10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows

It’s a function of the human condition to seek out meaning, to construct theories and strategies - coping mechanisms - that allow us to deal with the thronging insanity of the universe about us without spiralling down into madness ourselves. Justice and pride, gods and devils, even love itself… all to hold back a sea of chaos within our own skulls.

As you can see from that first paragraph, it’s also an excuse for the most magnificent bullsh*t imaginable. Which is what all fan theories are, really: utter codswallop, delivered in the manner of a late night pub conversation between two old friends who’ve had a little too much to drink.

The best fan theories fit as many of the facts as is convenient - the important thing is that they fit those facts elegantly, eliciting a startled, excited response. OMG. Mind = blown. I’ll never see X the same way again. Stuff like that.

Naturally, they’re not intended by the originators of the texts, because real fan theories aren’t implied, they’re inferred. That’s especially important here, because here I present you with ten strange and terrible theories surrounding some of the world’s most popular children’s television shows. Naturally, the creators of said TV shows didn’t mean for any of this to happen. They’re good people. They love kids. The children are our future.

Nonetheless, be warned: spoilers follow, both of plot and of your childhood innocence...

Back in Halloween 1989, tasked to come up with a seasonal twist for his long-running Garfield newspaper strip, Jim Davis published a terrifying week-long storyline in in which the world’s favourite tawny tubby tabby woke to find himself alone, his once-familiar home cold, abandoned, and crumbling around him.

Briefly hallucinating his family - owner Jon and gormless sidekick Odie - back in the warm, inviting and breakfast-laden home he fell asleep in, Garfield finally realises that he’s alone, and that only his stubbornly feline powers of straight-up denial will save him. Suddenly he’s back with his family again, free to hate Mondays and gorge on lasagne for the rest of his life… or is he?

The implication, of course, is that Garfield is dead, and has been for some time - a ghost, haunting a broken down house, reliving his time there in a self-perpetuating cycle of undead delusion. It’s a conceit borrowed from the Italian animated feature Allegro Non Troppo, which featured a segment showing the ghost of a cat prowling the ruins of its old home.

Of course, fandom being what it is, there’s been plenty of speculation surrounding ‘Alone’ in the past seventeen years. Chief amongst it has been the idea that this isn’t a self-contained little ‘what if’ story, but the Awful Truth behind the Garfield concept: that this isn’t a comfortable, wry little comic strip about a fat, lazy cat, but an existential jolt of caffeine satirising strips like that.

All of which would make Garfield’s small screen antics - covering thirty-four years of television, including twelve primetime animated specials, and two long-running hit cartoon series, the second of which, The Garfield Show, continues to this day - nothing but stories about a dead cat obsessively, heartbreakingly, hallucinating a time when it was alive and happy.