Garfield Shouldn’t Still Be So Popular Almost Half A Century Later

When was the last time Garfield made you laugh? I mean, actually laugh out loud. Was it when he complained about how much he hates Mondays?

Was it when he talked about how much he loved to eat lasagna? How about when he was mean to Odie?

Garfield feels to me like the talking animal version of a Kardashian—famous simply for being famous. Nobody ever claims that Garfield is their favorite character, yet every home in America has at least one plush of the cat. Don’t think so? Search your basement or attic—it’s there!

It might be more accurate to compare the cat to Kiss. Kiss has about three OK songs and has somehow parlayed that into a billion-dollar merchandising empire.

Jim Davis, Garfield’s creator, did the same thing, taking three or so passable jokes and spinning them into a sea of plushes, toys, movies, and video games. I dare anyone to tell me that Garfield has actually earned his place in pop culture.

Instead, Jim Davis carefully crafted a marketable character that he could sell to the masses. A mediocre, inoffensive, visually pleasing cartoon cat.

That’s not just my opinion either. Davis admitted in a 1982 Washington Post interview that the birth of Garfield was a direct result of Davis making “a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character.” 

Davis approached cartooning from such a capitalist standpoint that he even noted how “Snoopy, is very popular in licensing,” while “Charlie Brown,” was not.

It would be one thing if Garfield spawned entertaining products, but he really doesn’t.

The live-action Bill Murray-voiced movies are so bad that Murray himself makes fun of them in Zombieland.

Every Garfield video game I’ve ever played—and there are surprisingly a lot—has been unmemorable. Ditto for most of his television and video appearances after the ’80s.

I will begrudgingly concede that the Garfield Halloween and Christmas Specials from the ’80s were legitimately good.

But that’s only because the former takes a sharp turn into abject terror near the end, and the latter has an emotional core that most Garfield media lacks. What’s that quote about a broken clock being right twice a day?

As a character, he’s so boring that the funniest thing associated with his name is Garfield Minus Garfield—a re-edit of old comic strips where the titular cat is removed.

Without Garfield, the strips play out as a sort of existential nightmare starring John.

How sad does a character have to be that their absence makes something better? I don’t know a ton about the new movie, but the trailers seem to imply that Garfield’s absentee dad shows up needing his son’s help with a crime or something like that.

I wonder why they felt like they needed such a convoluted premise for the fat orange tabby?

Oh yeah, because 90 minutes of Garfield just doing regular Garfield stuff would be boring AF.

The bottom line is that if Garfield hadn’t been created specifically as a product for mass consumption and packaged accordingly, he would never have endured for almost 50 years.

He doesn’t have the whimsical heart of Snoopy or the social consciousness of Opus from Bloom County. What he does have is the perfect face for a T-shirt, and judging by Jim Davis’s net worth—hint, it’s in the billions—that’s enough.