Livio Sellone, who sends me way too many questions, sent one I decided to answer here…
We all have heard of Jim Davis, right? The creator of the Garfield franchise! Ah…Good ol' Jim Davis. He gave birth to one of the greatest and most charismatic characters ever, Garfield, and his seemingly stupid pal Odie, whose purpose is to accompany Garfield on his many adventures and he's usually the victim of Garfield's nasty pranks. Jon Arbuckle is just a loser (just like you portrayed him in the Garfield and Friends cartoon), and I find him boring, so I don't feel the need to compliment Jim Davis for creating Jon Arbuckle.
So anyway…let's get to the point, old chap! I'm gonna ask you a very personal question: but how is Jim Davis as a person? Is he a nice and kind person? Just wanted to know. Is he../uhm.. (I don't want to be offensive) greedy as some people in the internet say? Cus, you know, he created Garfield with the sole purpose of making money. He knew Garfield would be a very marketable character.
How is Jim Davis as a person? You must have worked with him when you were writing episodes for Garfield and Friends and The Garfield Show.
Those two shows were by far the happiest experiences I ever had in the animation business and that would not have happened if Jim was not a very nice and very wise human being. I can't give him all the credit. Our other two Executive Producers — Lee Mendelson and Phil Roman — had a lot to do with it as did others. But all the benevolent, smart people in the world can't do much if the guy with Ultimate Veto Power is going to be non-benevolent and non-smart.
Yes, I worked a lot with Jim but he also gave me and others a lot of freedom and trust. I wish certain people I'd worked with in the cartoon biz could have seen the results and understood the correlation. The whole success story that is Garfield is not just because Jim hit on a great character. It's because he worked his tail off and also hired good people to assist and advise him and because — and this was key — he understood the appeal of his creation.
At other cartoon studios and in comics, I have worked with folks who owned or were in creative control of great characters and were clueless as to why people loved those characters. Just in the upper echelons of Hanna-Barbera — I'm talking now about people who had power there but weren't Bill or Joe — I worked for and with folks who viewed the output just as "product" and it was "product" they didn't (and probably couldn't ever) understand.
You often saw the results of this attitude in the cartoons but a better example of it was in the merchandising of Yogi, Scooby, Huck, Fred and Barney, and all the rest. 75% of it was badly-made, badly-designed, badly-drawn and often creatively wrong for the characters. By contrast (and to my joy), there was no bad Garfield merchandise. It was all well-made, well-designed, etc. I watched Jim reject offers that the guys in that division of H-B would have grabbed. There was a little closet in Jim's office building that held boxes of proposed Garfield toys and other merchandise that he'd rejected because its designers didn't meet the standards he demanded. At Hanna-Barbera and a few other studios I worked for, they never rejected anything if the money was right.
So I got along great with Jim. Here's a very old photo of us together and — believe it or not — the person wearing the Garfield mask was Lorenzo Music. Honest…
