Any Franchise Left To Its Own Devices Will Go Off The Rails

As if to prove that truly insane ideas can always get even more insane, a group of young actors dressed up like ghosts and played baseball against each other to promote the release of Sadako Vs. Kayako. This stunt was doubly ridiculous because any manager worth a damn knows the tormented souls of murdered children can't hit a curveball.

In the simultaneously overcomplicated and unambitious world of Pet Force (which takes place in a comic book in Garfield's world), there's a parallel dimension ruled over by Emperor Jon Arbuckle (Garfield's owner) and protected by the Pet Force. Peace is being threatened by Vetvix, the parallel universe's version of Liz, the veterinarian that Jon has been sexually harassing for years.

Garfield becomes super-strong Garzooka, Odie turns into the also super-strong Odious, Arlene becomes Starlena and gains singing powers, Nermal gets freezing and forcefield powers as Abnermal, and Pookie becomes a cyborg teddy bear called Compooky. If Jim Davis molested a can of alphabet soup, its subsequent testimony would spell out the plot to Garfield's Pet Force.

Despite being an idea that would seem like a stretch for a piece of fanfiction, the saga of Garfield's Pet Force unfolded over the course of six goddamn novels. Not comics -- novels. And it played the premise much more seriously than it deserved, sometimes going to legitimately dark places. For example, here's a scene in which Vetvix banishes the Pet Force to the cartoon cat equivalent of Hell World:

The last book was published in 1999, and the casual reader would have been justified in thinking that Jim Davis had sobered up and moved on. But no, in 2009 Pet Force came screaming back to hideous life in the form of a feature-length CGI movie that, despite being distributed by 20th Century Fox, looked like a cutscene from a mid-90s PlayStation game:

Refusing to let a bad idea die, Jim Davis reanimated Pet Force AGAIN in 2013 as an actual comic book, for all of those novel readers who were struggling to picture Pet Force in their mind's eye:

You may ask yourself, how does one go about squeezing more extreme from a cartoon already made up entirely of karate, explosions, and parachutes? To that we say, "Go back and read the previous sentence."

To let the viewers know their cartoon wasn't messing around, G.I. Joe Extreme (and let's note their restraint in not spelling it "Exxtreme") featured a live-action introduction, despite the fact that the show itself was animated, presumably by an art team of chrome skeletons on flaming windsurf boards.

It's not easy to parse a storyline between so many screams and electric guitar riffs, but G.I. Joe Extreme was a complete reboot, cutting G.I. Joe down from two hundred thousand battling toy advertisements to a ragtag handful of mercenaries. Instead of detailing each one, we'll just note that one member was named Metalhead and his action figure came with a combination machine gun/rocket launcher/keytar:

The Extreme team also featured a girl, who was a pilot reassuringly codenamed "Mayday" introduced to the series in a storyline about the other Joes getting upset about having to be on the same team as a woman. Meanwhile, the original G.I. Joe team featured twice as many women, and nobody seemed to have any contempt for their ovaries.

"What about Cobra Commander and his ruthless gang of lackeys?" you may be asking. Apparently they never existed, since they're never mentioned at any point in the show. Instead, the main antagonist is some guy named "Iron Klaw" who looks like Saddam Hussein combined with the entire cast of Mortal Kombat.

A whopping 26 episodes were produced before the period that would be known to historians as the Extreme Era (they still differ on how many X's to use) came to a close.

The modern re-imagining of the modern stone age family did more than place Fred and Barney in the uncanny valley of sexable cartoon protagonists. It discarded a lot of the gender roles in which the original 1960s show was entrenched to allow Betty and Wilma to have more identifiable personalities, and to enjoy hobbies other than nagging and harping.

For example, in one of the issues, Wilma takes up painting. Since she's technically a cavewoman, her paintings consist entirely of handprints, which would've been a way to toss in a jab at abstract art if this was the 60s Flintstones show, and maybe thrown in an overwrought cavemen portmanteau like Sandy Warhol or Jackson Polrock. The Flintstones comic, however, uses Wilma's painting to humorlessly explain the depth and importance of art and the quiet terror of existentialism.

In another issue, The Flintstones dive headlong into the institution of marriage. Since marriage is new and radical in the town of Bedrock, there are scenes of various cavepeople struggling with it, getting counseling and discussing the implications of it. And not in a cute way. Here's Fred and Wilma getting hit with the sobering realization that marriage occasionally involves heartbreaking conflicts that are simultaneously no one's fault and impossible to resolve:

Which is not to say this reboot completely abandoned its goofy roots, since it still found time for things like caveman Carl Sagan using a dinosaur seesaw to launch a monkey into space while three different characters orchestrate a clumsy reference to a David Bowie song.

Following the deaths of Mr. and Ms. Pac-Monarch, the president-elect of the new global Pac-Government rounded up the traitorous, genocidal insurgents -- led by a guy whose actual first name is "Betrayus" -- and had them all processed through a machine that, in the show's own words, "separates the consciousness" of a Pac-Person from their "physical body" and "banishes them to the nether-realm." Yes, the government designed a machine to rip the souls out of Pac-Men, which it did millions, perhaps billions, of times.

Creepily enough, their bodies are apparently "in storage" somewhere, and the process is reversible. Even so, the ghosts are referred to as "the dead" more than once, and the "nether realm" includes a lake of fire and a three-headed dog. So in Pac Man's world, Hell is a verifiably real dimension and a State-run machine can send you there. Again, this is the plot of a cartoon based on the Pac-Man series of electronic games.

Remember the original four ghosts, Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde (who, in the show's canon, were absolutely victims of the soul-tearing machine)? Well, they work for Pac-Man, who agreed to not eat them in exchange for their servitude. Seriously. And so they work as double agents hoping to get returned to their original bodies by the Pac-World president. And while no one on the show seems to bring it up, their voices and personalities clearly denote them as children.

Fun fact: Sitting through an entire act of Pac-Man And The Ghostly Adventures makes you 78 percent more likely to be questioned in related to an unsolved disappearance.

Shaggy, the useless, perpetually hungry member of the team who never contributed anything to any investigation and would actively flee any threat the instant it was perceived, was transformed from a well-meaning coward into the super aggro self-righteous asshole you see at every bar who looks like he carefully built his personality around being unique. Shaggy now looks like the kind of person who, at the slightest provocation, will burden you with his insufferable opinions about music and whiskey.

Fred and Daphne, on the other hand, have apparently spent the last 40 years powerlifting. They are ripped to shreds in a way that almost makes you feel sorry for the next poor drifter who dresses up like a pirate ghost to spook kids. These two look like they might tear off your entire human head while they're pulling off your mummy mask.

Of course, all of this pales in comparison to DC Comics' post-apocalyptic gritty reboot of Scrappy Doo. Scrappy Doo, as you may remember, was the ridiculous catchphrase-shouting puppy who was comically unaware of his own strength, and who is widely considered to be the most obnoxious cartoon character ever created.

Well, techno-cool reboot Scrappy Doo is most of those things -- he's still an irritating cheesedick who talks like an elementary school jokebook -- but in this new reimagining, he's a super-buff permanent werewolf wearing a pair of elaborate sunglasses and absolutely nothing else.

There are plenty of mysteries surrounding this new Scooby-Doo, but we doubt the gang ever gets around to solving any of them.

Jonathan Wojcik writes more about weird, creepy cartoons and has his own horror-comedy webcomic at Bogleech. Adam Koski wrote a hilarious and thrilling fantasy novel he can't wait to give weird spinoffs some day. Chris is planning to relaunch his Twitter account with more dynamic characters and fewer nerdy Hamilton references.

Also check out 5 Little-Known Sequels That Ruined Iconic Stories and 6 Movies You Didn't Know Had Catastrophic Unofficial Sequels.

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