Sabtu, 16 Februari 2013
Though this is rarely mentioned in print, Garfield is set in Muncie, Indiana, the home of Jim Davis, according to the television special Garfield Goes Hollywood. Common themes in the strip include Garfield's laziness, obsessive eating, and hatred of Mondays and diets. The strip's focus is mostly on the interactions among Garfield, Jon, and Odie, but recurring minor characters appear as well. Originally created with the intentions to "come up with a good, marketable character", Garfield has spawned merchandise earning $750 million to $1 billion annually. In addition to the various merchandise and commercial tie-ins, the strip has spawned several animated television specials, two animated television series, two theatrical feature-length live-action films and three CGI animated direct-to-video movies. Part of the strip's broad appeal is due to its lack of social or political commentary; though this was Davis's original intention, he also admitted that his "grasp of politics isn't strong", remarking that, for many years, he thought "OPEC was a denture adhesive".[2][3]
History
In the 1970s the comic strip artist Jim Davis authored a strip, Gnorm Gnat, which met with little success. One editor said that "his art was good, his gags were great," but "nobody can identify with bugs." Davis took his advice and created a new strip with a cat as its main character.[4] The strip originally consisted of four main characters. Garfield, the titular character, was based on the cats Davis was around growing up; he took his name and personality from Davis's grandfather James A. Garfield Davis,[5] who was, in Davis's words, "a large cantankerous man". Jon Arbuckle came from a coffee commercial from the 1950s, and Odie was based on a car dealership commercial written by Jim Davis, which featured Odie the Village Idiot. Early on in the strip Odie's owner was a man named Lyman. He was written in to give Jon someone to talk with. Davis later realized that Garfield and Jon could "communicate nonverbally". The strip originally centered on Jon, being rejected by the King Features, Post-Hall and the Chicago Tribune-New York News agencies, all which asked Davis to focus on the cat, who in their opinion, got the better lines. United Feature Syndicate accepted the retooled strip in 1978 and debuted it in 41 newspapers on June 19[6] of that year (however after a test run, the Chicago Sun-Times dropped it, only to reinstate it after readers' complaints).[1][7] Garfield's first Sunday page ran on June 25, 1978,[8] being featured as a third-pager until March 22, 1981.[9] A half page debuted the following Sunday (March 29),[10] with the strips for March 14[11] and 21, 1982,[12] having a unique nine-panel format, but UFS curtailed further use of it (but it allowed Davis to use the format for his U.S. Acres strip).The strip's subject matter in the early months varied from the pattern it later settled into. Some could be seen today as politically incorrect, such as strips involving Jon's pipe smoking[13][14][15] or his subscription to a bachelor magazine.[16] Another point which has distanced these strips was the U.S./Canada-centric humor, with a few jokes being totally untranslatable to some languages,[17] however by 1980, the strip became the universal family fare product that it's known for.
Garfield quickly became a commercial success. In 1981, less than three years after its release, the strip appeared in 850 newspapers and accumulated over $15 million in merchandise. To manage the merchandise, Davis founded Paws, Inc.[19] By 2002, Garfield became the world's most syndicated strip, appearing in 2,570 newspapers with 263 million readers worldwide;[1] by 2004, Garfield appeared in nearly 2,600 newspapers and sold from $750 million to $1 billion worth of merchandise in 111 countries.[20] In 1994, Davis's company, Paws, Inc., purchased all rights to the strips from 1978 to 1993 from United Feature. The strip is currently distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, while rights for the strip remain with Paws.
While retaining creative control and being the only signer, Davis now only writes and usually does the rough sketches. Since the late 1990's most of the work has been done by long-time assistants Brett Koth and Gary Barker. Inking and coloring work is done by other artists while Davis spends most of the time supervising not production and merchandising of his characters[20].
Marketing
Garfield was originally created by Davis with the intention to come up with a "good, marketable character".[20] Now the world's most syndicated comic strip, Garfield has spawned a "profusion"[20] of merchandise including clothing, toys, games, Caribbean cruises, credit cards, dolls,[21] DVDs of the movies or the TV series,[22] and related media.[23]Media
Feature films
Garfield: The Movie was the strip's first feature film. Released on June 11, 2004, the movie followed Garfield's quest to save the newly adopted Odie from a TV pet-show host. While some critics lauded the casting of Bill Murray as the voice of the title character, Garfield: The Movie met with mostly negative reviews: Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times called it "soulless excuse for entertainment", while Desson Thomson of The Washington Post said of the film "There's nothing to recommend about this film except its sheer innocuousness".[24][25] The film garnered a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while Yahoo! Movies gave the film a C- grade.[26][27] The film's sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006), did not perform any better in terms of critical reception, gathering an 11% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and a C- grade from Yahoo! Movies.[28][29] In 2007, the CGI movie Garfield Gets Real was released,[30] followed by Garfield's Fun Fest in 2008, and Garfield's Pet Force in 2009.Internet
Garfield.com is the strip's official website, containing archives of past strips along with games and an online store. Jim Davis has also collaborated with Ball State University and Pearson Digital Learning to create Professor Garfield, a site with educational games focusing on math and reading skills and with Children's Technology Group to create MindWalker, a web browser that allows parents to limit the websites their children can view to a pre-set list.[31][32][33]A variety of edited Garfield strips have been made available on the Internet, some hosted on their own unofficial, dedicated sites. Dating from 2005, a site called the "Garfield Randomizer" created a three-panel strip using panels from previous Garfield strips.[34] Another approach, known as "Silent Garfield",[35] involves removing Garfield's thought balloons from the strips.[36] Some examples date from 2006.[37] A webcomic called Arbuckle does the above but also redraws the originals in a different art style. The Arbuckle website creator writes: "'Garfield' changes from being a comic about a sassy, corpulent feline, and becomes a compelling picture of a lonely, pathetic, delusional man who talks to his pets. Consider that Jon, according to Garfield canon, cannot hear his cat's thoughts. This is the world as he sees it. This is his story".[38] Another variation along the same lines, called "Realfield" or "Realistic Garfield", is to redraw Garfield as a real cat as well as removing his thought balloons.[39][40] Still another approach to editing the strips involves removing Garfield and other main characters from the originals completely, leaving Jon talking to himself. While strips in this vein can be found online as early as 2006,[37] the 2008 site Garfield Minus Garfield by Dan Walsh received enough online attention to be covered by news media. Reception was largely positive: at its peak, the site received as many as 300,000 hits per day. Fans connected with Jon's "loneliness and desperation" and found his "crazy antics" humorous; Jim Davis himself called Walsh's strips an "inspired thing to do" and said that "some of [the strips] work better [than the originals]".[41][42] Ballantine Books, which publishes the Garfield books, released a volume of Garfield Minus Garfield strips on October 28, 2008. The volume retains Davis as author and features a foreword by Walsh.[39]
Television
From 1982 to 1991, twelve primetime Garfield cartoon specials and one hour-long primetime documentary celebrating the character's 10th anniversary were aired; Lorenzo Music voiced Garfield in all of them. A television cartoon show, Garfield and Friends aired for seven seasons from 1988 to 1994; this adaption also starred Music as the voice of Garfield, one of the very last times Lorenzo Music would voice the character was in Garfield's Phone Messages from the Official Garfield site before his death.[citation needed] The Garfield Show, a CGI series, started production in 2008 to coincide with the strip's 30th anniversary.[43] It premiered in France in December 2008 and made its US debut on Cartoon Network on November 2, 2009.Video games
Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal is a 1987 video game for the Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and the Amiga based on the comic strip. Sega also made video games based on Garfield for the Genesis (Garfield Caught in the Act) and Windows 3.1 computers, as well as other companies made games, such as A Tale of Two Kitties for the DS, published by Game Factory, Garfield's Nightmare for DS, Garfield's Funfest for DS, and Garfield Labyrinth for Game Boy. On PlayStation 2 were Garfield and Garfield 2 (known in the US as Garfield, a Tale of Two Kitties). Also, Garfield Lasagna World Tour was also made for PS2. And a recent addition for mobile devices is "Garfield's Diner".Konami also released a Garfield Handheld electronic game.
Stage
Joseph Papp, producer of A Chorus Line, discussed making a Garfield stage musical, but due to some complications, it never got off ground. A full-length stage musical, titled "Garfield Live", was planned to kick off its US tour in September 2010, but got moved to January 18, 2011, where it premiered in Muncie, IN. The book was written by Jim Davis, with music and lyrics by Michael Dansicker and Bill Meade, and it was booked by AWA Touring Services. However, no other cast or crew's name is available for dispersion to the public. The opening song, "Cattitude" can be heard on the national tour's website, along with two more, "On the Fence," and "Going Home!".[44] When the North-American tour concludes in 2012, it will tour throughout Asia.[edit] Comic book
In agreement with Paws, Boom! Studios launched in May a monthly Garfield comic book, with the first issue featuring a story written by Mark Evanier (who has supervised Garfield and Friends and The Garfield Show) and illustrated by Davis's long-time assistant Gary Barker.[45]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield
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