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Garfield has spent decades perfecting one skill: refusing to leave the couch. So of course Hollywood sent him to England, handed him a royal lookalike, and made him the most reluctant cat in the history of the monarchy. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties is a movie about mistaken identity, a very large castle, and a cat whose idea of a crown jewel is anything left unattended on a buffet table.

Naturally, a video game was in order. The Nintendo DS got its own version, and so did the PlayStation 2, which means this cat managed to be a tiny royal on your lap and a tiny royal on your TV. Not many orange cartoon cats can say they’ve been in two different living rooms at once without moving.

Joining us to sort through the royal mess is Chris Maynard from Following Films. Chris knows his way around a movie, which makes him ideal for the question at the heart of this episode: when you turn a movie about a cat pretending to be a prince into a game, does the cat get to keep pretending, or does he just end up running down hallways? Chris is here to tell us whether this is a proper adaptation or a very loud costume party.

So polish your crown, put the snacks within reach, and let’s find out whether A Tail of Two Kitties is a game fit for a king or one that should have stayed incognito.Continue Reading

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Back in 1988, CBS gave us Garfield: His 9 Lives, an anthology special where our favorite lasagna enthusiast got to be a caveman, a pampered Egyptian god-cat, and an honest-to-goodness astronaut fending off an interstellar war fleet. Ambitious! Mythic, even! Then in 2006, Lucky Jump Games and The Game Factory looked at that legacy, borrowed the exact same title for a Game Boy Advance platformer, and said: actually, what if his nine lives were a farm, a haunted house, a circus, a sewer, a tree, an alley, an obedience school, and a lab? No pyramids. No space combat. Just Garfield, freshly stuffed from an eating binge, suffering eight increasingly damp nightmares about locations you could reach on foot from his own kitchen.

Climbing out of Garfield’s nightmare to help us survey the damage is Derek B Gayle, who hosts or co-hosts what feels like an ever-multiplying stable of shows including Walloping Websnappers, Gimmicks, Skreeonk!, and, at this point, so many other podcasts that keeping an accurate list may violate several laws of podcast physics. If Garfield hates Mondays, Derek looked at that same feeling and apparently decided the correct response was to start four more podcasts to fill the time.

So raid the fridge, settle in for a night you won’t remember fondly, and let’s find out if Garfield and His Nine Lives earned its spot next to the caveman, the pharaoh, and the astronaut, or if it should’ve stayed exactly the kind of dream you forget the second your alarm goes off.Continue Reading

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Garfield has spent I don’t want to think about how long being terrified for our entertainment, and somehow this is only the second time we’ve noticed. Today we’re looking at two occasions Jim Davis’s laziest creation got shoved into a horror plot he absolutely did not sign up for: Garfield’s Nightmare on the Nintendo DS and Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt, the Flash game that lived on Garfield.com back when “Flash game that lived on a dot-com” was still a sentence people said out loud.

Helping us make sense of not one but two instances of “cat, but afraid” is Dee Parson from Supr Dee, the syndicated cartoonist behind Rosebuds. A guy who, by his own account, actually learned to read on Garfield comics, which means this episode is less “guest booking” and more “the student returns to grade the source material’s video game output.”

So lock the pantry, keep an eye on the Scare-O-Meter, and let’s find out if either of these games earned the right to scare a cat who once ate an entire sandwich made of other sandwiches.Continue Reading