame Street. He stands for nothing other than eating, laziness, belligerence, and commercialism. He was not created to teach lessons and provide guidance for Nermal, who, here at least, is now the bully instead of his traditional role as the bullied.
Oh well. As surreally shitty as this cyber-safety and anti-bullying campaign might be, it’s still better than Melania Trump’s “Be Best” crusade.
Melania WISHES she had the unimpeachable moral authority of a figure like Garfield.
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