Someone who signs his name "Davy Jones" has been sending me this question over and over under a couple of different names. It's about a character named Binky the Clown who turned up now and then on the Garfield and Friends show when I was working on it…
Why did Binky stop appearing after Season 3? I mean…he was a recurring character in Season 1 and in Season 2, he also had his own segments called "Screaming with Binky." But after the episode "Binky Gets Cancelled Again," and a few "Screaming with Binky" quickies, he had very few appearances, mostly cameo appearances, until his appearance in "The Feline Philosopher," even though he appeared for 11 seconds. He claimed that they let him back on the show, but after that episode, he never appeared again. Why did Binky have so few appearances, after season 3? I always wondered that. Were you running out of ideas for his episodes, and all you could do, was make him a cameo appearance? We could have an episode about his origin or his backstory…an episode that would explain why he became a clown. Missed opportunity. He's such an interesting character.
As I recall, we dropped the one-minute "Screaming with Binky" episodes because CBS added another minute of commercials per hour and I decided I'd rather lose that segment — which was basically the same joke over and over — than lose a minute from the episodes. And by then I think we'd all decided that Binky had worn out his welcome on the show.
I vaguely recall a conversation with Jim Davis where one of us said, "Are you getting a little tired of Binky?" and the other one of us said, "Yeah." And you have to figure if we felt that way, the viewers were probably real tired of him. So I decided to cut him back to the occasional cameo and to see if anyone would write to complain.
We made that decision 33 years ago. So far, you're the first.
