Garfield and Friends

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Garfield and Friends
The ideal television adaptation of two iconic comic strips.
Genre: Comedy
Running Time: 22–48 minutes
Country: United States
Release Date: September 17, 1988 – December 10, 1994
Network(s): CBS
Nickelodeon (1997-2000, TBA)
Created by: Jim Davis
Starring: Gregg Berger
Thom Huge
Desirée Goyette
Howie Morris
Frank Welker
Seasons: 7
Episodes: 121
Next show: The Garfield Show


Garfield and Friends is an American animated television series based on the comic strip Garfield by Jim Davis and run on CBS Saturday mornings from September 17, 1988, to December 10, 1994, with reruns airing until October 7, 1995. Seven seasons of the series were produced.

In addition to the segments featuring Garfield, the series also included segments featuring the characters from U.S. Acres, a comic strip Davis was drawing concurrently with Garfield when the show premiered on television. Like the comic strip these were based on, the animated segments were re-titled "Orson's Farm" for viewers outside of the United States (taking the name of their main character, Orson Pig). Although Davis stopped producing new U.S. Acres comic strips seven months after the show debuted, the characters continued to appear on television throughout the show's run.

A total of 121 episodes were made, each consisting of two Garfield segments and one U.S. Acres segment, totaling 242 Garfield segments and 121 U.S. Acres segments. All episodes have been released in the United States on five DVD sets by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The first season aired in a half-hour format before switching to an hour-length format in the second season, showing two episodes each week. During the last season, while the series was still an hour long, the second half-hour of the show featured either an episode from the previous season or one of the Garfield TV specials.

On May 25th 2016, 9 Story Media Group acquired the worldwide distribution rights to Garfield and Friends and its specials.

Why It Deserves Lasagna

  1. It stood out as one of the rare Saturday Morning cartoons of the 1980s that eschewed the era's typical merchandise-driven approach and overly saccharine characters, choosing instead to emulate the Looney Tunes style with its humorous narratives and sarcastic wit.
  2. It remains highly faithful to both the Garfield and U.S. Acres comic strips.
  3. The Quickies are amusing, charming, and humorous, with some being adaptations of previous comic strips.
  4. The characters are all likable and have such good spirits, includingbut not limited to:
    • The titular Garfield, that is one of the most likable character of the show, he also had a lot of funny moments.
    • Odie is as always likable and had some hilarous moments, even thiugh he a punching bag when Garfield want to kick him off the table.
    • Jon is a good owner of both Garfield and Odie, and his moments of stupidity is really funny, and is at it's best in this show, he's also way more likable than in The Garfield Show.
    • Nermal
    • Liz
    • Arlene
  5. Decent voice acting, with Lorenzo Music returning from the Garfield specials to reprise his role.
  6. Entertaining humor of both the sarcastic and non-sarcastic variety, as well as good slapstick, and the humor is faithful to the books.
    • The fourth-wall-breaking humor is also pretty enjoyable and resembles a Tex Avery cartoon, with some episodes specifically devoted to breaking the fourth wall alone:
      • "Mistakes Will Happen" is a jab at the show's various errors sprinkled throughout the past episodes, but unlike the many Teen Titans Go! episodes which are made to offend the audience and critics, this one is still respectful as it's littered with many bizarre and utterly ridiculous errors, and Garfield does admit that there were errors in the episode- but not the ones we think of.
      • There's also "How To Be Funny", which is not only a satire of typical comedy tropes, but also teaches a few good examples on how to write good jokes and humor, as well as "The Cartoon Cat Conspiracy" in which Garfield grows tired of the trope that cartoon cats have to suffer and makes his own show to combat the problem.
    • There's so many funny moments in this show because of this, and it also had some savage moments at times, similar to show such as Arthur and The Ren & Stimpy Show.
      • The scene where Garfield eat a part of wall is very funny and it ended up being one of the most popular moment of the show.
  7. Even within this comedy-centric show, there are heartwarming and emotional moments to be found, particularly in certain US Acres episodes.
  8. The animation and art style are splendid for their time, capturing the essence of both Garfield and U.S. Acres with perfection.
    • The art style is faithful to the books but still does some slight improvements, such as some of the characters designs that are mostly the same but slighly changed to look even better than ever before.
    • The animation is very fluid, and animation errors aren't common at all, which is impressive for it's time, and because of this, the animation aged extremely well, and still look great as of today, same goes for the art style.
  9. The opening theme songs, "Friends Are There" for the first two seasons and "We're Ready To Party" for seasons three to six, are highly enjoyable and entertaining to listen to.
  10. Many great episodes such as:

Bad Qualities

  1. The rap song edition of the theme song for Season 7 is somewhat bland and lacks the charm and enjoyment of the first two theme songs.
  2. The initial episodes of U.S. Acres tend to be a bit preachy, tiresome, and lackluster, especially when compared to the Garfield segments. However, they gained a more comedic edge in Season 3, and by Season 4, they even began to satirize the earlier episodes, particularly in "Big Bad Buddy Bird."
  3. There are some occasional bad/mediocre episodes, such as:
  4. The backgrounds when zooming out can look unfinished at times.
  5. While the series preserved its quality to the end, Seasons 6 and 7 are deemed less compelling than the first five, due to the emergence of more outlandish storylines, an overreliance on breaking the fourth wall, the sidelining of numerous secondary characters—save for Nermal and Floyd—and the alteration of the theme song in the last season.
  6. The recent Boomerang remasters of the episodes by 9 Story Entertainment is more of a downgrade with the intro horribly reanimated in Flash, unnecessary cropping on most episodes, and other episodes using a cheap TV screen border referred to as "Retrovision", making this so-called remastered version worthless. The credits are also replaced with a cheap static background with the original audio intact.
    • However, this so-called "remastered" version also applies color correction to all the episodes, which is the only good thing. Also, the original versions are being uploaded on the official Garfield & Friends YouTube channel.
  7. Desirée Goyette makes no attempt to give Nermal a boyish-sounding voice, causing many viewers who never read the original comics to think he was a girl. Fortunately, this incarnation of Nermal is MUCH more tolerable than the one from The Garfield Show.
  8. Some dubs are mediocre at best, examples being:
    • The Galego dub, suffers from piss-poor voice acting (Booker being the most infamous example, and Garfield sounding like the voice actor didn't bother at all.).
  9. It was eventually followed by "The Garfield Show," which, particularly in its initial two seasons, lacks the charm and wit of its predecessor.

Reception

Garfield and Friends received positive reviews by critics and audiences, in which this show was responsible for making the Garfield franchise popular, and it is considered to be the best Garfield show, and as of nowadays, it spawned a huge cult following and had a lot of memes spawned because of this show.

Trivia

  • The theme music for this show is "Friends Are There" for the first two seasons, and "We're Ready to Party" for the last five seasons.
  • Among the voice actors considered for the show were Daws Butler and Jim Backus.
  • Garfield and Orson are the only characters to appear in all episodes of their respective segments.
  • The fact that the show was still running at the end of the U.S. Acres strip was referenced one time.
  • The U.S. Acres segments and Quickies are absent in Japanese airings and are replaced by Garfield and Screaming with Binky cartoons and Quickies, although the characters still appear in cameos and the intro.
  • Although the U.S. Acres Quickies were dropped in later episodes, they are still referenced in Garfield cartoons.
  • Mark Evanier has stated that he prefers the Spanish dub of "Friends Are There" over the original.
  • "Friends Are There" is the only intro to use original animation, instead of montages of clips from the show and TV specials.
  • On home video releases, the "Don't bother checking NBC, kids. They don't air cartoons anymore" introductory line was not included.
  • Although Garfield, Nermal, and Floyd are consistently shown to talk without their mouths moving, some Garfield cartoons feature other animals talking otherwise.
  • Although animals generally cannot talk to humans in the Garfield segments of the cartoon, there have been some exceptions. For example, in "Garfield's Garbage Can and Tin Pan Alley Revue", Jon could apparently hear Garfield singing. In "Binky Gets Cancelled Again!", humans could hear what the Buddy Bears were saying, and in the episode "Half-Baked Alaska", Jon could hear what Ichabod was saying when he whispered in his ear.
  • Mark Evanier has written that Arlene rarely appeared in the series due to the dearth of satisfactory ideas involving her character, the number of other characters appearing in the show, and the short length of each cartoon segment. Additionally, Jim Davis, at the time, had specific plans on what projects could feature her. Therefore, episodes where Garfield would have a romantic interest instead used new characters created by Evanier, most notably Penelope Pussycat.
  • This would be the first known Garfield project to be outsourced to an animation studio overseas, as most of the specials were animated in-house at the former Meléndez and Film Roman studios.

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