Turns out i was right and now i'm very depressed about it.
i've mentioned before the fact that as a nation Americans don't want anything new. We generally avoid smaller restaurants and stores in favor of big national chains. Folks will line up for miles to see some generic action movie, but avoid seeing a better "art house" flick, and a good many folks will never consider a book unless it's premiers as a #1 best seller on the New York Times list. (Anyone want to explain that to me?)
Well, i finally read the Slate article about Garfield. In a nutshell, he's popular because he's bland. Jim Davis very carefully crafted Garfield to appeal to the generic more forgettable elements, going so far as to pull the suckerfooted doll when it threatened to become a craze. He copped stylings from all the post-peak comics that were out at the time, mostly Peanuts, and started the strip with a stable of five jokes he could constantly rely on. ("i hate Mondays","He sure is fat and lazy", "He's so cruel to poor Odie", etc.)
Davis doesn't want a funny clever movie. He wants a bland, forgettable movie that will net him lots of money in marketing tie-ins. And he's going to get it.
And we only have ourselves to blame.
You know what i'd love to do? i want to start up a grass roots campaign to put an edge back into comics. Start a letter writing campaign to insist that formulaic, safe comics like Garfield are deeply offensive and how we are planning a public boycott of the Picayune Post unless they run comic strips that make people think. Pull the pabulum and replace it with something local that isn't afraid to confuse the hell out of people.
And then i want a magic pony that gives me ice cream, but knowing my luck, it'll probably be just vanilla.
