Search Results for: Garfield

Life magazine, which once was a must-read weekly, now lives on in name and logo only as an occasional devoted-to-a-single topic special that I see in the checkout line at my local market and nowhere else. The issue which you can probably find now in the checkout line of your local market is devoted to Garfield the Cat and Jim Davis and how the latter created the former and how big the lasagna-devouring feline became. The issue is, no doubt, intended to piggyback (cattyback?) on the publicity about the new movie but the story would be worth telling anyway.

A lot of you who read this blog are fans of said pussycat so I wanted to let you know this is out and also, I need to correct/clarify some things. It says in there I wrote all 121 half-hours of the series Garfield and Friends. I am always careful to say that I wrote or co-wrote all 121 half-hours. Another writer worked on some. It also says I voice-directed the series and that's true as of a certain point in the run but the earlier episodes were voice-directed by Mr. Jim Davis and then I took over.

Also, it says that reruns of the show are now streaming on Tubi. On my TV, they seem to be streaming on several platforms, Tubi included. I'm just waiting for all that residual money to flow my way. I may blow it all on a t-shirt.

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…

Ellis Rogers-Archer wrote to ask…

You have been with both Garfield shows, Garfield and Friends and The Garfield Show, so I will ask you some questions about the latter that have intrigued me.

1. Why the sudden transition to CG? Why didn't they just keep it in 2D like it was before? Was it because of those then-recent direct to video CG films?

The two shows were produced by different companies in different countries under very different financial arrangements. Very few people were involved with both. The company that wanted to do what became The Garfield Show does CG animation and Jim Davis likes CG animation. There was, as far as I know, no discussion whatsoever of doing it a different way. There are all sorts of debates, both creative and financial, about which is preferable but this is the way they wanted to do it.

2. Why do the animals' mouths move when they have dialogue? It's harder to tell if they can talk or not.

This was a problem from the moment that Garfield was first animated. He was the star of the show so they felt he had to have a voice…but he was a cat and in his world, cats don't talk. His "dialogue" in the newspaper strips was in thought balloons. For a while, it seemed to work to have his mouth not move, therefore conveying the idea that what you were hearing were his thoughts.

But as we got into longer stories or more complex stories…or just more stories, it became harder and harder to make that distinction. It was especially a problem in a cartoon where he spent a lot of time talking (or "talking") to other animals. For a while, the rule I came up with was that in a scene with just animal characters — like if Garfield was communicating with Odie or Arlene — mouths moved. If Jon or a human was in the scene, Garfield's mouth didn't move.

This rule did not last long because there had to be scenes where Garfield was "saying" something to Odie but Jon was present…like if the pets were in the back seat of Jon's car and Jon was chatting with them while driving. The animators were sometimes confused and they animated mouths they shouldn't have and…well, we just kind of gave up. Do not harm yourself by straining to figure out the logic behind it all. There was none…or at least none consistently.

3. Why was U.S Acres excluded from the show?

For those who don't know: U.S. Acres was a second newspaper strip that Jim Davis created and which ran in newspapers from 1986 to 1989. In other countries, it was often retitled Orson's Farm because the pun in the name didn't work in other languages and they didn't seem to even "get it" in some English-speaking countries. The episodes were made with two sets of title cards — one for each name — and for reasons unknown to me — a lot of cartoons that got into syndication or onto DVDs had the Orson's Farm title cards on them.

When CBS finally, after years of urging convinced Jim to allow a Saturday morning Garfield cartoon series, he suggested U.S. Acres be a component and that was done; ergo, the title of Garfield and Friends. It was, among other reasons, a way to get more exposure for those characters. When The Garfield Show was proposed years later, U.S. Acres was no longer an active property and besides, the various buyers around the world didn't want the same Garfield series as before. They wanted something they could promote as new and different.

So we gave them a show that was all The Cat and the shows did very well — they're still doing very well — and everyone involved was happy. There were discussions about also doing a new show that would have just been U.S. Acres (or maybe Orson's Farm) but that never quite got put together. As my first agent used to say, "Sometimes, you can make a deal and sometimes, you can't."

Someone named Mike wrote to ask…

First of all, I'm a big fan of your blog. Your recent post about voice actors that you wanted to have guest star on productions got me wondering… what voice actors auditioned to lend their voices to the Garfield projects you worked on? Were there auditions for Jon, Roy and Binky before Thom Huge decided to voice those characters? Were there any voice actors who auditioned for characters, didn't get the roles, but still wound up guest-starring on Garfield and Friends? Were there auditions at all, or did the crew just call up various actors they liked and offer them the roles?

Well, the first Garfield project with which I was involved was the Saturday morning series, Garfield and Friends. Jim Davis, the cat's creator, selected the voices before I came along. Garfield's first voice was, briefly, a radio personality named Scott Beach and you can read about him here. He did the voice for a short segment in a 1980 CBS special called The Fantastic Funnies.

That segment more or less served as the pilot for a series of prime-time animated Garfield specials, kicking off with Here Comes Garfield!, which aired in October of 1982. For that special and all that followed, Jim decided Garfield needed a different voice and the answer to the question, "Who did they audition?" would be "Who didn't they audition?" Just about every voice actor in L.A. read for the part and some of them read several times before Lorenzo Music tried out and got it. (Lorenzo, by the way, redubbed the Fantastic Funnies clip for when it was later shown here and there.)

One of the people who auditioned for the role of Garfield was Gregg Berger. Jim liked Gregg tremendously and while he felt Gregg was wrong for the cat, he found out Gregg could make dog sounds and awarded him the role of Odie. To this day, Gregg has been Odie in every case where Odie has had a voice.

Sandy Kenyon (you can read about him here) was the voice of Jon in that first special. With the second special, Garfield on the Town, Jim decided to give the role of Jon to a friend of his who'd been working for his company and had a background in radio and voice work. That was when Thom Huge became Jon…and he also picked up other roles, including Binky. For that special, Jim also selected Julie Payne to voice Jon's lady friend, Liz. As far as I know, Liz was the last role for which auditions were done. In other specials, Jim just cast actors he'd heard of or who had auditioned for other roles.

When Garfield and Friends started, Jim was originally the Voice Director but I took over casting new roles and eventually took over the voice direction when Jim got too busy to fly out here and do it. Thom Huge, who lived back in Indiana and worked for Jim there, flew out for voice sessions so we ganged-up recording dates so Thom could do several shows while he was out here. He turned out to be quite versatile so he did a lot of other roles in the show, plus he played Roy in the U.S. Acres segments. Gregg Berger also turned out to have an endless supply of other voices.

To cast the other regular characters in U.S. Acres, we did the only other auditions ever done for the Garfield and Friends series. We decided that since they were already part of the show, we'd have Julie Payne voice the character of Lanolin, and we'd assign Gregg one of the male roles and I brought in about eight of my favorite voice actors to audition. I directed the auditions, Jim listened to the tapes and he picked Gregg to be Orson, Howie Morris to be Wade Duck, and Frank Welker to play Bo, Booker and Sheldon.

And that was that. Thereafter, when we needed a new voice for a recurring or one-shot character, I might be able to have Gregg, Thom, Howie, Julie or Frank — or even Lorenzo, once or twice — do it but otherwise, I'd just hire someone I knew could give me what I wanted. A few of the actors who auditioned for U.S. Acres, like Chuck McCann and Lennie Weinrib, wound up doing guest voices.

Over the 121 half-hours we did of that series, we hired a lot of people who were new to the voice business. We also hired a lot of actors who'd voiced cartoons I'd loved as a child including Stan Freberg, June Foray, Larry Storch, Don Messick, Gary Owens, Dick Beals, Shep Menken, Paul Winchell, Julie Bennett, Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang. I certainly didn't need to audition any of those people.

Forty years ago today, Jim Davis's cranky cat made his debut in a whopping 41 newspapers across the nation. 41 is not a bad number to start with but if you want to make a living off your strip, you'd better get that number up and soon. Three years later, he was well in the safety zone and by his fifth anniversary, in 1,000 papers. Today, Garfield's furry face is in more newspaper strips than any other strip.

In 1987, much of my writing work was on Saturday morning cartoon shows and I was having a problem: I was running out of studios to work for. I quit several of them. I sued one. A couple didn't want me on the premises. I left the biggest one — Hanna-Barbera — because I felt so uncomfortable arguing, as I so often found myself doing, with Joe Barbera. He not only had his name on the building, he was Joe Barbera and it didn't look like that was going to change.

My last major assignment before I hooked up with Jim Davis's pussycat was developing a Saturday morning series with Michael Jackson. I could fill this blog forever (but won't) with tales of that unpleasant experience and why I eventually moonwalked off it.

When all was said and done, I felt I owed CBS some money for work they'd paid me for but which I was declining to do. Instead, a terrific lady named Judy Price who was the Vice-Prez of Saturday Morn for them suggested that instead of giving it back, we apply it towards my price for the next project she wanted me to tackle…a Saturday AM series of Garfield. I said sure; I liked Garfield and had since I'd first laid eyes on the strip.

Soon, I was meeting with the man who would produce that series, Lee Mendelson — a gent who has more Emmys than I have toes and who turned out to be the best and most honest producer I have ever worked for. I liked him. Then I met Jim Davis and I liked him, too. Let me tell you one of the first things I liked about Jim…

I had worked for years for companies and people who owned or controlled great properties, including characters I loved when I was a child. To most of these people, they were properties first and beloved characters, second. Sometimes, it was a rather distant second. One of the things I argued about with Mr. Barbera was because I often dealt with the men who managed the merchandising for his company and who had, I thought, no grasp or concern for the integrity of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, etc.

On my first visit to Jim's offices outside Muncie, Indiana, this happened: We were meeting and talking about the creative direction of the show. An aide to Jim interrupted to ask him if he could sign off on the prototype for a Garfield alarm clock that one of his licensees was about to start producing in large quantities. Jim's OK was necessary and they needed it right away because the factory was poised to begin making them by the zillions and there were deadlines that had to be met to ensure on-time delivery to wholesalers and retailers.

Jim inspected the prototype and he said, "No, they still don't have Garfield's eyes right." He picked up a Sharpie and indicated on the model just where those eyes should be.

The aide said, "If they have to break the molds and redo them, it will cost them thousands of dollars and they'll miss their shipping dates." To which Jim said, "So?"

Jim doesn't know how close he came at that moment to getting a big, wet one on the lips from me. I had worked for way too many companies and individuals — including people who'd created the characters who were about to be done wrong — to not be delighted by his attitude. Later, he told me his philosophy and he's also said this in interviews: "If we take care of the cat, the cat will take care of us."

I've now been involved with Garfield for more than thirty years and I'll tell you a few things about Jim Davis, one being that he believes that credo. I have seen him turn down more money than most of us will ever see because some lucrative proposal might not do right by Garfield.

Jim also works very hard. True, others do a lot of the artwork on the strip but Jim writes and sketches things out and keeps an eye on every aspect of the strip and also of the voluminous merchandise. Early on in our association, I'd be about to knock off work and go to bed at 3:15 AM here in Los Angeles…and in would come a fax from Jim who had just started his workday in Muncie. And I know why he's able to put in that many hours a day. It's because he really loves what he does…and that has a lot to do with why Garfield has been around so long. It's why when people find out I work on Garfield, it gets the reaction it does. They just love that cat.

So happy birthday to the lasagna-eater and I feel like closing this with a song. Here's an appropriate excerpt from an old episode of Garfield and Friends…

A couple of folks who read this post about The Garfield Show wrote to me with concerns/questions like Judy Fiske's…

Say it isn't so. I read what you posted about how Season 5 of The Garfield Show is only four episodes and there may not be a Season 6. Why would Boomerang cancel such a great show? Please tell me it is not in danger as I just read on another website.

It is not in danger as you just read on another website. Or at least, it's not in danger if Boomerang cancels it, which they probably won't do because the ratings are quite good.

I guess I should have explained a little more than I did. The Garfield Show is not produced for Boomerang. In fact, I think we were well into doing Season 2 before that company — the division of Time-Warner that also owns Cartoon Network — bought it, first for C.N., then for both, then for Boomerang.

The show is done principally for the France 3 network and sold to many nations around this planet. The Cartoon Network folks purchased the right to broadcast it in certain countries including America. There's a long, complicated explanation of how it is decided if and when we will produce new episodes but it has very little to do with any one channel except for France 3.

CN/Boomerang can acquire whatever new episodes are made and they do…though they waited more than a year to begin airing episodes from Season 4 because the first three seasons were rerunning so well. I assume they'll continue to run the package as long as the ratings hold up and it fits into the general thinking of their schedule. And I assume that if and when they drop it, someone else will grab it. (If I were running the Food Network, I'd snatch it up and sell all the commercial time to lasagna companies.)

What I'm getting at is that the business model is quite different from the way most of us in this country think TV programming works. We think that, for example, CBS buys a series and then that series is produced to CBS specifications and then when CBS cancels it, that series disappears unless some other network grabs it up then.

With a program like The Garfield Show, the math is a little more complicated but it runs on a whole roster of channels around the globe and the episodes are rerun over and over…and those reruns will always be available to any channel that wants them so long as no other channel has that jurisdiction locked up. And then at times, there's enough demand for new episodes to justify the huge expense of making more. This show costs a lot of loot to produce.

I am fairly certain it will be around in some form and on some channel for some time. I just don't know yet when any of the current plans to make more might solidify. I'll let you know when that happens, assuming that happens. Gee, I hope that happens.

As many of you know, I've been the Supervising Producer, Voice Director and Head Writer of The Garfield Show, a series which plays all over the world and which airs in the United States on the Boomerang Channel. Boomerang currently runs a half-hour containing two cartoons at 7:00 AM and another half-hour containing two cartoons at 7:30 AM. This happens Monday through Friday and the times I'm giving here are when they run on my cable feed. They might be different where you are.

As with most cartoon shows, they run an episode once and then they run it again and again and again and again, etc. I do not pretend to understand the pattern but I do know that the first airing of each episode on Boomerang has usually always occurred long after it's been run several times in other parts of the world. Sometimes, several years after.

This coming Monday, they're airing a special two-hour block of The Garfield Show. It starts at 1 PM on my cable service. The second hour features episodes that they've run before here and which have themes relevant to Halloween.

The first hour will be filled by the four parts of "Rodent Rebellion," which I believe are the only episodes we've produced which haven't aired before on Boomerang. I call it to your attention because to the best of my knowledge, they comprise the final cartoons to feature voicework by the late, great Stan Freberg. He doesn't have a big part but he's in there, mainly in the second half. The rest of the voice cast consists of Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert, Jason Marsden, Laraine Newman, Candi Milo, Corey Burton, Laura Summer and Jewel Shepard.

Freberg did his first cartoon work in 1945 for a Warner Brothers cartoon released in 1946. He did his last cartoon work in 2014 for a cartoon released in countries other than America in 2015 and now in this country in 2016. You can score that a couple of different ways but by any math, it's a career of around 70 years. Stan was a genius at making funny voices, funny records, funny radio shows and funny commercials…but how about a round of applause for sheer longevity?

Okay, the rest of this post is for the people who maintain the Episode Guide for The Garfield Show on Wikipedia. The rest of you can ignore what follows…

For complicated reasons that would bore the heck out of you, Season 5 of The Garfield Show consists only of the four episodes of "Rodent Rebellion." There are not nor will there ever be any more in Season 5. We may or may not do a Season 6 but that's still under discussion. Season 5 is just those four cartoons which air as two half-hours.

There's someone who likes to post phony episodes titles and descriptions of as-yet-unaired Garfield Show episodes on Wikipedia. This person — and it may be a team effort — is quite clever and has sometimes made up episodes vaguely similar to real ones we had in the works. But his or hers are bogus and I'm told some of them were posted for Season 5 and then deleted like all the other fake ones because they could not be verified. I am the best source you're going to find for this stuff — this blog has been running for sixteen years, guys and my name is on every episode of the series — and I hereby testify under oath that Season 5 is just those four episodes of "Rodent Rebellion." Thank you.

I don't track this kind of thing but This Day in History informs me that today marks 26 years since Garfield and Friends debuted on CBS. One of the happiest professional experiences of my life was to serve as writer, voice director and co-producer of that series.

Odd thing about that "co-producer" title: I didn't ask for it. I never even asked to be credited as voice director or for the songs I wrote so I wasn't. But after the first time the show was nominated for an Emmy, one of the executive producers, Lee Mendelsohn, suddenly realized that if it won for Best Animated Series, I would not be receiving one of those nifty statues.

The rules were changed a year or two later to include someone who'd written more than a certain percentage of the episodes. I don't recall the number but I was then writing all of them so I obviously would have qualified there. Before that change was instituted, Lee — who literally has more Emmys than toes — decided it would be wrong for him to get one for Garfield and Friends if I didn't.  (He needn't have worried.  Though nominated a couple of times, it never won.)

Designating me a co-producer meant I'd be included so they made me co-producer. My actual duties did not change nor did my compensation. But I got a lot of messages congratulating me on my promotion…which shows you how meaningless some credits in television can sometimes be.

We did seven or eight seasons of the show, depending on how you figure. It aired over seven seasons but according to CBS and my contract, we did eight. They just made the show an hour its second year and aired Season Two and Season Three at the same time.

Writing it was a lot of fun because after the first few episodes, I was just left alone to write whatever I wanted and to hire the voice actors I wanted. It was so much fun to go in and work with the core cast: Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Frank Welker, Julie Payne, Howard Morris and, of course, Lorenzo Music in the role of Garfield. I miss those sessions and some of those people. Some, I can't miss because they're still around to repeat their roles on The Garfield Show, the new series starring the lasagna-loving feline.

One of these days, I'll get around to writing more about this series. I'll tell you every problem and crisis we had and you'll think, "That's all?" Because it really was a joy — one that came into my life after a series of experiences in animation that were not and which had left me thinking I'd give it up and find something else to write. I'm glad I didn't.

Today marks 36 years since a certain lasagna-loving cat first appeared on the funny pages in not-very-many newspapers. I didn't see it because the L.A. Times was not among them. I didn't become aware of Jim Davis's creation until the first paperback collection came out a year or two later, by which time a few hundred other newspapers had picked it up.

The L.A. Times was still not among them but I had that first collection and then another and another. I thought it was a cute strip and in 1987 when I was asked to get involved in writing the character for television, I said, "Sure." I've been involved ever since. In fact, I have to stop posting stuff here today and instead work on a script that we're recording next Monday.

This job has put me in a great position to understand how beloved Garfield is around the world. He really is. Here are 36 of the best things he's said. None of these came from me.

Yesterday, I told you a bit about the new Garfield comic book I'm writing for the folks at Boom Studios and I showed you what I thought was the cover. Well, I've now learned, that's not the only cover. This first issue has three different covers. The green one above is the main one, the one most of you will get on the copies you buy. This one comes out on May 30.

There are two "incentive" covers, meaning that fewer of them were printed. The orange one above features a Jim Davis drawing back from Garfield's first appearance. And then the other limited edition cover (though not as limited) is the super-hero one I posted yesterday. These two editions come out on or about May 2 and sell for more. As far as I know, the insides of all three editions are identical. It's just the cover that differs.

Sorry for any confusion. This should give you some idea of how little attention I pay to some aspects of my business. And the feeling seems to be mutual.

The voice tracks for all the Garfield TV shows I worked on were recorded at Buzzy's Recording Studio on Melrose here in Los Angeles. Buzzy's, sadly, no longer exists but just about every actor you ever heard of — voice or otherwise — active during the years the studio was operating recorded something there. It had a great staff, a great mood, a great history, a great atmosphere, great refreshments and like any other recording studio in town, a terrible parking lot.

But we all loved working there and one of many reasons — apart from the owner-operator Andy Morris — was that when you there working in Studio A, you could run into just about anyone in Studio B or vice-versa. Case in point: One day while we were recording in A, James Earl Jones was recording in B.

I have no idea what he was recording but once he was finished, he heard laughing coming out of A and peeked in to see what it was. We, of course, stopped what we were doing and crowded around so each of us could tell him what our favorite thing was he'd done. There was a pretty long list from which to choose. The man had an incredible career even back then — this would have been around 1992 — and everything he'd been in had been good and often very good and award-winning.

It turned out he was a very nice man and he loved Garfield. I'm not sure I had the courage to ask him, "Would you like to do a voice in an episode some day?" if only because I was sure he got Top Dollar for saying anything in front of the microphone and we paid our guest actors union scale. That was pretty decent money but maybe not for someone used to working for ten times that or more. In any case, I didn't have to find out if I had the courage because he said, "If you ever have a part that I'm right for, I'd love to do it."

All the other actors — thinking of how thrilling it could be to act with James Earl Jones — looked hopefully at me and I said, "Well, do you have any samples of your work?"

Everyone laughed — including, fortunately, James Earl Jones. And I'm not sure you ever heard it fully on the screen but that man had a great laugh. I told him we had another recording session in two weeks and I'd have a script that was perfect for him. He said, "Great…what do I play?" I said, "I'll know as soon as I write it."

The only difficult part of arranging all this was that his agent, as you might imagine, wasn't thrilled about his client doing a voiceover job for a fee so far below his usual quote. He insisted I try to get his client more money so I went to our Executive Producer, Lee Mendelson, and told him what was going on. Lee, who I'm sure I've said here on this blog, was the smartest, most honest producer I ever dealt with the TV business. He authorized me to go back to the agent and offer double-scale and then, if necessary, triple-scale.

I called back the agent and said, "I have an offer for you." He said, "Never mind. I spoke to James and he said he wants to do this for the same money you pay everyone else. Actually, I think he'd do it for free if he could." Then the agent said, "Just out of curiosity, how much were you going to offer?" I told him and he said, "Well, I wouldn't let him do it for that but I've been outvoted."

I wrote a script that was about two ghosts — one very meek (kind of a Casper parody) and one very evil and sinister (like, say, Darth Vader in voice). To play the meek one, I booked a fine actor I knew named Will Ryan. I can't link you to a video of the cartoon but here's what the end credits look like on the version of the show currently streaming on a great many networks…

Some of those folks were in the two other cartoons that made up that half-hour of Garfield and Friends.

The recording went fine. I didn't really have to "direct" Mr. Jones because he did every line right the first time. Our recording engineer joked that it was a little tricky to get Will's meek, shy voice and James' booming monster of voice onto the same tracks. The contrast was pretty amazing.

I remember Lorenzo being very happy and saying he was going to a party that evening and if anyone asked him what he'd done that day, he was going to just grin and say, "I acted opposite James Earl Jones!" Mr. Jones was an absolute delight in every way…just like he was every time he got on a stage, in front of a microphone or in front of a camera.  He even made my stupid writing sound like it was worth something.