Anyone’s whose grown
up watching children’s animation knows something about the fourth wall. Some
believe that the earliest attempt in modern cartoons came with Tiny Toon
Adventures or Animaniacs. As I’m slightly older, I know better. I could say that Garfield & Friends broke
the fourth wall from day one, but I’m pretty sure before the first season was
over there were no walls left standing.
That’s kind of
remarkable considering the source material. Jim Davis’s Garfield has
never been highly regarded by admirers of comic strips. A major Pearls Before Swine arc
involved Rat holding his strip hostage and threatening to read a Garfield
punchline if his demands were not met,
the live action films are such a punchline that Bill Murray made it his
last words in Zombieland
and
I’m pretty sure no one would ever write a comic parody called Nancy Without Nancy. And having read the strips for decades I
honestly find it remarkable that one of the most imaginative animated cartoons
in history was born from a strip which has been doing the same jokes for more
than forty years. Yet from the moment it
debuted in the fall of 1988 until it came to an end in the spring of 1995, Garfield
& Friends seemed joyously
determined to violate every rule not merely of its own source material but
every animated series at the time.
To be fair there had
been signs of this in several prime-time animated specials in the years before
this. Some of the Garfield half-hour shows were traditional animation but even
then it broke the rules. Babes & Bullets was a hysterical as well as
very accurate film noir parody and homage (Garfield played Sam Spayed) and Garfield’s
9 Lives was even more daring as in featured Garfield in several previous
incarnations, some of which went beyond the scope of what you expected from a
1980s cartoon. (Garfield didn’t show up as his traditional incarnation until Life
Number 8.) But none of that prepared any one – certainly a nine year old like me – for what you would get from the
show almost from the first time we heard the words: “Ladies and gentlemen,
Garfield and Friends!”
Garfield seemed
determined to violate any rule animation had at the time and create some new
ones for the sole purpose of breaking them. In a very early episode Garfield realizes he has forgotten Jon’s
birthday and decides to go on a game show hosting by Binky the Clown. (Binky
was created almost entirely to give Garfield a nemesis in the first season;
like so much of the show he quickly evolved beyond that.) The show is called Name
that Fish and from the start its clearly a lampoon that seems very plausible
for a 1980s game show. At the climax, in order to win Jon a vacation, Garfield
finds himself entering a tank and faced with naming all the fish in it before
the water gets too high. At that point Garfield says that this can’t possibly
be real and says he has to still be asleep. He then leaps out of the tank, runs
out of the studio and to his home – where indeed he is still in his bed. He
kicks his bed and wakes up. From this
point on every time something like this happens, the show would say something along
the lines of “I think I’ll have a dream sequence” and we’d be down the rabbit
hole, er, litter box.
If anything the series
continued to wink at this with every single episode going forward. At one point
when Garfield, Odie and Jon are in a plane that seems certain to crash,
Garfield turns to the screen and says: “Kids! Check your TV listings! Make sure
we’re still on next week!” As the show went on the other characters were more
than willing to acknowledge this. Nermal, in the midst of being mailed to Abu
Dhabi would say as he was being sealed up: “I don’t like running gags!” and
certain characters such as Floyd the Mouse would openly complain about not
being used enough on the show.
This was played out even through recurring
features: a sequence called ‘Garfield’s Tales of Scary Stuff!” would be played
with Garfield saying: “I love that echo’ to undercut the ominous nature
of the reverb. As the series went on
Garfield himself acknowledged that he was the star of a television show and
seems just as determined to knock the nature of his series existence. Network
executives would come on to tell him the problems with his series and would
threaten him with cancellation if he didn’t go on with the network’s plans.
This would be done is subtler ways such as the acknowledgement than Garfield
would treat Odie nicely – ‘until the next cartoon’.
At one point Garfield woke up and realized
he’d wandered on to the set of a more action
oriented cartoon and tried desperately to find his way back to his old
series. In another he would offer the fans a chance to choose exactly what
happened in the cartoon that was to follow.
In one segment he invited viewers to spot the bloopers (the entire
cartoon was just one string of errors). In another the sound effects team quit
and he had to hire an unqualified replacement (Odie).
To be clear the show
did all this without violating any of the character tropes of the comic strip.
Garfield still loved lasagna, did nothing but eat and sleep, and constantly
harangued Odie and Nermal. Jon Arbuckle was a cartoonist who was perpetually lovelorn
(Liz was someone he only sporadically dated) Nermal was still a revoltingly
cute kitty cat and Odie was dumb and never said a word. But the show was always
playing with those tropes as far as it could. At one point Garfield became so
exhausted and being able to do nothing but eat lasagna and sleep that he staged
a revolt and decided to write his own script. The problem was no matter how
much of an adventure he tried to write, he kept finding himself eating lasagna
and going back to bed at the climax. Eventually he gave up and just went back
to business. He continued to deal with
the problem of Mondays and the show milked this, once having him have to deal
with an endless Monday, another time having him wish Mondays out of existence
only to find they weren’t so bad after all.
There was a certain
level of character growth in many of the other side characters: Jon’s inability
to find love as well as his dullness was milked for quite a bit of laughs that
would have been above the average child. (At one point when he asked to name
his favorite Marx Brother, Garfield tells us its Zeppo.) Odie never said a word
on the show but he managed to become remarkably sympathetic as the series
progress, mainly because of his often ridiculous devotion to Garfield through
thick and thin.
And the show could
often be clever in ways you just didn’t expect an animated cartoon to be. At
one point, the show follows Binky after he is fired from his job as a
children’s host. He takes a job as a referee as a wrestler but is fired
“because he’s so loud the wrestlers couldn’t study their scripts.” He follows
through with a series of degrading job before deciding to do what most clowns
do when they get fired - ‘run for public office.”
And the series took a lot of fun biting the
hand that fed them. I lost count of how many times that they made fun of
television. At one point Garfield is forced to watch his broken set and say:
“You know what the sad part is? This isn’t that much less entertaining.” At one point Garfield is trying to find
something on TV to watch and the only
think any show is airing is Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2. (Every time
they tune to it, the male lead is saying the title – including the 2.)
Eventually they go to a video store (ah the nineties) and by the time Jon gets
through with the ID process, there’s only one video left – no guesses as to
what. Finally they get desperate enough to go out and watch a movie. They go to
local megaplex and have to go Theater 70 (they have to hike there like they’re
on a desert voyage) and before they go in Jon desperately demands if the movie
inside is not Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage 2. They get inside and –
well, I wouldn’t dream of giving away the punchline.
This was enough to
make the show revolutionary in its own right. What made it a work of art was
the And Friends. I had never heard of U.S. Acres, another Jim Davis
strip that was in some papers in the 1980s and have never seen anywhere at
all. Indeed, it may have been just
thrown in so the entire show wasn’t only about Garfield. But the segment
so quickly took on a life of its own
that by the second season the show had been expanded from half an hour to a
full hour in length. Apparently kids and
adults wanted more of the Friends as much as they did Garfield.
The lead was Orson, a
pig who was ostensibly the straight man but that meant little. Orson had such a
voracious imagination that every time he read a book the entire barnyard would
become one of his pictures of it. Other times, he would act out satires of
television and movies – perhaps most famously as a James Bond parody who
carried a ‘357 Magnum cream pie.”
Wade was the cowardly
duck who had a life preserver with an image of him nearly as active as the duck
itself: his fears so manifest they were often numbered in a filing cabinet or
in an alphabetized list. Roy the rooster was (fittingly) cocky and arrogant,
usually taking advantage of Wade. Bo and
Lanolin were brother and sister sheep, twins who were always arguing. Booker
and Sheldon were sibling chickens, though Sheldon had never hatched.
(Apparently he had read the papers and thought it was safer to stay inside.)
They all worked together on a farm and would occasionally face predators such
as Orson’s idiot older brothers (who loved to bully him) the Weasel and the
Wolf.
If anything U.S. Acres
was more imaginative than the Garfield segments, sometimes because there
was a greater cast of characters who had more of a personality. The show got a lot of milage out of Wade
running around in terror as well as just how casually everyone else seemed to
take it. Bo and Lanolin were always have
absurdist arguments that had the manor or Beckett:
Bo: “You are so disagreeable.
Lanolin: “You’re
wrong.
Bo: “You just
disagreed with me!”
Lanolin: “I did not!”
Sometimes they could
be even more surreal. At one point before
going to bed, Bo said: “I think I’ll count people to help me fall asleep.”
Other times the stories could start logically and then go out into absurdity.
At one point they started discussing Close encounters went through the first
through third and then kept going until they reached fourteen. (When the aliens
inevitably showed up, they disagreed about what number encounter they had.)
And often the series
would do variations on literary parody. One of my all time favorites was Orson at the
Bat, obviously a ‘Casey at the Bat’ parody. This was not only a brilliant parody
of the poem but also acknowledged the reality of the situation as one couplet
will recognize:
“Kill him! Kill the
umpire!” rang out high and low.
But you can not kill a
person a children’s cartoon show.”
(At least you couldn’t
in the 1990s. Maybe you can now.)
Both shows were
willing to break down all the boundaries of traditional animation, not merely
when it came to comedy but every so often going into darker territory, certainly
for the minds of be even at thirteen.
In one segment Garfield’s
next door neighbor is appearing in court. By this time, the show had used his
character quite a bit as a frequent victim of Garfield’s stealing other people’s
food. The neighbor is explaining to the
judge that all of these charges come from the harassment of his next door neighbor’s
cat (he never knew his name because of course cats don’t talk) It starts out
fairly funny, until the neighbor sees Garfield at the restaurant again. He then
tells the judge that the cops who arrested him also looked like cats and the
booking officer did too. Then he turns to the judge - who to this point has been human – and she
has Garfield’s face. She turns to the jury – which is entirely made up of Garfields,
who find him guilty and for not giving the cat all his food, she sentences him
to life in prison.
The next ninety
seconds were genuinely terrifying as the neighbor is taken off to prison and
every figure he sees is Garfield, including the Statue of Liberty and a giant
cat fighting off airplanes. In your
heart you know this has to be a dream (“a pretty stupid dream’) but the longer
it goes on you begin to question whether this poor man has been driven insane
by Garfield. We know the kind of behavior he has and the description would seem
to have driven past his breaking point. Of course, it is a dream but the viewer’s
relieved when he finally wakes up. This segment passed comedy quite a while
back.
U.S., Acres did a
segment even more unsettling called Déjà vu. The show had made jokes about it
before, but this segment took it in a different direction. First we see Roy and
Orson playing tennis and Orson pauses, because he thinks this has happened
before. Roy says: “Maybe it’s a rerun.” Then the segment repeats word for word.
Orson and Roy walked
off and the weasel appears. As always he is looking for chickens and goes into
the coop. He too thinks he’s done this before. Then he runs into Wade, who goes
into a panic attack.
Roy and Orson keep
thinking this is a déjà vu, “the sensation you feel like you’ve done something
before, sometimes over and over again.” Roy says: “Sounds a lot like cable TV.”
(This was another old joke.) Then they run into Wade who in mid panic attack
and learn the Weasel has stolen the chickens.
This is on the edge
between comedy but now it starts to get creepy. The Weasel runs into Wade who
begins the exact same panic attack,. The Weasel throws the chickens into a bush…and
then runs back into the coop where the same chickens are waiting to be stolen
again. He runs into that same bush where Roy and Orson are looking for him and
repeats the exact same dialogue he did at the start of the cartoon and heads
back to the coop for the same segment. By
this point the Weasel (and the viewer) are completely freaked out and when the
Weasel runs into Wade who does the exact same panic attack, the Weasel runs off
in utter terror, trying to comprehend what is happening.
The ending brings no
relief. Roy and Orson are playing tennis like they were at the start.
Roy: “You can expect
to be beaten again, pig.
Orson: “Well, it’s
possible. The past does have a way of repeating itself.”
Orson trails off
again. Then we are back to this exact segment and lines. Except halfway through
repeating Orson pauses. “The past…does have a way of repeating itself.”
The last shot of the
episode is of Roy and Orson, grabbing each other in terror and the music is
closer to that of suspense then a kid’s show.
I was fourteen when I
first saw that. It freaked me out, with good reason. Several years later I read
Stephen King’s short story about this exact experience which he introduced with
his idea that to him ‘hell was repetition.” And the
thing is I knew that in the next cartoon everything would be back to normal: it’s
the nature of animation. But in a sense, it’s not because this cartoon is an
enclosed universe and all the characters are trapped in it with no clear way
out. Heavy stuff for a children’s cartoon. Hell, it’s heavy stuff for Peak TV.
Garfield and Friends lasted until 1995 when
the general slide of Saturday morning cartoons was starting to begin for
several of the major networks. As it was
the show had lasted eight seasons which in that era was practically forever. And
it had shown no sign of losing its edge: if anything, it continued to
demonstrate right up to its final season. They actually had both Garfield and U.S.
Acres do two part stories that would play out within the course of the hour.
And it was still biting the hand that fed it to the end: In 1993, one of the
first segments the show aired was ‘Top 10’ , an in-joke that David Letterman
had just jumped to CBS.
Garfield has come back in many forms since the cartoon
ended in 1995, including a Cartoon Network series in 2005. But none have ever
shown even a fraction of the imagination that you could see in a single episode
of Garfield & Friends in even
its weakest segments. The show was willing
to tear down any sacred cow that existed, including its own medium but it was
one of the highlights of television and animation that any era has ever had.
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