When I was a wee lad back in the 1970s, there was a brand of clothing called "Garanimals", which was aimed at boys my age (say, age ten and under, more or less). They were cool! Each garment had a little brightly colored cartoon monster on the label, and those which "matched" each other had matching monsters. So you could extract a pair of pants out of the pile under the bed, and then you got to look for a shirt with a matching monster to wear with it.

Now, there's nothing good in telling kids that their clothes should "match", but that message never sank in with me anyway; I just dug the monsters. It was brilliant marketing because the cartoon monster thing would hook little boys, and the "matching" gag justified it to their mothers who paid for the stuff.

Nowadays, Garanimals have long since gone to join Big John's Beans and Fixin's in the cold and lonely circle of Hell reserved for high-concept marketing gags, but their spirit lives on in the Gap. Which is where I buy most of my clothes...

It may be that the "gar-" prefix on the name is from (get it?) "garment", but that seems too obvious.

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