Trivia / Garfield and Friends

• Acting for Two: Frank Welker was the voice for Booker, Sheldon, and Bo.
• Adored by the Network:
  • It was like this on CBS since its first episode — until it was canned during its seventh season for refusing to accept a budget cutback.
  • Tooncast and Teletoon Retro adore the show as well. Tooncast has had it since 2008, while Teletoon Retro airs it three times a day. Teletoon Retro also aired the show's first marathon on September 1, 2012.
  • In the past, Nickelodeon adored the show more than Tiny Toon Adventures when it was on Nick in the Afternoon by airing it back to back for an hour. It was justified, as Nick's airings of the show were one of the highest-rated shows among kids, with ratings on par with Power Rangers.
  • For Chicagoland kids, WPWR-50 aired at least two episodes a day during the weekday afternoon syndicated cartoon block.
  • Pluto TV has added a 24-hour Garfield and Friends channel as of September 2021 — Pluto's owner, ViacomCBS, acquired the entire franchise two years prior.
• Banned in China: In Malaysia, the show has all of its U.S. Acres segments cut from the late 90s onwards, mostly because the protagonist of the segment is a pig. The segments are usually replaced with a "Garfield" segment from an older episode of the show.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Contrary to the Memetic Mutation, Garfield never actually says "Huh. I wonder who that's for" when confronted by a sign prohibiting his entry into a store. Ironically, his line in that scene indicates that he knows exactly who that sign's for.
  Garfield: Hmm...I'm gonna need one of my brilliant disguises if I'm gonna get in there this time.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Due to Lorenzo Music, Thom Huge, Gregg Berger, Desirée Goyette, and Julie Payne all being decent singers, the show got many musical episodes over the years.
  • Aloysius Pig's voice actor, the late Kevin Meaney, has several routines where he sings. In "Kiddie Korner", there's a scene where he is asked to sing a song by Roy, which he even lampshades by claiming that only Aloysius' magnificent singing voice can do it justice, which makes him smile and comment that he does have the music in him.
• Colbert Bump: When Kevin Meaney died in 2016, several websites mentioned his role in Garfield and Friends, leading people who were fans of the show as kids to discover Aloysius Pig for the first time. ^note  His episodes weren't shown in syndication, so the only people who would remember them either saw the original CBS airings or purchased the boxset DVDs in the 2000s. Even Skiprope Entertainment, the DVD-distributing division of PBS Kids, noticed his sudden popularity and put "Kiddie Korner" on their first DVD release of Garfield and Friends.
• Creator Backlash: Binky stopped appearing after season 3. Mark Evanier said that they stopped doing Screaming With Binky because CBS wanted another minute of commercials and it was basically the same joke over and over again, so he preferred to cut that rather than part of the episodes. He and Jim Davis also agreed to getting tired of Binky, so they demoted him to cameos.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Desirée Goyette as Nermal — who, if you can believe it, is a male cat.
  • In the Spanish version, Booker and Sheldon, also one of Orson's brothers in the earlier episodes for some reason.
• Died During Production: Pat Buttram, voice of Cactus Jake, died of kidney failure while Season 7 was being produced. He would have no further appearances in the show, with "The Legend of Cactus Jupiter" being his final appearance.
• Digital Destruction: In October 2018, an HD remaster of the show was added to the Boomerang streaming service, and fans weren't happy with the final results. (This is, sadly, also the version Pluto TV is running.)
  • Instead of scanning the original film for an HD master, the intro was instead re-animated in Flash. Not surprisingly, fans of the show quickly noticed that the animations of the characters looked cheap and stiff, missing reactions of the animated characters and some special effects completely ruined. A comparison with the two intros can be found here. This can be justified as apparently the original film masters couldn't be located for the opening, and the original effects were edited on videotape and the master tape is too low resolution to upscale to HD, meaning a true restoration is straight up impossible.
  • The entirety of episode 7, as well as the episode "Beddy Buy" and the quickie before "Temp Trouble", narrowly avoid this by being presented with a border around the cartoon (dubbed "Retrovision" by the restoration team) because, like with the original opening, the original film masters for these particular segments couldn't be found and the master tape couldn't be properly upscaled, so they used this method to present the picture quality as best as they could.
  • Meanwhile, the title cards are cropped to 4:3 with a random-colored border filling the rest of the screen (this even occurs during the title card gag in "Orson Goes On Vacation"), while the episodes themselves are cropped and zoomed in to fit a 16:9 picture.
• Distanced from Current Events: Boomerang removed reruns of the episodes "Peace and Quiet; Wanted: Wade; Garfield Goes Hawaiian" and "Attention-Getting Garfield; Swine Trek; It Must Be True!" from their channel during the COVID-19 Pandemic because the plot of the third segment in the former episode involves Garfield catching the Hawaiian Cat Flu, despite the symptoms of the illness not resembling what one would consider to be the flu, and the second segment in the latter episode has its plot spurred from Orson being sick in bed. However, both are still on the Boomerang app, as well as the official Garfield and Friends YouTube channel.
• Dueling Works: In 1991, this series shared the same time slot as ProStars did on NBC. Garfield won this duel, as it lasted a total of 121 episodes over the course of seven seasons, whereas ProStars only lasted thirteen episodes over the course of one season. Not helping ProStars' case was that it aired on the lowest-rated Saturday Morning cartoon block at the time, which NBC abandoned in September of 1992 thanks to the combined failures of it, Space Cats, Wish Kid and Yo Yogi!. (And as the final nail in the coffin, one post-opening sequence line from Garfield following it was "Don't bother checking NBC, kids. They're not running cartoons anymore.")
• Edited for Syndication:
  • Most of the Quickies (including all the U.S. Acres quickies^note  except for the fake one in Moo Cow Mutt and all "Screaming with Binky" segments except for one ^note  The one that was kept in syndication was the one where Wade fills in for Binky. were edited out of The Program Exchange's prints, as was the original theme song, replaced with the "We're Ready To Party" theme song used in seasons 3-6. The last three seasons weren't seen in reruns after the show ended its run either, as CBS declined to sell them the rights.
  • After CBS stopped showing the show on Saturday mornings, people never got to see (or rewatch) the last three seasons until they finally came out on DVD. Which is a shame because not only were the last three seasons the funniest, but they also show Roy and Wade becoming closer friends in comparison to the earlier seasons. Something that people only familiar with the syndicated episodes didn't get to see...
  • The show was broadcast in Finland in a format that dropped the U.S. Acres segments but kept the opening titles. It was bizarre having characters in the titles that never appeared in the show. Considering what happened in their dub of the episode "Peace and Quiet" (where Binky sings off key) and that "Wanted: Wade" had a scene where Wade does a "song" which has him talking instead of singing, it could have been a lot worse.
  • Also, it appears the Japanese version dropped the segments featuring US Acres on both of their dubs of the show! And how do we know this? On a Japanese blog, there aren't Japanese names for any US Acres episodes, and the US Acres bug quickie is replaced by the hospital episode of "Screaming with Binky". They also only dubbed the first four seasons.
  • In Malaysia, the U.S. Acres segments had all scenes with Orson Pig edited to appease Muslim audiences (as pigs — whether used as food or not — are considered offensive to the Muslim religion and Malaysia has a sizable population with people of that religion).
  • The Venus Centre dub for Spacetoon only dubbed the Garfield segments, removing the U.S. Acres segments all together. The opening was also edited to only feature clips from the Garfield segments (with only 3 parts of the original opening kept in). Garfield segments were censored too. Look at this video, for example.
  • When 9 Story Media Group took over distribution in 2018, they decided to "remaster" the show for the HD era; see above for how that turned out.
• Executive Meddling:
  • From season 4 onwards, some elements of the show that Jim Davis and Mark Evanier thought took up too much time in the show were removed, which also allowed more advertisements to run. These included the Once an Episode songs in the U.S. Acres segments and having three quickies in an average episode, which led to two types of quickies, Screaming with Binky and the U.S. Acres Quickies, being phased out. By the time the final season aired, the show stopped using them entirely (though international prints and The Program Exchange's syndicated prints still used at least one).
  • During the seventh and final season of the show, the series' traditional "We're Ready to Party" intro was replaced with a rap-like intro that everyone ranging from fans of the show to the creators hated—the rap intro was only used on the original CBS airings. It was not used in international airings and as a result does not appear on the series' DVD boxsets (which use the international version of the series). According to a post Mark Evanier made on Usenet in response to a fan who asked about the intro, this was done to differentiate the intros of the syndicated Garfield and Friends ^note  which had begun airing a year prior from the Saturday morning run of the show. The amount of meddling got so bad, the crew created the character Aloysius Pig as a Take That!.
    • CBS also wanted to cut the budgets of Garfield and all its other animated shows, the creators refused to give in and decided to end the show rather then letting it suffer from the cutbacks.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Prior to 2018, any episode with a "U.S. Acres" title card excluding "Much Ado About Orson" was this, since the FOX and SoPeachi releases used the "Orson's Farm" variant (as that was the version used internationally). The 9 Story restoration has restored these original title cards and all of the quickie screens save for the quickie before "The Worm Turns"◊ and the quickie before "Hogcules"◊.
  • Four Screaming With Binky segments are missing from the DVDs and from international broadcasts (possibly for time): one about baseball, one about ballerinas, one about a pizza parlor and one taking place in the mountains. No info can be found on the mountain one, but a Platypus Comix page on the series has a summary of the "Pizza" and "Ballerina" segments, and a fan uploaded "Baseball" online.
  • The "rap" theme song was used only in American airings of Season 7; the Fox DVDs and 9 Story's remaster don't feature it.
• No Export for You: For whatever reason, this show seems to lack a release, or at least dub, in the Netherlands and Romania.
• Non-Dubbed Grunts: None of Odie's vocals were redubbed when broadcast on Cartoon Network Japan.
• Non-Singing Voice: Despite each of the Buddy Bears having their own voice actor, Thom Huge (the speaking voice of Bobby) did all three bears' singing voices.
• One-Book Author: Thom Huge has no other voice acting roles outside of this show and other animated versions of Garfield. This is because he was simply an employee of Paws, Inc. who happened to have the voice they were looking for.
• The Other Darrin: Lorenzo Music voiced Billy Buddy Bear in his first appearance only; Howard Morris took over after that.
• Out of Order: The U.S. Acres short "The Worm Turns" was likely the first one written for that half of the show, as the first part of the short has Orson introducing us to the farm. However, the first short produced was "Wade, You're Afraid" and the first short aired was "Wanted: Wade".
• Promoted Fanboy: Kevin Meaney played Aloysius Pig in this show because he had always dreamed of being a voice actor in a cartoon.
• Recycled Script:
  • The Quickies are mostly adaptations of the Sunday strips (at least one was based on a daily strip, and at least two have a direct Call-Back to the preceding cartoon), but the main cartoons themselves derive from the strips, especially in the earlier episodes. For example, the episode "Caped Avenger" is an episode where Jon takes Pooky to wash him and pitches ideas for a new comic strip, but is otherwise based on two weeks of strips where Garfield, as the Caped Avenger, adopts Odie as Slurp, his sidekick (specifically, August 26-31, 1985 and September 2-7, 1985). To the cartoon's credit, it also had a subplot involving Jon trying to pitch comics to a visiting expert that wasn't in the original strips.
  • Season 7's "Clash of the Titans" repeated the plot from Season 2's "Attack of the Big Robots"
• Screwed by the Network: As mentioned above, CBS wanted to cut the show's budget despite the fact that the show was still pulling in strong ratings. The creators, instead, decided to end the show rather than let it suffer from budget cuts.
  • On Toon Disney, the show aired as early as 2:00 AM Eastern Time. (It's possible they only inherited the rights by way of what's now Freeform, which had purchased the cable rights as Fox Family not long before they became ABC Family, and Disney was generally uninterested in running a property that wasn't their own, but was presumably bound by contractual obligations.)
  • After Boomerang re-acquired the rights to the show in 2019, they placed it at 12:00PM on weekdays, when the target audience would've been at school. After getting removed in late November, it returned a few weeks after at 4:00AM on weekdays, when most people would be asleep. Surprisingly, the show managed to last another year and a half on the schedule, before Viacom's purchase of the Garfield franchise caused the channel's broadcast rights to expire in August 2021, which was when its timeslots on the schedule were replaced by The Looney Tunes Show. The show's dedicated channel on Pluto TV launched immediately afterwards. That being said, it remained on the app until a year later in 2022.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The show was originally going to be just U.S. Acres, but networks refused to pick it up, so they added Garfield.
  • Mark Evanier only became showrunner by chance — he'd been under contract at CBS for a proposed Michael Jackson animated show that he ultimately left (said show never made it to air), and Judy Price, VP of children's programming at CBS, offered to have him work on this show instead (partially as a method of him working off his contract); Evanier accepted and the rest is history.
  • According to an article about Kevin Meaney's death posted by showrunner Mark Evanier, Aloysius was supposed to be a main character in Season 7. However, demand from other companies to get Meaney to play roles in their shows led to him only appearing in three episodes.
  • According to the same Usenet thread that told the history behind the rap theme, the later episodes that did not appear in syndication were supposed to be added to the package in 2000, but this never came about, as broadcast stations did not think it was necessary to add more episodes; it was already successful the way it was (of course, those stations phased out syndicated kids' programming just years later).
  • Why did Penelope replace Arlene on the show? Well, according to Evanier (as noted on the show's official page on Wikipedia), Davis was very specific about how he wanted Arlene to act, and felt that, if the show couldn't do her character justice, then they may as well not use her at all. Hence, Penelope was created as a replacement.

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