Something's Missing

I have been fascinated lately by how much a thing changes when you remove some of its core elements. Today, my friend Andy linked me to an amazing blog called Garfield Minus Garfield, which takes Garfield out of his own comic strip, leaving Jon Arbuckle to wander around like a mad man. The strips are posted daily. Here are 3 of my favorite strips from the site:









Funny how you never realize just what a loony toon Jon is until Garfield isn't there for comic relief. It's pretty depressing actually.

I was also looking around on Cory Archangel's page yesterday when I came across this:


He took a level from Super Mario Bros from NES and took everything out but the clouds. Kind of cute and relaxing. It looks like a happy place with King Koopa's evil doings erased.

This stuff is cool, but it's not even close to the videos of Saved By the Bell that my friend Craig made in high school. He edited out the laugh tracks from entire episodes, exposing that Zach and the gang were just some troubled, unfunny teens. I wish I could post the videos here but they are boxed up in some garage in Arizona. But to give you an idea of how truly unsettling this is, watch the laughless Full House. It's confusing not knowing when to laugh, and you start to realise that none of these people make sense.

And speaking of laugh tracks, this episode of Hey Dude has one of the most insanely inappropriate laugh tracks I've ever heard, unless you find alcoholism and drunk driving funny.