As many of you know, I've been the Supervising Producer, Voice Director and Head Writer of The Garfield Show, a series which plays all over the world and which airs in the United States on the Boomerang Channel. Boomerang currently runs a half-hour containing two cartoons at 7:00 AM and another half-hour containing two cartoons at 7:30 AM. This happens Monday through Friday and the times I'm giving here are when they run on my cable feed. They might be different where you are.
As with most cartoon shows, they run an episode once and then they run it again and again and again and again, etc. I do not pretend to understand the pattern but I do know that the first airing of each episode on Boomerang has usually always occurred long after it's been run several times in other parts of the world. Sometimes, several years after.
This coming Monday, they're airing a special two-hour block of The Garfield Show. It starts at 1 PM on my cable service. The second hour features episodes that they've run before here and which have themes relevant to Halloween.
The first hour will be filled by the four parts of "Rodent Rebellion," which I believe are the only episodes we've produced which haven't aired before on Boomerang. I call it to your attention because to the best of my knowledge, they comprise the final cartoons to feature voicework by the late, great Stan Freberg. He doesn't have a big part but he's in there, mainly in the second half. The rest of the voice cast consists of Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert, Jason Marsden, Laraine Newman, Candi Milo, Corey Burton, Laura Summer and Jewel Shepard.
Freberg did his first cartoon work in 1945 for a Warner Brothers cartoon released in 1946. He did his last cartoon work in 2014 for a cartoon released in countries other than America in 2015 and now in this country in 2016. You can score that a couple of different ways but by any math, it's a career of around 70 years. Stan was a genius at making funny voices, funny records, funny radio shows and funny commercials…but how about a round of applause for sheer longevity?
Okay, the rest of this post is for the people who maintain the Episode Guide for The Garfield Show on Wikipedia. The rest of you can ignore what follows…
For complicated reasons that would bore the heck out of you, Season 5 of The Garfield Show consists only of the four episodes of "Rodent Rebellion." There are not nor will there ever be any more in Season 5. We may or may not do a Season 6 but that's still under discussion. Season 5 is just those four cartoons which air as two half-hours.
There's someone who likes to post phony episodes titles and descriptions of as-yet-unaired Garfield Show episodes on Wikipedia. This person — and it may be a team effort — is quite clever and has sometimes made up episodes vaguely similar to real ones we had in the works. But his or hers are bogus and I'm told some of them were posted for Season 5 and then deleted like all the other fake ones because they could not be verified. I am the best source you're going to find for this stuff — this blog has been running for sixteen years, guys and my name is on every episode of the series — and I hereby testify under oath that Season 5 is just those four episodes of "Rodent Rebellion." Thank you.