Back when I wrote Garfield and Friends, I'd do one "budget-buster" episode roughly every two years…something where the animation was so complex that extra artists had to be engaged and significant amounts of extra cash had to be spent. This episode, which was done late in the second season, cost about three times as much as your average Garfield cartoon. There was a bit of grumbling by the producers and the folks in charge of budgets but they did it, and they didn't do it on the cheap. Which is to their credit. There are producers and studios who would have tossed me and my script out onto the freeway.
As it turned out, it was a good investment. When the network people saw the storyboard, they thought the episode was so clever that they gave the series an early pick-up for the following season. That saved the studio a lot of money…way more than the overage on this cartoon. Sometimes, it's cost-effective to spend money.
A very talented artist named Mitch Schauer did most of the design work. Lorenzo Music, of course, supplied the voice of Garfield. Desiree Goyette did the voice of the rabbit at the end. And Neil Ross, who was then one of the lead voice actors on Transformers and G.I. Joe, handled the other roles. Click and watch.
