Keep Kitsch Kitsch

I've gotten a little bit of feedback about this page. That makes me oh so happy!! Please continue to read and tell your friends. Your readership and free advertisement are the generators of my mind. They will keep me writing silly and trivial (but hopefully entertaining!) posts for a long time to come.

If any of you use AOL Instant Messenger you've seen the Garfield: The Movie ad at the top of the interface there. Is anyone else really, really upset by this? Some things really should just be left alone.

Don't get me wrong. The Garfield comic is shit. I think it started in 1978 and it hasn't been funny since 1982. Someone in my family had one of the Garfield books. Not the long rectangular ones containing strips that had been printed in the newspaper, but some sort of "Visions of Garfield" graphic novel for adults where he led nine different lives. In one he was a private investigator, in another he was a cavema...uh, cave-cat, I guess. Oh ok, here I see it on Amazon.com. It's called Garfield: His 9 Lives. Out of print. Hey! 37 Used & New from $0.98!! Anyway, that was decent and creative...but it was also written in 1984 (I was born in 1980. It took me several years to understand EVERYTHING in that book). Well, it's 20 years later. The dream is over.

So I'm not upset about a Garfield movie because I particularly like Garfield. But does the material lend itself to a CGI blob falling out of a skyscraper, as shown in the AIM trailer? Or Jennifer Love Hewitt "holding" the cat and smiling in the camera? Are there even any women in the Garfield strip? And what the fuck happened to Nermal??

I felt the same way when they made a live-action Inspector Gadget movie (with Matthew "reckless driving" Broderick, no less). Who knows? I haven't speculated on reasons for this phenomenon of remaking kitsch-y things, but I need to think about this less. Damn, it's already noon?!