Hey, it's been a long time since I embedded a cartoon that I wrote. When I was a lad, one of my favorite comedians — and I almost never saw him; only heard him on records — was The Old Philosopher, Eddie Lawrence. I thought he was hilarious.
In 1994 when we were doing the final season of the original Garfield and Friends, the producer let me record a couple of voice tracks in New York so I could use some New York voice actors. My "wish list" was Arnold Stang, Jackson Beck, Imogene Coca…and Eddie Lawrence. As it turned out, Mr. Beck suddenly had to record some commercials for the Little Caesar's pizza chain on the one day I could record there so I never got him…and Imogene overslept. I took her out to dinner and to see a Broadway show but I wound up recording her a few weeks later when she was visiting Los Angeles.
I'm going to quote some things now from earlier posts on this blog, slightly amended…
I called Eddie Lawrence's agent in New York and said I wanted to hire him to do one or two Garfield cartoons. Here was the deal. I told the agent, "What I really would like to do is write for the Old Philosopher. I know Eddie has always written all his own material so I don't want to offend him. If he doesn't want anyone else writing for that character, I absolutely understand. I'll just write a different kind of Garfield cartoon and have him play a role, just so I can meet him and say I worked with him. If, however, he is willing to trust me, I'll do two cartoons with the Old Philosopher character and we'll pay him twice as much."
The agent said, "I don't know…Eddie is really protective of that character."
I said, "Tell him I know his work backwards and forwards. Tell him I will send him the material in advance…which is something I've never done for anyone else in six years of this show. Tell him I will overwrite the monologues. I'll write them 50% longer and he can cut the jokes he doesn't like or reword them or whatever he wants."
She said she'd check with him. The next day, she called me back and said, "Eddie says he'll do the two episodes with the Philosopher….but I'll warn you. He's going to be really fussy about the material." We verbally "shook" on the deal and a week later, I sent the scripts to her to pass on to Eddie.
I was packing for the New York trip when the phone rang. On the other end was the unquestionable voice of Eddie Lawrence and he said, "Mark, you have been listening to my records." I would love to be able to tell you that he did everything I wrote just as I wrote it but in fact, we spent about a half hour then and another half hour after I got to New York fiddling with the jokes. Which was fine with me. I wrote two Old Philosopher routines for Eddie Lawrence and I am a happy man because of it.
The day we recorded, I did one first with Arnold Stang. Happily for me, Arnold was an hour early to the recording session, as many old pros were, so we got to spend an hour talking about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Top Cat and other things he'd done.
We then recorded his Garfield episode. He and I were in the booth in midtown Manhattan. Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger, Thom Huge and the other actors in the show were in our usual recording studio in Hollywood and we were all linked by telephone and Internet. In the cartoon below and the ones I did with Eddie, you can't tell that L.A. actors were 2,798 miles from their director and guest stars. I just figured that mileage on Google Maps. Back to quoting from an earlier post…
While I was recording with Arnold, Eddie Lawrence arrived. He and Arnold were longtime pals, and when Arnold and I were done with his cartoon and he exited the booth, he and Eddie embraced.
Then Arnold looked him in the eye and sounding as serious as Arnold Stang could possibly sound, he pointed to me and said, "Eddie, don't give this young man any trouble. He's a fine director and you just do everything he says."
Eddie promised he would. That wasn't good enough for Arnold. He added, "If you give him any crap, I'll come back here and kick your ass." Then he handed me his pager number and said, "Remember…if he gets out of line, call me and I'll come back and kick his ass." This wasn't necessary but there was one moment when Eddie was giving me a little problem and I had to threaten, "I'll call Arnold." He immediately apologized and agreed to do it the way I wanted. The power of an Arnold Stang threat.
Here's one of the two cartoons I recorded with Eddie, who passed away in 2014, thirteen years after Lorenzo Music. The voice of Binky the Clown was done by Thom Huge. Binky appeared a lot in the early seasons of Garfield and Friends and then I decided he'd worn out his welcome (and Thom's vocal cords) and he didn't show up for a long time…until this episode, in fact.
By the way: If you stay for the end credits after the cartoon, you'll see Eddie's name…but several of the other names don't belong. For most of its run, Garfield and Friends was an hour-long show and the end credits pertained to both halves. When the shows were chopped into half-hours for syndication, no one redid the end credits so a lot of them have been wrong. The shows were recently remastered for high-def and we took the opportunity to fix all the voice credits. The new versions will be turning up somewhere soon.
Enough of this! Here's Eddie and it's still a thrill for me that I got to work with this man…
