Bryan Wong (and about nine of you) read this piece here and then wrote to ask…
You said that when you worked on Garfield and Friends, the CBS censor only had about five requests in all the years it was on and you found them reasonable and easy to comply with. Do you remember what any of them were?
Yeah. One of them was to not choke anyone by the neck. Another was not to electrocute anyone, especially by having someone stick something like a screwdriver or wire into an electric outlet. There were a couple of those where they had some reason to believe that kids might either imitate such actions and be hurt or they might do it on their own and then the cartoon would be blamed.
There were one or two others in this category and I don't recall clearly if these things had happened or if there was some good reason to think they might. On the other hand, it was fine to drop a sixteen-ton safe on someone because impressionable children were not likely to do that. I thought these were reasonable requests.
Another was to make sure that when the characters were driving somewhere, they wore their seat belts. Okay, fine.
More than once, I wrote a joke that mentioned Tabasco Sauce and at least one wasn't noticed before the Standards and Practices guy called and said, "That's a brand name. Would you mind switching it to hot sauce?" I decided that was better for the joke because (probably) more kids today know the term "hot sauce."
In 1991 when "Operation Desert Storm" was suddenly in the news, he called me and said, "We've been asked to make sure none of our childrens programming has any reference to war or combat." He explained that CBS News was occasionally cutting into programming at all hours — yes, even Saturday morning — with "Special Reports" about the conflict. Someone high up at the network was concerned that when one of those reports ended and they cut back to regular programming, there could be cartoon characters making light of war.
I suppose one could debate whether that was a silly thing to care about…and it is. But there are times when you think one of those silly things is an even sillier thing to spend time arguing about.
Garfield and Friends was in reruns at the time but I went over the scripts of the episodes that were scheduled for repeating and found one joke which could be construed as a reference to combat. I think it was Garfield and Odie pretending they were in a war movie, sneaking up on some enemy to try and capture their lasagna. Something like that. We moved that episode out of the rotation so it wasn't rebroadcast for a while…and that was that. That may have been the most the Standards and Practices department ever impacted the content of our show.
Since then, one Garfield and Friends cartoon has been pulled from the rerun packages because of what someone called an Asian stereotype. Folks are more sensitive about that kind of thing than they once were and it does no good to point out that since the series was animated in Taiwan, that alleged Asian stereotype was drawn by Asians.
I knew people who had near-coronaries over this kind of thing back when Standards and Practices was an actual division at every network and had some power. One guy at Hanna-Barbera used to refer to their requests as "pissing on the Mona Lisa," which I thought overstated what they were doing and perhaps (just perhaps) slightly overvalued what they were doing it to. What I learned was that you can't fight over everything. You're more likely to win the battles that really matter if you don't reflexively scream about every little thing. In the case of Garfield and Friends, all the little things were little things.