Here's a clip from the Garfield and Friends series that needs a bit of explanation. If you ever saw the show when it was on CBS, you may recall that we had episodes of Garfield and we had episodes of a cartoon that was called, in this country, U.S. Acres. In other countries, it was called Orson's Farm. These cartoons ran 6-7 minutes in length. We also had little short cartoon gags that were called "quickies" that ran an average of thirty seconds each. In an hour-long episode of Garfield and Friends, we had four of the longer Garfield cartoons, two of the longer U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm cartoons and some Garfield quickies and some U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickies. (We also, for a time, had a segment called "Screaming With Binky" but never mind that now.)
One week, I wrote a Garfield cartoon called The Attack of the Mutant Guppies, which was all about giant, radioactive guppies that lived in the sewers. The cartoon ended with the monsters apparently being swept out to sea. This was then followed by a U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickie in which…well, here. See for yourself. Here are the last few seconds of the Garfield episode, followed by the U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickie…
See? The Garfield cartoon is continued, sort of, into the Orson's Farm quickie. I thought that was kind of funny. If it was though, it was only funny when that Orson's Farm quickie immediately followed that Garfield cartoon. You have no idea how hard it was to keep them together. The folks editing the shows kept calling to say, "Hey, the show's running a little long. Can we move that U.S. Acres quickie to another show?" And I kept telling them no, they couldn't. I think when the hour was first delivered to the network, they had the quickie before the Garfield cartoon and someone at CBS figured out the problem and made them go back and change it. When the show went into syndication, a number of elements had to be juggled around or trimmed to fit the syndication format and that quickie disappeared. So when the "Guppies" cartoon airs now, it airs without its punch line.
Along the way, I got a lot of people mad at me there because I'd made things too complicated. We also had a complaint from someone over at the studio that made The Muppet Babies because we'd mentioned their show. I still don't know why that bothered them.