Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 Spotlights The "Lazy, Orange Superstar" Garfield

Im sorry, John.

I still have to get use to him being now an official Nickelodeon character.

Interesting addition

I can't say I care about this game at all, but I find it rather odd that they went with a sequel instead of character packs. And if not that, maybe they could have gone with cross compatibility between the two games to combine both rosters.

@T317 it sounds like they did the melee thing where they added at least a special for all characters or revamped their movesets.

@RareFan I'm not really thrilled about it. But That's mainly because they removed his website, that's been there like the beginning of the internet. It was filled with soooooo much stuff!

Oh my god old Garfield shine!

@garfreek In all fairness, the old website (which I also loved to frequent back in the day) would have been rendered broken and useless with today's Internet, ever since Adobe and all of the major Internet browsers dropped support for Flash Player, which much of the content of the old Garfield website relied upon.

That means that unless you find some sort of emulator to run Flash, the content for the old Garfield site (especially the games, particularly the Scary Scavenger Hunt games) will only exist in our memories.

That original design Garfield is a really nice touch.

Off topic but this just reminded me that I really wanted to visit GarfieldEats and planned to next time I'm in Toronto... only to look it up and find out that they closed in 2021. Boo. I wanted a Garfaccino.

Love the original design being included!

@T317 The first one was on sale for $7.50 (now 5) all the time, so they weren't really making anything from new players and most people spending that little aren't going to spend extra for dlc on old games. So slap a little bit of fresh paint on it, call it 2 and the cycle continues.

Jon is shown in a chair reading a newspaper
Jon: Now where could my reflector be?
Garfield is shown with Jon’s reflector
Jon: Garfield!!!!!!

@AstroTheGamosian Flashpoint has the games in the library

Garfield is still one of the more baffling Nick acquisitions, because they treat him like a Nicktoon, yet he doesnt officially have a Nickelodeon cartoon to call his own yet.

@DTFaux they probably make enough out of the syndicated newspaper strip.

@DTFaux maybe they have a cartoon scheduled to premiere sometime after the movie is out next year.

@RareFan I am not exactly sure why Jim Davis sold Garfield to Nickelodeon, but It probably has something to do with his age, as he is almost 80 and will not be able to manage licensing and merchandising forever.

@LillianC14 Oh, I'm sure there's a lot of value in the IP without any additional footwork. It's odd how much of an outlier he is to other "Nicktoons". Especially compared to other acquisitions like Alvin & the Chipmunks and TMNT

@Paulo It's very possible. It wouldn't be the first time Nick introduced a new series following a theatrical release (or short).

@Smash_kirby Good to know.

Just don’t catch him on a Monday.

@Paulo Over the years Jim was less interested in working on the comic strip and more interested in the marketing and seeing what other people did with the character. He really enjoyed managing Paws inc when it was a physical building that was pretty much a giant Garfield museum of every previous product from around the world, and he could show licensees around to give them ideas and explain the history of the brand and characters.

He had his sales pitch down but also was just a lovely guy who liked talking to fans, buy you a drink, take you for dinner etc. Make a day of showing his love for Garfield to prospective clients. He was often very willing to work with individuals with almost no money on their pet projects if he felt they were passionate about Garfield and had grown up with him or whatever. This is how you end up with strange stuff by eccentric people like GarfieldEats and the random mom-n-pop "themeparks" with Garfield rides that are little more than hand made things handpainted on mdf on a farm/petting zoo in the middle of nowhere.

Sadly after the covid shutdowns, it became obvious that pretty much all business was moving to online only meetings, zooms, emails, and Jim didn't have the fun experience of having a prospective client fly in from a foreign country and being shown around. Once they closed the Paws Inc building, it wasn't fun any more. Time to retire. I certainly don't blame him.

@samuelvictor some of It makes sense, but "Over the years Jim was less interested in working on the comic strip.." as far as I'm concearned is not correct. He continues working on the strip to this day and even said recently that is what makes him get out of bed, to create the strips and make people laugh.

@Paulo Sure, I didn't say he didn't work on them any more, just that over the years he progressively outsourced more and more elements, bringing in artists, letterers, moving everything to digital, and then hiring more writers... For decades now he has been overseeing the strip rather than entirely making it himself like he used to, and over time he's become less hands on while concentrating on other areas. Of course, he always has the final say though, everything has to be signed off by him.

He has been quoted in several interviews as saying that he prefers the marketing side and the social/team aspect and finds it exciting and rewarding to give others a chance to do something with Garfield. Watch any of the interviews he did in the Paws Inc building and he states that the daily strip isn't so much his priority anymore, and he doesn't write for it as much, except when hit with jokes or inspiration.

In the modern era, whenever Jim is fully involved with 100% writing a project, it nearly always takes Garfield in very strange, creative, unique non-canon directions that don't fit the daily strip, such as short films/features/espisodes, things with sci fi, horror, superhero, multi-verse, or other takes like philosophical looks at life, death, religion... In a way, this was always his intention, if you look at some of the stuff from the early days, such as the original "9 Lives" book.

Garfield to him is not a specific canon and timeline, more an iconic image to give to different people and see what they do with him. This manifested in him finding writing for the standard strip and kids show somewhat restrictive, but really loving the idea of companies and individuals from all around the world using Garfield in unique (and often very ecclectic!) ways.

I don't say any of the above to insinuate that he doesn't have artistic merit or doesn't care about the strip. Quite the opposite. Its just that to him, the beauty of Garfield is that he doesn't belong to him, he belongs to the world, and he believes there can be infinite multiverse style reimaginings of his core concept - similar to how Disney use Mickey or Nintendo use Mario - except Jim is far less concerned about keeping things family friendly. He is often delighted by the weirder, more esoteric takes, occasionally even cosigning random stuff from the internet, such as officially publishing "Garfield minus Garfield". His only public concern is that children might be scared by some of what people create, but he still loves it and frankly none of the lovecraftian weird things the internet has created are that far from official stuff Jim has created and officially released himself over the years.

I personally find that fascinating, especially when you compared his career and ideals to other similarly successful cartoonists such as Charles Schultz or Bill Watterson, two people that I also deeply admire, both of whom took very different approaches to a very similar business, all three of which are completely incompatible but equally valid. Art is funny like that. And its beautiful.