It's time to highlight another one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons aaaaaaand... you know who it is. Let's Kablama Slam!
The Premise: The original grumpy cat, Garfield lives with his owner Jon Arbuckle and loyal-but-dimwitted dog sidekick Odie. This lazy orange tabby loves sleeping, eating lasagna, and (for whatever reason) HATES Mondays! Seriously… why does a cat care what day of the week it is?
Explaining Garfield feels as ridiculous as explaining Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny (the latter of which, I actually might do when I get around to The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show) but that’s what I’m doing with this thing, so here goes, I guess. Garfield and Friends is based on the beloved comic strip by Jim Davis. The strip was originally titled Jon and focused more on Garfield’s lovable loser of an owner, but that quickly changed as the focus of the strip shifted to the REAL star and Garfield took off as one of the most successful comic strips of all time!
Poor Jon.
After several primetime specials, I guess Davis finally realized that we wouldn’t mind watching Garfield and his shenanigans once a week, and thus his Saturday morning cartoon was born.
There’s always been a special place in my heart for cantankerous cartoon characters, so I was naturally a fan of this show. I especially loved the episodes where Garfield would try (and fail) to dispatch his annoyingly adorable fellow feline Nermal. It’s not cute to constantly tell others you’re cute, Nermal! Of course, my favorite character was and always will be Odie. What can I say? While I do love the grumpy characters... I'm also a dog person.
Several of these Saturday morning cartoon shows would sometimes change their theme song just for the sake of something new, I suppose. In the case of Garfield and Friends, I loved both theme songs equally, so I thought I’d brake things up with the second version.
The other half of this is, of course, the “and Friends” part of the show, which referred to the cast of barnyard characters that starred in the segment, U.S. Acres. Although, I don’t recall ever seeing Garfield interact with these guys, and the whole rural aesthetic of life on the farm doesn’t really seem like something Garfield would find appealing, so I don’t know if I’d necessarily call them “friends.” But it has a nice ring to it.
The Premise: What was known as "Orson’s Farm" to audiences outside the United States, U.S. Acres features a hard-working bookworm… or… pig …named Orson and his colorful cast of fellow farm animals such as the wisecracking Roy Rooster, sheep siblings Lanolin and Bo, and the oh-so-cowardly Wade Duck.
U.S. Acres was a separate comic strip that Jim Davis started working on shortly before Garfield and Friends premiered. The strip itself only ran for three years, but Orson and the gang were able to live on for several more years in their much more popular animated format.
My favorite thing about U.S. Acres was that it allowed for more diversity in its storytelling. While the Garfield segments always centered on Garfield (obviously), episodes of U.S. Acres gave each of the cast their own time in the spotlight. My favorite character probably has to be Wade. Being a coward, Wade wore a pool floaty because he’s probably afraid of drowning. That, in and of itself, is funny for a duck, but what I loved most was that Wade’s floaty had a tiny replica of his own head on the front of it, which would inexplicably change expressions to duplicate the one on Wade’s actual face.
Cartoons, man. They’re just the best!
Kablama Slam! Fun Fact: Garfield is named after Jim Davis’ grandfather who he described as large and cantankerous. Maybe he hated Mondays as well. I mean… they really are the worst!
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