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YMMV / Garfield and Friends

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This series contains YMMV examples of:

  • Accidental Aesop: Usually, the later seasons make jabs at shows that try to shoehorn educational material into the stories, but the episodes that do have educational material teach us that putting educational stuff in a show can work if you let it come naturally and not make it the main focus.
  • Adaptation Displacement: Not many people know that U.S. Acres was a comic strip too, as it had a much shorter newspaper run than Garfield (it had ended before the second season even began). Fewer still know that there were two other characters, Cody the Dog and Blue the Cat, who had disappeared from the strip by the time the show was in production, or that there was some significant Adaptation Personality Change, such as Bo being more unintelligent and Sheldon having a more philosophical side.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Roy in the Snow Wade two parter. Was he mindscrewing with both the other characters and the viewers or is he just an idiot... or both?
    • Another one in "Once Upon a Time Warp". Roy didn't give Wade back the five bucks for fourteen years because "he doesn't like the principle of giving back money he owes". Considering they knew each other for fourteen years or so and in "Banana Nose", Roy implied he had little to no friends before he moved to the farm, was that the only reason or was that also an excuse for Wade not to stay away from him?
    • Also was Roy jealous of Wade and Orson's friendship in the early episodes?
    • Does Orson secretly look down on Wade as a friend? And if he does, is he just too polite to say anything?
    • Is Aloysius actually nice, but is his angered personality because of work-related stress?
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: In "Video Airlines", Jon has to provide lots of items to get a membership to the video rental store such as a driver license, credit card, the Klopman Diamond, etc. This was actually Truth in Television during the heyday of videocassette rental; some stores went beyond photo identification and may have required references, background checks or even a personal interview! While sounding bizarre nowadays, this was to protect the store. The videocassettes were different from the ones sold in retail as they could stand up to repeated playbacks for months or even years; they were not cheap. Any customer losing, damaging or even stealing those cassettes could financially hurt the store.
  • Anvilicious:
    • "Binky Gets Canceled...Again!" As the title implies, Binky's popular kids' show is canceled after parents complain that the program isn't educational. Binky points out that he does teach educational stuff: "I make children laugh! I entertain!" The station manager then declares that entertaining simply isn't good enough for children's shows anymore — they need to have "social content" to get airtime and stop getting complaints. This seems to be a reaction against programs that treat kids like idiots while hammering home countless Aesops and never shutting up about it.
    • In a later episode, "Learning Lessons", the Buddy Bears constantly ruin Garfield’s fun by explaining the jokes and giving boring unnecessary lectures on everything he does (including his name). They are ironic, but they make the legitimate claim that it's OK for people to simply have fun and enjoy themselves while watching television, rather than constantly having to learn something from it. The Buddy Bears episodes teaches a lesson against groupthink, conformity, and The Complainer Is Always Wrong, teaching that blindly following the group and being unable to form your own opinions is both unfair and not the way to be.
    • In "Big Bad Buddy Bird," Roy quits the farm because he's sick of getting hit with pies, and his agent books him on the Buddy Bears Show, who promise that they only do things that are "educational and uplifting." Roy is cast as the title character, who disagrees with the group and ends up getting pummeled with sixteen-ton safes as punishment, which is even worse than before. Towards the end of the episode, he presses himself against the camera and makes a panicked speech about resisting groupthink.
      Roy: Kids, don't listen to any of this, these bears are dangerous. You should have opinions of your own! You should think and decide and not listen to what everyone else says! Use your own mind—don't do everything your friends do just because they do it. HAVE A BRAIN OF YOUR OWN! LET GO OF ME! THE GROUP ISN'T ALWAYS RIGHT!
    • Quite a few episodes warn us about various businesses who try to con their customers, but "Supermarket Mania" in particular went the extra mile and showed that the customers getting soaked was their own fault due to falling for the flowery promotions and (obviously fake) sales the supermarket constantly provided.
    • "Keeping Cool" has the calm and level-headed Bo informing Orson and Wade how to remain cool in complicated or dangerous situations. While the whole "keeping cool" lesson is preached repeatedly to us throughout the episode (including via a very catchy song), he's still completely right, even pointing out that neither of the types of problems in the worldnote  aren't worth stressing about since they're either out of your hands or easily fixable. Also noticeable is how the usually nervous Wade manages to calm down Orson by observing how wise he is and how they should listen to him.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Any recurring human character who isn’t Jon, Dr. Liz, Binky, or Herman (namely Al J. Swindler and Cactus Jake). Were they good foils for the main characters or bland side characters whose repeated appearances were unnecessary?
    • Booker and Sheldon. Adorable as they were and occasionally able to spout a good one-liner, of all the U.S. Acres characters they each had the least amount of development and personality, making their Day in the Limelight episodes all the more uninteresting.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In "Beddy Buy", Garfield and Jon are driving to the mall to buy Garfield a new bed. They suddenly start singing about spending money and buying stuff, even though it isn't even related to the episode until the very last line of the song. When it ends, they're in the store like nothing ever happened.
  • Broken Base:
    • Was the series becoming Denser and Wackier an improvement or a sign of slipping quality? Some people prefer the more simple and realistic tone of seasons one and two, especially when they adapt stories from the comics, and dislike the constant Breaking the Fourth Wall and references in later seasons. The other side thinks it's creative and funny, and that the show needed to do something different to have its own identity from the source material.
    • Which theme song ranks supreme? “Friends Are There” or "We're Ready to Party"? The split lasts to this day. The only thing that most fans can mutually get behind is that the third theme song, the rap, wasn't that great (or at least will never gain the same popularity as the other two).
    • The U.S. Acres segments. Do they add diversity to the show? Or do they just pale in comparison to Garfield and serve as filler? It doesn’t help that the comic ended before season two and is way less known than Garfield.
  • Can't Un-Hear It:
    • Just try reading the original strips in any voices other than those from the series, especially Lorenzo Music's Garfield.
    • A similar situation happens with the Latin American Spanish dub with Sandro Larenas as Garfield, to the point he kept his role as Garfield in The Garfield Show even though he didn't live in Mexico, where the dub was being recorded, but in Chile.
  • Common Knowledge: It's usually assumed that the famously memetic sequence of Jon doing an epic disco dance is from this show. It's not; it happens early into Garfield Gets a Life.
  • Designated Hero:
    • As always, Garfield’s whole character is about him pushing Jon, Odie and Nermal around. He has his share Pet the Dog moments, but the show usually portrays those against him, particularly one-shot characters, as being in the wrong.
    • The Buddy Bears are actually a deliberate example. They are supposed to be role models for children and good educators, but they are very hypocritical and they are against freethinking and they treat Roy and Garfield as their enemies and abuse them when they say their own opinions. You can chalk that up to Mark Evanier, who hates conformity more than anything and uses them as a jab at it.
  • Designated Villain:
    • Roy can be this sometimes. An intentional example is in "Big Bad Buddy Bird" where he quits the farm when he doesn't get the respect he feels a famous actor deserves. He gets a new job on The Buddy Bears' Show as the titular character, who "sets a bad example for impressionable children everywhere." He's supposed to act as the antagonist and disagree with the Bears, who in turn crush him with giant safes to teach the lesson "Never have an opinion of your own!" Roy eventually gets sick of his shabby treatment and delivers an impassioned speech about the importance of resisting groupthink before returning to the farm.
    • Nermal is often on the receiving end of Garfield's torment, usually caused by simply bragging about how cute he is. In Garfield's defense, Nermal doesn't ever seem to take a hint and simply stop pestering him. Not helping matters is how Orson and his friends, a saber-tooth cat, and several other characters have likewise shown resentment towards Nermal's obnoxious attitude.
  • Die for Our Ship: Penelope gets a lot of hatred from Arlene fans.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • The ants are reasonably popular, despite only appearing in three episodes. They even say that they’re back by popular demand in their last appearance. While they do declare that they'll be back in "a third ant episode" in "Another Ant Episode", such a thing never happens because it turned out to be the last season.
    • In some interviews, Jim Davis said that Binky the Clown was the most successful minor character on the show and he attracted more audiences than ever.
  • Franchise Original Sin: Later seasons of the show would have more fantasy-driven plots, but the show still balanced them out with the everyday storylines so they fit in within the Garfield universe. The Garfield Show and the Garfield Animated Movie Trilogy, on the other hand, were criticized for relying too much on fantasy (the former had plots revolving around multiple different alien invasions, witches, and evil cats from alternate dimensions; the latter took place within a Denser and Wackier Alternate Tooniverse); a number of viewers felt these plots were way too out of place for a Garfield work, not helped by there being less slice of life plots to balance them out.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • According to research from Yale University, people who have love-hate relationships due to their poor self-esteem. Wade has poor self-esteem and he has a love-hate relationship with Roy! There are moments when Roy shows the esteem issue as well ("Banana Nose" for example), it's just not as upfront or often as Wade.
    • Bo's "Keeping Cool" song and philosophy says that you shouldn't worry about a problem, whether you can or can't control it. You shouldn't worry about the former because it's fixable, and you shouldn't worry about the latter because it's out of your control. This is a very common mindset with the method of dealing with problems in stoicism, which teach people to remove anxiety by looking at a big picture.
    • Abu Dhabi actually has a large population of stray cats, so it makes sense for Garfield to often try to mail Nermal there.
  • Growing the Beard:
    • Not many people cared for the "U.S. Acres" portions of the show at first, but many believe the segments hit their stride around Seasons Three and Four. This is when the cartoons phased out the songs and morals, as they were considered a nuisance, and the plots started to focus more on slapstick and absurdism with a lot of hilarious banter. Some fans even felt these sections eventually got better than the Garfield segments, especially in the last season with episodes like “Kiddie Korner”.
    • Likewise, the Garfield segments didn't really hit their stride until Season Two. Season One suffered from some awkward jokes and plots that were clearly adapted from the strip. Season Two saw the jokes become funnier, the plots more original, and the characters more like their comic strip selves. Season Three, meanwhile, took everything great about Season Two and increased it tenfold.
    • Also worth mentioning is that the show didn't have consistent title card music until season twonote .
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Two examples in 'The Legal Eagle', when Orson was building a cage jail. Wade said, "You're going to put your friends in jail?" By the end of the episode, it was Orson's fault, everybody ended up in jail.
    • Another example, when Wade told Roy (who Orson made into a Deputy), "...Lock me up and throw away the key!" After Roy put everyone in jail, including himself, he literally threw away the key.
    • For a more general example, the whole episode "Ode To Odie" would later show Garfield’s aversion to bullying became part of his character in later years, since it reminds him of some of the bad things he does.
    • The episode "Binky Gets Cancelled, Again!" is about Binky’s show getting unfairly cancelled again because parents complained that it wasn't educational. Years later, it would be one of the main reasons why Saturday morning cartoons have all but disappeared on network television. Two other episodes, "Learning Lessons" and "Kiddie Korner", used the "educational things forced by the network" plot as well, making them this trope too.
    • That episode was also Binky’s last appearance on the show until the final season and the Buddy Bears started making more appearances after that. So in a way, the Buddy Bears did take his place on the show.
    • “Films and Felines” is this twice over in its final segment: first its comments on how theatres who try to soak their customers never stay open was dead accurate and now the industry is slowly dying due to so many theaters employing strategies not unlike that in the episode. Second it showed that the video rental business was booming; the advent of online streaming all but killed video rental stores.
    • After Kevin Meaney's death, the end of "Kiddie Korner" became this. The last thing Kevin Meaney tweeted was "Some last minute advice for Hilary: Light your hair on fire! Be crazy and tell him he's fired! Hit him in the face with a pie!". Aloysius' last line in U.S. Acres (if you don't count him complaining about being hit by pies and crying for help) was "Are those pies"?, and he winds up getting hit by pies.
      • In the same episode, one of Aloysius' lines is "More death, to say nothing of high cholesterol!". Kevin Meaney wound up dying of a heart attack, which can be caused by high cholesterol.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Has its own page.
  • Ho Yay: Roy and Wade have plenty of Tsundere moments with each other. Their biggest example would have to be the Snow Wade two parter, with not only Wade as Snow White, but Roy as the prince. When Roy realizes he has to kiss Wade in order to revive him from being poisoned, he refused to do so and leaves. Orson unwillingly becomes the new prince, but his attempts to kiss Wade awake fail. Eventually Roy comes back, and his kiss wakes Wade up. Granted, Roy only came back so he could become rich via marrying Snow Wade, but when Wade is revived, he is happy to let Roy have his hand in marriage.
  • Informed Wrongness: The Buddy Bears' lesson on their show is "never disagree because if you do, you're just a troublemaker" which isn't true as people are allowed to have their opinions and are supposed to think for themselves (the thing said by Roy).
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Some viewers of the U.S. Acres portions of the show only watch the episodes centered around Roy or Lanolin. Due to their episodes usually having a lot more grit, edge, and biting humor than the ones centered around Orson. Some U.S. Acres viewers also just tune in for Wade, due to his Lovable Coward personality and Howard Morris' hilarious delivery.
  • Love to Hate: Some people feel this way about the Weasel.
  • Memetic Mutation: An image from the episode "Don't Move!" of Garfield looking at a sign with a crossed-out version of himself with the caption "Huh. I wonder who that's for." has been making the rounds. It's commonly used to reflect people blatantly ignoring rules or being completely unaware of how they're implicating themselves, as seen here.
  • Nightmare Fuel: This early 2000's Latin American commercial for the show is a bit dark, to say the least. It's all about Jon coming back home and discovering Garfield's eaten everything in the house. That's par the course for Garfield, right? Except for the chilling slow electronic music that plays over the entire ad, the slow pans over the utterly tattered house, and the horror in Jon's voice as he asks Garfield where all the food and furniture went. Garfield's response isn't some sassy quip or a snarky pun, either; it's an evil smirk with a full set of sharpened teeth. We then cut to Odie's destroyed bed and overturned food dish as Garfield grins at Jon, who then screams in horror. Garfield belches out one of Jon's shoes as the narrator tells the viewer that they're going to be dessert!
  • Replacement Scrappy:
    • This is how most people, especially the Arlene fans feel about poor Penelope. What’s worth noting is that Arlene was supposed to appear in the show, but due to creative issues going on between Jim Davis and the writers, they scrapped her from appearing in the show.
    • Some Binky fans feel this way about the Buddy Bears, who were ironically introduced as replacing him when his show got cancelled, and despite Binky getting his show back by the end of the episode, he stops making that many major appearances soon afterward while the Buddy Bears become recurring characters.
  • Ron the Death Eater: There are some fans who despise Orson for the events of "Snow Wade and the 77 Dwarves" (where the U.S. Acres cast acted out their own version of Snow White), concluding that Wade's death was planned by Orson and that Orson's initial refusal to play the part of the prince to kiss Wade awake wasn't helping his cause. This disregards that Snow White being poisoned by the Evil Queen's apple was part of the original story, the story only being pretend, the inanity of assuming that what happens to an actor's character equates what the director wants to happen to the actual actor, Orson begrudgingly taking the part of the prince because Bo and Roy (the latter at least initially) refused to kiss Wade and Orson getting the idea to imagine a prince who'd be willing to kiss Wade when his attempts to kiss Wade awake fall flat .
  • The Scrappy: The Buddy Bears, in-universe. They are very hypocritical and they are against freethinking. They also abuse Roy and (sometimes) Garfield when they say their own opinions. You can chalk that up to Mark Evanier, who hates conformity more than anything and uses them as a jab at it.
    Garfield: I hate Buddy Bears episodes!
    • In the episode "Odie The Amazing", Garfield goes so far as to declare Binky, Nermal, The Buddy Bears and Cactus Jake scrappies!
    • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: They redeem themselves in "Roy Gets Sacked", where this time they provide comedic torment toward Roy that he actually deserves under the circumstances. Also, for what it's worth, it's revealed in "Five Minute Warning" that they do see Garfield as their good friend, even offering him a big feast out of genuine appreciation.
  • Seasonal Rot: Many feel it happened after Season Five. The plots became more bizarre, almost every episode was oversaturated with fourth wall breaks, all of the side characters who weren’t Nermal or Floyd got retired, and overall people felt that the last seasons six and seven didn’t have the same charm of the first five. Despite having decent ratings and some stand out episodes, the show slowly began to lose its audience. It doesn’t help that the last two openings were badly received and that the show was in danger of suffering budget cuts.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: October 31st 2018 saw remastered versions of the show by 9 Story Media Group being issued on Boomerang, and the fans being really unhappy with how they look now would be an understatement.
    • Instead of scanning the original film for an HD master, the entire intro was instead re-animated in Flash by 9 Story themselves. Not surprisingly, if you remembered the original intro, you immediately noticed that the animation in the intro is really stiff and not like the original at all, and what's worse, a few special effects are outright destroyed.
    • The title cards are in their original 4:3 ratio with a border filling the rest of the picture in a random color, while the episodes themselves are simply cropped to fit a 16:9 picture. Some of the title cards even had their colors swapped around to a different one.
    • All of episode seven is presented in Retrovision, as a bland excuse for not restoring the episode. This also happens to the segment "Beddy Buy".
    • The worst case of this was an entire shot from Swine Trek being entirely re-animated.
    • The gag with the title card in "Orson Goes On Vacation" is done in 4:3 ratio with noticeable bars as you'd probably expect, that is, until the scene ends and the zoom-in used to crop the episodes is clearly visible.
    • Non-remaster example, this is how people felt about the second version of the "Ready to Party" intro from season 6 and most versions of season 7. The rap theme song from original airings of the latter season also got this reaction.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley: "Mystic Manor" had Garfield in a haunted house and while sliding down a pole trying to escape from Frankenstein's Monster, one of the still scenes he slides past is of Jim Davis looking at the camera while at his drawing desk. What makes it this trope is both the fact that his head is on Garfield's body and that he's drawn more realistically than other humans on the show.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: Being that this show was mostly on the air during the 90's, there are many moments that make the show dated:
    • The episode "Video Airlines" screams this nowadays in the era of optical discs, video-on-demand services and the fact that many video stores have closed down.
    • In "The Record Breaker", Jon is looking to replace his record player, and any time he explains what a record is, people assume he means "compact discs". Flash forward twenty years and The New '10s saw CDs becoming the dying format due to streaming replacing them for convenient music delivery, while vinyl experienced such a resurgence amongst audiophiles that record players started being regularly manufactured again.
    • A lot of the stuff that Garfield watches and/or gripes about on TV, like the abundance of Trash TV daytime talk shows (all but dead in the US), game shows (which have gone through several ups and downs in popularity) and "Late Night Creature Feature" showings of old B-Movies (which disappeared around the same time with the rise of FOX, The WB, and UPN, who snapped up a lot of the independent stations who used to air movies like that).
    • The constant jokes about cable television and the endless glut of seemingly useless and empty shows is hard to grasp in the era of cord-cutting reducing most cable companies to ISPs at best and many cable channels going out of business.
    • There was also a segment that had Jon be a participant on a spoof of American Gladiators, which was extremely popular at the time.
    • "Roy Gets Sacked" has a scene in which Roy spoofs various 90's movies and shows to impress his agent Bernie.
    • The plot of "Hare Force" has Orson teach Booker and Sheldon how to use a computer by using the story of The Tortoise and the Hare. Nowadays, many kids their age are skilled at using computers.
    • In "The Incredibly Stupid Swamp Monster", Roy mention to his agent that Hanna Barbera is making "a funny version of Ren & Stimpy", a Take That! at 2 Stupid Dogs (which premiered the same year as the aformentioned segment) and a Take That! at Ren and Stimpy.
    • In "The Discount Of Monte Cristo", Aloysius talked about how animation cels are used to animate cartoons. Most modern cartoons are animated on computer programs, and the last show to use cels, Sazae-san, stopped doing so in 2013. They even lampshade this in a previous episode, "The Automated Animated Adventure", since digital animation was slowly becoming the norm at the time.
    • At the end of the intro in one episode, Garfield says, “Don’t check NBC, kids. They’re not airing cartoons anymore" (which, at the time, was true: because of Saved by the Bell being popular with pre-teens and teenagers and NBC's cartoons not doing well in the ratings, with Yo Yogi! being the death knell, NBC decided to do away with Saturday morning cartoons in favor of live-action teen shows, news broadcasts, and sports). This was omitted in home video releases.
    • In "Mini-Mall Matters", Garfield states that every mini-mall must have a video rental store and a one-hour photo shop. Both businesses rapidly declined in the Turn of the Millennium and became virtually extinct in the following decade.
    • The depiction of the Buddy Bears as a blatant example of The Complainer Is Always Wrong (with lines like "If you ever disagree, it means that you are wrong", "Anyone who disagrees is never, ever right", and "If you have a point of view, then keep it out of sight") is a satire of 80's cartoons which played the trope straight. Nowadays, the joke is just plain weird.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • The bucktoothed, bespectacled Chinese restaurant staff in "China Cat" are very uncomfortable to look at now, in addition to a lite version of Asian Speekee Engrish when they speak. The Chinese Dragon has a much thicker accent than the humans as well. The voice actors for the restaurant workers aren't given explicit assignment in the voice credits for the episode, but as all the credited actors for the episode are white, it's reasonable to assume the thick Asian accents were being performed by non-Chinese actors. At least the only people shown wearing coolies are actually clearly rural farm workers.
    • Similarly, "Guaranteed Trouble" has a pretty offensive depiction of Japanese people, with their spoken gibberish on Jon's new TV set doing no favors at all.
    • There's no way in hell that you'd ever hear anything like Garfield's Mad Libs Catchphrase ("Whoever [performs x action] should be drug out into the street and shot!") on a kid's show again.
  • Values Resonance: Roy's rant in "Big Bad Buddy Bird" is one that everyone on social media could stand to hear, given the growing phenomenon of people defining themselves by what groups they belong to and not wanting to suffer any flack from said group by pretending to agree with everything they say, rather than forging their own identities.
  • Vanilla Protagonist: Orson is very much seen as this by some viewers, especially in the early seasons, due to his Straight Man Nice Guy nature coming off as less entertaining compared to Wade, Lanolin, and Roy.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: Most fans thought Nermal was a girl because of his feminine voice and there is absolutely nothing boyish about him...and he has eye-lashes. Most of the people who knew he was a guy only knew because he was frequently referred to as a guy in the comics, though even the dialog on this show still uses male pronouns to refer to him.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: In the US Acres segment, "Kiddie Korner", Aloysius demands that Orson and his friends perform family-friendly Nursery Rhymes. Unfortunately, since the gang plays them straight, they inadvertently reveal all of the violence, starvation, and death that the rhymes contain, and Aloysius won't stop griping about it.
    Roy: Boy, this is the most violent episode we've ever done!
  • The Woobie:
    • Wade Duck, although his Woobie status has been toned down from the comics where he was a Chew Toy. He especially becomes this in "Quack To The Future" where Orson almost makes him cry.
    • Roy is a Jerkass Woobie in the episodes "Big Bad Buddy Bird" and "Roy Gets Sacked", thanks to the Buddy Bears. Granted, he had it coming especially in "Roy Gets Sacked", but it was still hard not to feel sorry for him.
    • Orson, whenever his mean older brothers(the real bullies) pick on him.
    • Heck, both Roy and Wade whenever they go through heck and back together ("Read Alert" for example). At least neither is suffering it alone.
  • Woolseyism: In the Spanish dub, this happens. Here are a few examples:
    • Any logobox quip mentioning something Spanish viewers couldn't get (such as "Hey, Heathcliff! Eat your heart out!" and "Don't bother checking NBC, kids. They're not running cartoons anymore.") would be cut out.
    • The US Acres segment "Kiddie Korner" had this happen to the nursery rhymes. One example was "La pequeña Lou, se sentó en su poo" replacing "Little Miss Muffet".
    • Roy's "It's Saturday morning. Do you know where your children are?" line in "Temp Trouble" was replaced with a different one.
    • In the US Acres quickie after "Attack Of The Mutant Guppies", the guppies want to go on Sabado Gigante, a Spanish variety show, instead of Muppet Babies (1984).
    • Aloysius will sometimes make a terrified screaming noise in scenes where he didn't say anything in the original (for example, the scene in "The Discount of Monte Cristo" where Orson yells at him for making the scene black and white and refusing to bring soldiers for a scene.)

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