5478: Just Another Saturday Night

|< < Prev Comic #5478 (2024-05-18) Next > >|

Just Another Saturday Night

Made by: shiningpikablu252

Explanation

The "certain strip from 2008" is the 2008-04-26 strip--better known as the "blender" strip. Garfield's line in that strip inspired this strip's author to treat it as a brick joke and used Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night" to pay it off; this strip first ran on a Saturday to further punctuate these references. The author's apology to Sam Cooke's estate was mainly to ensure that this strip was not mistaken as a jab toward the song or to Sam Cooke.

The author took the original strip in question and presented the strip in the opposite angle in multiple ways: not only were the key panels mirrored horizontially--this was to show the bandage from the injury caused by the blender to be on the correct side of Jon's face (the blender strip showed the blender glued to his left cheek, and the original strip uses originally also had Jon facing the same direction, hence why the panels needed to be horizontially mirrored to have the injured cheek face the viewer)--but the core thinking of the original strip was turned around so that it was Jon annoyed at a song Garfield liked (the original strip had Garfield annoyed at a song Jon liked). Jon getting fed up with the song and the ensuing radio smash was conveyed with an "Objection!" bubble from the Ace Attorney series.

For the first time from a production standpoint, the author changed the title panel of a Sunday original strip, this time to a mock-up of Ace Attorney series box art featuring Garfield characters; this was done to punctuate the "Objection!" panel from later in the strip. (The author had submitted two other strips using bases from Sunday strips prior to submitting to this one, but did not remix title panels for those; 5528: Azurafield was the first of those two, the other has yet to run.)

The first panel of the strip proper has the radio station giving its station identification: the HD6 subcarrier of 108.2 FM, call sign WGARF; "old-time" indicates the program stream carries an oldies format. There are a number of signs that this station is an obvious fake:

• WGARF is not a legal United States radio call sign (Muncie, Indiana being located in that country); apart from a small number of grandfathered three-letter calls, full-service radio and television stations use four-letter call signs. Five-character call signs are exclusively the realm of television translators (low-power stations usually repeating the signal of another station), and even then have two numerical digits as part of their signs.
• 108.2 MHz is not a legal FM radio frequency. The official end of the FM radio brand, worldwide, is 108.0 MHz. Even then, FM radio stations in North America are centered on frequencies where the y digit in "xx.y MHz" is an odd number, thus the highest possible FM frequency in North America is 107.9 MHz; even ignoring the fact that the broadcast band doesn't go that far, 108.1 or 108.3 would have been more believable numbers. That said, even-numbered tenths in the frequency are in more common usage elsewhere in the world.
• No FM station in North America at the time the strip was created had more than four HD Radio subcarriers, and even by the time this strip first ran no station had introduced an HD5 subcarrier, much less an HD6; only a digital-only FM station could feasibly carry six HD Radio subcarriers, and the only digital-only radio stations in North America were on the AM band at the time the strip first ran.

The author making a note that the reference to the HD Radio subcarrier might fly over the head of someone not from North America; for example, Europe and Australia tend to use some form of DAB for digital radio broadcasting, with the United Kingdom using a mix of DAB and DAB+, and Australia also using DAB+. The way the FM radio band is structured outside North America tends to make the North American HD radio standard impractical in much of the rest of the world.

The pop culture reference hidden in the station's frequency is based on Square Root of Minus Garfield itself--namely, the date of the first strip. 108 is derived from subtracting 1900 from the year of of SRoMG #1 (2008), 2 is derived from adding the digits in the month of SRoMG #1 (11), and 6 is derived from adding the digits in the day of the month of SRoMG #1 (15). The clue "17 dynamite" involves the total number of syllables in a haiku--the structure SRoMG #1 used--and the final word stated in SRoMG #1.

The author writes

Don't know about you, but I feel the punchline from a certain strip from 2008 hit like a brick joke which needed a payoff...The song itself isn't actually bad (I'm with Garfield on this one), I just felt it to be an appropriate piece to pay off said brick joke, apologies to Sam Cooke's estate if I rubbed you the wrong way...

Also, think you can figure out a pop-culture reference I placed into the radio station's frequency? There are three parts to this reference (each part in brackets): [108].[2] FM-HD[6]. The second and third parts are figured in the same fashion, the first part is figured out differently, all resolve into a singular date. Hint: 17 dynamite.

[Note: The reference to the station's HD subcarrier may fly over the heads of most readers outside North America, as most digital radio implementations outside the North America region opt for systems other than HD Radio.]

Original strip: 2013-12-22

Transcript

{Cue Garfield and Jon drinking from a coffee cup while listening to a radio. Jon is wearing a bandage on his cheek throughout.}
Radio Announcer (on radio): You're listening to WGARF Old-Time, 108.2 FM-HD6, Muncie.
Singer (on radio): Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody
Singer (on radio): I got some money 'cause I just got paid
Singer (on radio): How I wish I had someone to talk to
Singer (on radio): I'm in an awful way
Jon {in a panel-obstructing shout}: Objection!
{cut to the radio having been smashed and Jon having left the room}
Garfield: Hey, I like that song!

Trivia

A formatting error initially resulted in the script cutting off after the word "like" in Garfield's line and boldfaced everything beneath it--namely the author's notes and the site footer; this has since been fixed.