As a few of you know and even fewer of you care, I wrote the Garfield and Friends cartoon show for something like eight years. I forget exactly how long. Anyway, it was a lot of lasagna jokes.
During the show's life on CBS, it had three different openings and three theme songs. I cannot explain the third one, which was an odd rap thing that no one associated with the show liked and which didn't last long. The first one though went like this…
That animation was done, by the way, by a gifted artist named Kevin Petrilak. The song was written by Desiree Goyette, who was also the voice of Nermal on the show, and that's mostly Desiree's fine singing voice you're hearing. I came up with the idea of having Garfield say a different line at the end of the main title each week, which was easy to do since his mouth didn't move. I wrote dozens and dozens of those, a couple of which got us into trouble. One week, I had him say, "And a special hello to all you wonderful Nielsen families out there." Apparently, you're not supposed to do that. NBC accused us of trying to rig the ratings (I am not making this up) and there was actually an article in The New York Times about how the Nielsen company had decided to void the Saturday morning ratings for the week because of it. (I can't find my copy, either on paper or in the online N.Y. Times archives. If someone here has Nexis/Lexis or some other service that can track it down, I'd love to get the text of that article.)
A year or so later, NBC got out of the business of programming animation on Saturday morning. The first AM this was effective, the end line to our opening was Garfield saying, "Don't bother watching NBC, kids! There are no cartoons there!" There were more complaints from the Peacock Network but nothing they could do to us. Besides, it was true.
Anyway, that was our first opening and I liked it. I've decided, however, that I like it even better in Spanish…