Joshua Rosenkranz recently sent me a question I get often in my e-mail. I usually give those who so inquire a brief, probably insufficient reply but I've now decided to write a long answer to which I can link when others ask. Here's Joshua…
I am writing once again so I could find out more about Arlene's absence from the Garfield and Friends cartoon. I read once that there was alleged information that during the production of Garfield and Friends, Arlene was omitted because the character had a specific portrayal envisioned by Jim Davis himself, and since the criteria wasn't met, she was never used and replaced with an original character named Penelope.
If possible, is there a way I could find out why Arlene was not present/denied usage for the Garfield and Friends cartoon?
I am willing to receive an answer anytime, since I asked about Arlene in my last writing along with the cut characters from U.S. Acres, Cody and Blue, and never got an answer specifically about Garfield's pink-furred love interest.
It's kinda true that Jim Davis had some other plans for Arlene but the main reason she only appeared fleetingly in the Garfield and Friends show is that I didn't come up with any ideas I really liked that involved her.
Much of the time when you create a TV series with a whole buncha characters, you find out along the way that you don't need all of them. When Happy Days started, Ron Howard's character had an older brother who was later quietly discarded by the producers. They didn't know what to do with him.
Shows change. When Larry Gelbart wrote the pilot for the TV series of M*A*S*H, he intended Hawkeye to be much more of a womanizer…and some have suggested that was Larry projecting a certain amount of himself into the character. I have a mimeographed, ready-to-shoot copy of a script that would have been Show #2 or #3 before it was decided (reportedly demanded by Alan Alda) to temper that aspect of the character and that script was tossed.
As a result, there were a couple of nurse characters who had been planned as recurring — Nurse Dish and Nurse Cutler, I believe — who didn't appear on the show as often as had been expected and were soon dropped altogether. Nurse Cutler was played by Marcia Strassman and when I worked with her on Welcome Back, Kotter, she was often complaining she'd been led to believe she'd have a much bigger role on M*A*S*H. That was when she wasn't complaining that she'd been led to believe she'd have a much bigger role on Welcome Back, Kotter.
That happens with cartoon shows, too. When I was writing a lot of 'em for Saturday morning, I was sometimes called in to rewrite the development (the pilot script and the "bible" overview) of a proposed series. Much of the time, I decided that one problem was that the writers before me had included a lot of extra characters that were unnecessary. I cut several out of the format for Dungeons & Dragons on CBS that had been developed before I was hired. On one series I worked on for another studio — one of several shows from which I removed my name — I threw out a dozen characters. (And, as the studio head later admonished me, "…killed a dozen potential toy deals!")
It's just a thing writers often do. You look at the script you're working on and ask of each character, "Is this character necessary?" Once in a while, you decide one isn't.
It even happens with newspaper strips. When Jim Davis launched Garfield on the funnies page, Odie the dog was owned by a friend of Jon's named Lyman. As Jim produced the script day after day, he came to the feeling that Lyman was extraneous…so Lyman went away and Odie became Jon's dog. (Lyman popped up every so often as a kind of in-joke. In one of the Garfield video games, you — as Garfield — eventually come upon Lyman locked up in a dungeon, which is where he'd been all those years. On The Garfield Show, I wrote an episode where we learned a different fate that took poor Lyman away.)
Anyway, when I started writing the Garfield and Friends TV show, we were doing cartoons that averaged about 6.5 minutes in length. That ain't a lot of room. In most, we saw a good deal of Garfield, Jon and Odie…and unless the main plot needed a certain character, I was better off not trying to also service that certain character. I just didn't have many ideas that would have needed Arlene.
But it is true that Jim had some plans for her so we decided I wouldn't try to put her into any episode and when I did need a female friend for Garfield, I created one for the occasion. One named Penelope, voiced by friend Victoria Jackson, wound up appearing in seven episodes.
Later, I decided the series had been a bit too male and when we did a new series called The Garfield Show, I told Jim I wanted to have Arlene appear and by then, whatever project he'd wanted to save her for had come and gone or perhaps never happened. Neither of us remembered what it was. So we made a special effort to get her into the new show…and that's really all there was to it.
The same thing happened back when we started doing the U.S. Acres segments for Garfield and Friends. I was adapting a newspaper strip that had about a dozen characters in it and I decided that was too many for a 6.5 minute cartoon, at least at first. I decided to focus on Orson, Wade, Roy, Bo, Booker, Sheldon and Lanolin…and then we'd add in the others when we had a place for them. And I just plain forgot about Blue and Cody and a few others. There just never seemed to be a need for them especially after the strip was discontinued.
I'm sorry I don't have a spicy, full-of-secrets explanation for these decisions. Sometimes, it's like how I decided to have roast chicken for lunch today. I just decided and there's no interesting story behind that decision.
