Here's another cartoon I wrote which should not be on YouTube and which the legal folks will soon have removed. But in the meantime, I wrote it. I can link to it. I can even tell you a little story about it.
I don't think it happens as much these days but those of us who do cartoons have been occasionally pressured, in much the same way a guy with a gun pressures you to hand over your wallet, to include certain "social messages" into our work. There's nothing wrong with trying to include a benevolent moral in a cartoon if — and here come a couple of big IFs — it doesn't despoil the entertainment value and it can be done without a condescending, lecturing tone…and especially IF the message is a sound one.
For a time in the eighties, a lot of us had to include a message with which I did not agree. It was, basically, that the group was always right; that one should avoid the anti-social behavior of not going along with what everyone else thought. This was embedded in many cartoon shows in many ways. On a show I launched called Dungeons and Dragons (the DVD of which is just now being released), I had to make one of the kids a sour presence who always wanted to go in a different direction from all the others. The same network also had a show called The Get-Along Gang, which was about a batch of cute, furry animals who always had to be reminded to get along with the gang. There were other examples.
I thought this was a foolish value to be teaching children. So did the programming folks at the network but it was forced upon them by outside interests. Later, when I did the Garfield and Friends show, things had changed and I not only didn't have to include that message, I could attack it…as we did in this U.S. Acres cartoon. U.S. Acres was Jim Davis's other newspaper strip — the one he retired because it was "only" in 300 papers…an impressive number for anyone but the creator of Garfield. In some other countries, the strip was called Orson's Farm so the cartoons we did were filmed with both title cards, and today's video clip has an Orson's Farm logo on it.
They all took place on a farm where Orson the Pig, Roy Rooster, Wade the Cowardly Duck and others cavorted. In the episode you're about to view (assuming the link is still good and you click on it), the voices of Orson and the agent were done by Gregg Berger, who I should mention also had a small role in the movie I saw last night. Thom Huge was Roy Rooster and the late, great Howie Morris supplied the sound of Wade Duck. All three, with their voices sped a la Bagdasarian, spoke for The Buddy Bears, three extremely annoying characters who popped up every now and then on the Garfield show singing their little tune which was written by Yours Truly and Ed Bogas. Which brings us to the cartoon entitled Big Bad Buddy Bird…
