Web Video / Gilbert Garfield

But you'd hate Mondays too if there was no Tuesday

Hate Mondays, eat spaghetti
Jon Arbuckle, Jack Benny
Shipped Odie's body to Abu Dhabi
Great act, what do you call it?

Gilbert Garfield is a bizarre Analog Horror Alternate Reality Game created by [adult swim] alumnus Max Simonet, creator of Gemusetto. The series follows a fictionalized Max as he endeavors to preserve what, at first, appears to be a lost episode of Garfield and Friends featuring the late comedian Gilbert Gottfried. However, as Max continues his investigation, he finds himself falling down a sinister rabbit hole surrounding the episode, its producers, and the enigmatic "Gilbert Garfield" himself.

What may be classified as "Season 1" of the series lasted from May to December 2022, with "Season 2" beginning in January 2023 and, seemingly, ending in November 2023.

The series is available for watching on its YouTube channel here.

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This series contains examples of:

• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Since Max's suicide, Faraone themselves took over his YouTube and Twitter profiles, using them as their own. In early July 2023 however, Faraone's recently-fired social media manager Dove found a backdoor into their servers and is exposing attempts by the company to silence celebrities they've approached for projects, one of them being Tay Zonday.
• Arc Symbol: Pharaohs are among the most recurring motifs in the works of Faraone Productions, to the extent they derived their name from the Italian word for it. The earliest depiction of this is Gilbert himself depicted as Moses in episode 4, but the imagery reoccurs through the rest of the ARG, to the point it's implied to be a symbol of Faraone's obsession with world order and the Pax Romana.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Technically Italian fascist rather than Nazi, the media group Faraone is clearly gunning for a return to the "good old days" of not just Benito Mussolini, but The Roman Empire as well.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Max's entire goal through the series is to archive the mysterious "Gilbert Garfield" cartoon and discover the mystery of its producers, Faraone Productions. He gets his wish, and far, far worse when the true insidiousness of Faraone becomes apparent.
  I wish you'd never sent me that fucking tape!
  • Gilbert Garfield can also be heard during the ending, pretty much summing up Max's journey.
    You did it! You archived lost media! Isn't this what you wanted?
• Blackmail: How Faraone acquires its celebrity headliners. The employee orientation implies that there are countless hours of celebs and politicians engaging in sex acts hidden away in the "Black Room" of Faraone HQ.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The Gilbert Garfield episode of Garfield and Friends is far more graphic and violent than any other episode of the show.
• Body Horror: The real "Gilbert Garfield" is masked for a large part of the final episode, and when he is unmasked, it reveals he literally possessed a third eye which he has since carved out to stop himself from "seeing".
• Clone Degeneration: Faraone's cloning technology is at-best imperfect. The clones seen in Dove's leak-tapes have numerous deficiencies; multiple limbs and developmental problems being the most obvious.
• The Conspiracy: As of July 2023, both of Faraone Production's primary socials have been hijacked by their recently-ousted social manager Dove, who's shining a light on the company's attempts to silence people whose talents they've "stolen" for their work.
• Deconstructive Parody: Of the ARG horror genre as a whole, and specifically the "lost media" subgenre. The ARG keeps a straight face even when the series is rooted deep in line-crossing bathos, which means the series derives most of its comedy by juxtaposing this absurdity with conventional tropes of the genre. One memorable instance features Max exploring the house of a woman who's been disappeared by Faraone. The creeping dread is interrupted when he stops mid-video to take a gigantic, lasagna-induced shit, before he gets right back to exploring without missing a beat.
• Driven to Suicide: Max's friend Austen kills himself midway through the series. Max follows suit at the end.
  Descartes said "I think, therefore I am"
  he clearly never realized
  how much thought goes into suicide
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The series is full of these.
• The Hero Dies: Max commits suicide in "An Uplifting European Finale!" The videos after this point, starting with "Gilbert Garfield Baby," appear to be made by a representative of Faraone.
• Heroic BSoD: Max slowly becomes more and more unhinged as the series progresses, ultimately culminating in his suicide following his face-to-face meeting with Gilbert Garfield.
• Horror Comedy: The series switches from horror to humor on a dime, mostly due to the fact Gilbert Garfield's personality is very much in the spirit of Gottfried himself, if far more nonsensical.
• Invincible Villain: Max and the other wannabe investigators are of no consequence to Faraone Productions. One-by-one Faraone kills them or otherwise disposes of them. By "An Uplifting European Finale!" everyone investigating Faraone is dead and they're free to continue their horrific cloning experiments.
  • Finally subverted as of "2.3mb": Faraone's ex-media manager Dove hijacked the company's accounts and (after numerous sensitive leaks) managed to get the United States Government involved.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: "ATTENTION" is an official announcement that both the CIA and Homeland Security have seized Faraone's media accounts. The government has been targeting Faraone for awhile and Dove's leaks finally allowed them to make a move. Running the audio through a spectrograph reveals a taunting message from Dove too, making this an actual loss for Faraone instead of a cover-up.
• Kill and Replace: Morse Code that plays during the playthrough of the Wednesday level indicates that Faraone killed Ronald Reagan and replaced him with a clone.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: At the end of "building c," Dove finds a clone with red shoes on in the "Serenity Room," implying that Faraone's making clones of the late Max.
• Mood Whiplash: "building c" ends with Dove discovering a clone of a baby Gilbert Garfield, then what looks like an orgy of male clones in the Men's bathroom, then a cut-off shot of what looks like a clone of Max sitting over a puddle of pasta sauce.
• Motor Mouth: Gilbert Gottfried himself rarely stops talking during the episode, and his diatribes often have little-to-nothing to do with what is going on around him.
• Mythology Gag: The line in the intro theme about shipping Odie's body to Abu Dhabi seems to be a reference to a running gag in the actual Garfield and Friends show involving Garfield repeatedly trying to mail his nemesis Nermal to the city.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Faraone website's section on Gilbert Garfield and Friends was updated to passive-aggressively thank Max and the fanbase he gathered for Faraone's ability to re-brand and return.
  The Website: Your unique and incessant interest in the GG brand helped spark a new dawn at Faraone.
• Shout-Out: The series' introductory video is highly reminiscent of Marble Hornets' own "Introduction" entry, even down to the series' impetus being a college project of the uploader's friend.
• Spinoff Babies: An in-universe example, Faraone apparently produced an original children's show featuring Gilbert Garfield as an infant, aptly titled Gilbert Garfield Baby.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Max's attempt to archive an absurdist parody of Gilbert Gottfried and Garfield slowly turns out to a rabbit hole into a conspiracy far deeper than anyone could have imagined. While Faraone Productions is officially "just" a fascist thinktank with a penchant for cloning and child abduction, their influence seems to verge into the outright eldritch at times. People Max knows totally disappear from history, in some cases return in cases emphatically as not themselves, and the further Max dives, the further he's driven nuts, in a classic culmination of this trope.
• Third Eye: Gilbert Garfield possesses a third eye which can see into the future. He also has a fourth eye which can see into the past, in a place you wouldn't expect. It's later revealed that the voice actor for Gilbert Garfield—the clone Faraone made of Gilbert—had a very literal third eye, which he appears to have carved out of his own forehead.
• Un-person: The ultimate fate of Christy. Faraone undoubtedly got to her, but we never find any indication of her fate—when Max returns to her house, it's completely empty, like nobody's ever even lived there.
• You Cloned Hitler!: Faraone attempted to clone Augustus Caesar in the hopes he would one day lead the world into a new age of Pax Romana.
• Womb Level: A level of the Gilbert Garfield NES game takes place within a flying egg known as the "Nexus of the Birth".

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You did it! You archived lost media! Isn't that what you wanted?