Peter Wong asked me a question which a number of people have sent me. This might be a good time to answer it. Here's Peter…
Way before prime time animation took off, there was just Saturday morning animation. Why was it that unlike live action shows, renewed animation shows in that period never made new episodes beyond the initial 13 or so that were first broadcast?
This is basically not true. In most cases, the initial order for a new animated series was 13 but other numbers were possible. Quite a few shows done for CBS, NBC and ABC during this period started off with 16. At times when the networks' budgets were tight, 13 became more common and that meant a 52 week run with each episode run four times. On a few shows I worked on, the voice actors were paid up front for the initial run and three reruns.
With rare exceptions, a show would debut in September. Around February, they would have enough ratings info from reruns to assess the strength of series and to have some sense as to whether it was worth retaining for the following season. At that point, they would either plan to order thirteen new episodes or, sometimes, six or eight new ones. A number of different deals were possible but the one that I saw used most often in the latter days of those networks programming for Saturday morn would be as follows: Thirteen for the first season, then if they wanted to pick the show up for Season #2, they would order eight additional episodes and they would select five shows from Season #1 to rerun. So the second season would consist of those thirteen episodes each being run four times.
But there were many variations on this. When I did Garfield and Friends, we started as a half-hour show and the commitment from CBS was for two years: Thirteen shows for Season #1 and thirteen more for Season #2. My initial contract to write them all guaranteed me 26 half-hours.
This was an unusual deal but between the circulation of the newspaper strip, the ratings on the prime-time Garfield specials and the flood of very successful Garfield merchandise, Exec Producer Lee Mendelson was able to get a deal that was unprecedented. And it may also have helped that Lee had a history with CBS of producing successful animated projects including the Charlie Brown specials. (I believe that to this day, A Charlie Brown Christmas — which CBS lost some years ago in a bidding war — is the single most profitable half hour of television ever produced.)
We never wrapped production on Season #1 of Garfield and Friends. We just went right on producing episodes for Season #2. When Season #1 went on the air and did well and when its first reruns did well, CBS decided to turn Season #2 into an hour and ordered — I think — twenty-six more half-hours. I'm a little fuzzy on this because we never stopped for a long time. I was never fully aware when I finished the shows for Season #2 and we were doing Season #3…or then when we finished Season #3 and were doing Season #4.
And to make matters more confusing, when we were producing Episodes #27-40, we referred to them as Season #3 and CBS was referring to them as Season #2. It took a while to get all the paperwork in sync.
I think — don't hold me to this — that it was after we finished the shows for Season #4 that we were so far ahead that a deal was made for us to stop making Garfield & Friends for a while. Instead, most of the same crew produced thirteen episodes of Mother Goose & Grimm. That program fell into the grey area where the ratings were too good to give up on it but not good enough for CBS to order thirteen more so the series was renamed Grimmy and its second season consisted of just reruns from the first and only thirteen we made. So that did happen.
I believe though that we did 18 new half-hours of Garfield & Friends for Season #3 and 16 new half-hours for Seasons #4, 5, 6 and 7 with the rest of each season's airings consisting of selected episodes from previous seasons. But there were new episodes made for each season. We ended up making 121 of them which is a helluva lot of lasagna jokes.
