6343: Flat and Sharpfield

|< < Prev Comic #6343 (2026-09-30)

Flat and Sharpfield

Made by: Manyhills

Explanation

This strip takes the original Garfield strip, originally about Garfield complaining about the length of a day that was about to hit its end, and reworks Jon's dialogue in the second panel (originally Jon bidding Garfield "good night") to be an invocation of the Sun's Song from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in its original Nintendo 64 form, with the third panel being darkened and having its dialogue removed completely.

The strip's title is an invocation of the names of the in-game composers of the Sun's Song, Flat and Sharp; during the course of the game, the song is learned at the back of the Royal Family's Tomb in the Kakariko Village graveyard, which is surrounded by the gravestones of Flat and Sharp on the surface. Its primary usage is to quickly progress time from day to night or vice versa, and in areas where this effect doesn't trigger, can temporarily freeze ReDead and Gibdo enemies or summon special stronger fairies (capable of restoring Link's magic meter, unlike normal fairies) from certain spots. The Sun's Song is optional, as there are no places that require the song to progress the main plot; in the Master Quest remix first present in the Nintendo GameCube release, it is necessary to collect all of the Gold Skulltulas, as one optional room in the Spirit Temple requires playing five different songs including the Sun's Song in order to open the way to a room containing a Gold Skulltula.

The directions of the song depicted in the strip are those played by three of the four C-buttons on the Nintendo 64 controller; the button setup in the Nintendo 3DS version is Y-R-A-Y-R-A. The setup in the Nintendo Switch 2 remake is not fully known, but is presumed to go (unknown)-A-X-(unknown)-A-X with the note corresponding to C-Down on Nintendo 64 and Y on 3DS not having been shown by the time of this writing (the other two unique notes also appear in Zelda's Lullaby, whose Switch 2 melody had been shown by the time this strip first ran).

This strip was first run nearly 28 years after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time first debuted, and roughly five weeks before the debut of its Nintendo Switch 2 remake.

The author writes:

Original strip: 2004-03-27.

Transcript

Garfield: It seems like this day will never end!
Jon: {a musical stave showing the Sun's Song being played on the ocarina}, Garfield
Garfield: Whew!
{Garfield sleeps soundly in bed in the dark night}