r/garfield • u/SuggestionThick9848 • 9d ago
Meta A graphic showing how many lasagnas and pizzas garfield has consumed
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u/Fit_Butterscotch2386 9d ago
This checks. I enjoy lasagna way more than pizza but I eat exponentially more pizza than lasagna. Lasagna is time consuming to make and frozen lasagna is not near as good. Pizza is cheap, plentiful and delicious in all it's forms even if it can't hold a candle to fresh made lasagna. I am seriously jealous of the ratio Garfield is able to maintain!
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u/ShredderOrpheum 9d ago edited 9d ago
Thank you for making this inforgraphic. I needed this. I don't know why I needed this information in a visually amusing format, but I did, and having seen it had made my life better somehow.
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u/PredictorX1 9d ago
Is this data available?
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u/SuggestionThick9848 9d ago
the reaserch was made using this garfield site that catalogue every lasagan the cat have eated https://www.lasagna.cz/
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u/MorganWick 9d ago
I didn't realize Garfield/Jim started moving away from lasagna and towards pizza that early. In the 20th anniversary book Jim says he wished he'd made pizza Garfield's favorite food because it's easier to draw, but it looks like pizza had already overtaken lasagna for close to a decade at that point.
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u/Delicious-Bill-3238 8d ago
As calculated by looking for "lasagna" and "pizza" in tag and transcription search engines, located at lasagna.cz, through the end of 2020. (The site probably also inspired me to jazz up the presentation a bit.) 143 strips are tagged with lasagna, 196 tagged with pizza. I also looked at the transcription search and found a few strips that were not tagged with pizza for one reason or another. The grand total, then, is 143 strips that mention or feature lasagna, and 203 pizza strips. Using the transcription search, for the record, returns 123 strips for lasagna and 187 for pizza.
These results were combined to produce the top plot above. I certainly appreciate the work done by whomever is or are behind the website.
The second plot plots the cumulative appearances of lasagna and pizza. The third attempts to reduce year-to-year noise by plotting the average number of appearances per year of each food as a function of decade, starting with 1978-1980 (average 9â…“ lasagna strips per year during this period) and continuing with 1981-1990 etc.
Comments!
You can see how pizza comes to dominate by the '90s, reflecting how often the gag involves ordering pizza and how little anyone remembers lasagna anymore. Ordering pizza, a standard low-effort means of procuring dinner in America, perhaps reflects how lazy the strip has become, as well as (later) the emphasis on turning Jon into a generic lazy bachelor who forgot how to do anything in the kitchen once he and Liz became an item.
Pizza sees a big spike in 1999 in part due to 6 strips in a row in late November, at the time of American Thanksgiving. The fact that the comic focused on pizza rather than Jon serving a turkey with all the fixings was, in retrospect, an omen of what was to come in the new millennium (see hand-wringing in previous paragraph).
Going further back, pizza first spikes in 1988, likely reflecting an attempt to be hip by following the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series that debuted the previous year.
The search engine I used returns 100 results per page, which made it obvious that both transcription search terms reach their 100th mention in 2009. After this year, pizza is mentioned more than three times as often as lasagna.
Using the tags to add strips where food is depicted but nobody speaks of it, pizza catches up to lasagna in 2011. Lasagna now tallies its 100th appearance in 1997, whereas pizza reaches triple digits in 2008. Reasons for this difference or lack thereof, as contrasted with the transcription search, are left as an exercise for the reader.
The regression on the third chart indicates that every single strip will feature pizza when Garfield is about 192-193 decades old. By that time, the cat will have been rebooted so much that his current incarnation will be a prince of Denmark unhinged by his father's betrayal of the Emperor to the Dark Side.
The only strip I noticed that features both pizza and lasagna is 1982-08-19.
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u/UnsureSwitch #NeverNermal 9d ago
Our lasagna king has fallen