On the Garfield and Friends cartoon show, there were these three annoying bears who popped up every so often. Joshua33 wrote to ask about them…
I loved watching the Garfield and Friends cartoon show you wrote and I still play the DVDs for my kids. My favorite thing on there may have been The Buddy Bears. I understand that you created them in response to network mandates that whenever you had a group on a show for kids, the group always had to agree on everything and the member of the group who didn't was always in the wrong. Was there a specific incident that caused you to strike back like that?
Who wrote their catchy little song? Who did their voices? I know they were always sped up like Chipmunks but someone had to speak and sing for them. Is there anything else you can tell us about them?
Well, let's see: I wrote the lyrics to the song and Ed Bogas, who did all the music for that show, wrote the melody. The core voice actors on Garfield and Friends were Lorenzo Music (as Garfield), Gregg Berger (Odie and many other characters) and Thom Huge (Jon and many other characters). Thom did all the singing for them — that's Thom singing with Thom singing with Thom, all sped — and their speaking voices were Lorenzo, Gregg and Thom. Oddly enough, we had trouble speeding up Lorenzo's voice. We tried it and he still sounded like Lorenzo Music but the engineer fiddled around and finally made him not sound like Lorenzo Music.
For those of you unfamiliar with their song, it went like this…
The Buddy Bears appeared in one episode of U.S. Acres, a series that appeared within the Garfield and Friends show. In that cartoon, their speaking voices were Gregg, Thom and Howard Morris.
Before I answer the first part of your question, let me quote a comment I noticed recently on YouTube. This was posted by someone signed BNSF1995 in response to a Buddy Bears episode…
The Buddy Bears were Mark Evanier's personal attack against cartoons he wrote for before Garfield such as The Get-Along Gang and The Smurfs that preached pro-social values until they spewed out your ears and all over the sidewalk. In fact, CBS Standards & Practices got pissed at him for this particular segment.
That's mostly wrong. First off, I never worked on The Get-Along Gang or The Smurfs, though I did have problems with messages that various folks wanted to insert into Dungeons & Dragons, Richie Rich, a couple of ABC Weekend Specials and maybe a few others. But I crossed swords — this being Saturday morning kidvid, they were toy light-sabres — with Standards and Practices in any number of ways and I argued a lot with one particular lady at ABC.
No one incident prompted The Buddy Bears. Sometimes when you're a writer and you have strong feelings about something, you just find yourself writing about it.
CBS Broadcast Standards and Practices was in no way pissed about them. In fact, during my run on that series — eight years of producing seven seasons of cartoons — I did not have one real argument with them. I think the biggest "note" I ever got from BS&P was something like, "On page 4 of the script, you have Garfield making a reference to Tabasco Sauce. Tabasco Sauce is a brand name. Could you change that to Hot Sauce or anything else that isn't a brand name?"
Actually, we did have a few problems because of one or two (i.e., very few) of the Storyboard Artists who worked on the show. When production began on Garfield and Friends, I had a series of phone calls with the gent in Standards and Practices who'd been assigned to our series. We essentially said to each other, "I won't make problems for you if you don't make problems for me." He gave me a list of six or seven "don'ts" that I agreed were reasonable and in no way harmful to the show.
I can't find my copy of the list right now but I remember a few: Don't choke anyone by the neck. Don't show someone in a car who doesn't have a seat belt on. Don't show someone getting electrocuted by a light socket or electrical outlet. There were others but most were a matter of not depicting harmful actions that youngsters might copy. It was fine to drop a piano or a sixteen-ton safe on a character but not to play with matches. I agreed to these "rules" because none of them would ever stop me from doing anything we wanted to do.
The Storyboard Artists on the show were really good — good at storyboarding and good at following the meager rules. Alas, there were a couple who either didn't get the memo, didn't read the memo…or in the case of one, wished to actively violate the memo. I didn't hear him say this but our producer quoted this one guy as insisting, "Anytime a cartoonist is told not to do something, he has a duty to the Art Form to do exactly what he's told not to do." I told the producer to tell him we had a rule against jumping off the roof of the studio.
But even the problems he caused, we handled. Some people approach this kind of thing like it's a Holy War and the entire future of the show (and maybe Mankind) hinges on them being able to get a fart joke on the air. I think it's wiser to save your ammo for the battles that really matter.
Lastly: This may be a microscopic point but I have no problem with the basic concept of "prosocial values." Where would we all be without prosocial values? I'm thinking about prosocial values like, you know…"Murder is wrong," "Stealing is wrong," "Hatred is wrong," "Cole Slaw is wrong"…
Okay, scratch the cole slaw one. The point is that many things that are called "prosocial" really do correspond to the dictionary definition of "prosocial," which is "relating to or denoting behavior which is positive, helpful, and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship." Is anyone really against that?
The term "prosocial" is getting a bad rap because some people are using it in a pejorative sense and because some things that are being sold as prosocial are anything but. They're often just someone's personal prejudices masquerading as a teachable moment. The moral of the Buddy Bears stories was "Don't do something just because your friends do it. Have a mind of your own." I would call damn good advice even if some people would scoff that it was prosocial.
