One time in a Garfield recording session, Lorenzo Music (the voice of said cat) got into a discussion with another actor about Tommy Smothers. They were talking about the years when the Smothers Brothers had their popular variety show on CBS and the news was filled with stories of Tommy fighting with the CBS execs…leading to the program's eventual cancellation. The other actor said something about how Tom was too dumb to be trying to run a network television show, apparently confusing Tom's screen character with the real person.
Lorenzo, who'd been a writer on that series, corrected him and said, "You have to be real smart to play stupid that well."
I had a few contacts over the years with Tommy Smothers — not enough to call him a friend but enough to see that Lorenzo was right. Tom was a sweet, funny guy who in person was impossible to dislike…and very much unlike the stammering clueless fellow he usually portrayed. He and his brother Dick were also examples of comedians, and there are several, that I didn't fully appreciate until I saw them perform live. They were real, real good.
New to our countdown this year is Allan Sherman and his version from 1963 of "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas." There have been dozens of record albums and CDs that collect comedic Christmas recordings and this selection is on about two-thirds of them, often called "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
By any name, I loved this song since I was eleven. Many years later when I was writing Garfield and Friends, I subconsciously stuck in a joke about an "indoor plastic birdbath" without realizing where I'd gotten that phrase. Several folks who saw the cartoon wrote to inform me but they were all nice enough to refer to it as an "hommage" instead of a "plagiarism."
This video may seem like Mr. Sherman and his singers are doing a clumsy job of lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track but I don't think so. As I recall, this was a number that he wrote and performed on some TV show taped several weeks before Christmas. Someone — Sherman or his record company — got the idea that it should be a record and they quickly rushed it out as a 45 RPM release using the music and vocals from the show. It was later included on one of his albums.
So why is it outta sync here? I can think of several possibilities, one being that whoever assembled this video for YouTube laid the stereo rendition from the record over mono (or silent) footage from the TV show and they didn't quite match up. Or maybe the record was made from an alternate take of the number from the show. Or something. Anyway, I think the audio you're hearing was recorded at the same time with the same singers but maybe not the exact same time. It's still a great song…
Every year around now, Time magazine names its Person of the Year and a whole lot o' people who never read nor care about Time the rest of the year get outraged. No matter how Time explains it's for the person who "for better or for worse…has done the most to influence the events of the year," people want to see their fave win it. Never mind that in the past it went to Hitler, Stalin, The Ayatollah Khomeini, Vladimir Putin and all sorts of folks who probably fell into the "for worse" category. As far as some people are concerned, it recognizes greatness no matter what its awarders say.
This year, it went to Taylor Swift. Fine. None of the folks protesting the selection care what's inside Time. Why should they care who's on its cover? If it was my decision and make the cat Person of the Year.
Among my fondest wishes for 2024 is that some part of politics, however small, will be about what's best for human beings, not about "owning" the opposition and making their heads explode.
I worked on 121 half-hours of the cartoon series, Garfield & Friends. There's a sub-channel on the Pluto streaming network that runs the show 24/7. As far as I can tell, they don't run all 121 in sequence and then repeat them and repeat them. They select something like a six-hour block of episodes and then run them four times a day, then run a different six-hour block the next day and a different one the next day and so on.
If they ran them all in order, they'd be repeating them all every two-and-a-half days. Either way, it means running every episode a little over 144 times a year. The voice actors who worked on the show and I each get enough money from this to buy the occasional can of Spaghetti-O's…but not too often. The animators and artists and others who worked on the show don't even get that.
Rumor had it that someone is trying to set up a streaming channel to run the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show that I also worked on. If they do and they run the show 24/7…well, there were only 27 episodes of that series so they'd be going through the entire run almost twice a day.
One of these days, Warners is going to set up the What's Opera, Doc? streaming channel that just runs What's Opera, Doc? over and over, every hour of every day so you can tune in any time and watch What's Opera, Doc? It's seven minutes long so if they put two minutes of commercials between each showing, they could run it 160 times a day, which would be 58,400 times per year except in Leap Year when it would be 58,560 times.
I don't think the families of Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese, Mel Blanc and the artists who made that film will even get a can of Spaghetti-O's. Well, they may get the O's part but they won't be seeing any of the spaghetti part.
Among the many things that some people believe without the slightest bit of evidence is that there is no such place as Wyoming. Apparently, there are websites and online discussion forums devoted to this theory. It seems to me this would be a pretty easy thing to prove or disprove…and if it could be proven, the Democratic party would have done so by now and eliminated two Republican senators, one Republican Congressperson and three electoral college votes that always go G.O.P.
What interests me about this is that according to the Associated Press and to the website Big Think, I am responsible for this strange belief because of a segment I wrote in a cartoon in 1989…
Oddly enough, the theory that Wyoming does not exist may have originated with a 1980s television cartoon. In an episode of Garfield and Friends that aired in 1989, the titular cartoon cat explains to an audience that the square on the map labeled "Wyoming" does not denote a real place, but rather expresses an Italian word for "no state here."
Wyoming is not an Italian word and Garfield did not help map the United States. Nonetheless, the movement either began or gained national exposure at that time, when it implanted into the passive minds of kids watching television who grew up to be adults who ponder the reality of state borders on the internet.
That's what the Associated Press said and they're never wrong except for most of the time. Here's the segment in question. Perhaps the stark, realistic statement of facts by the animated talking cat convinced some people it was a serious documentary…
And yes, that's Gary Owens as the announcer. Thanks to Taylor Ramsey for telling me about this…and y'know, this whole thing with people believing Donald Trump is a good, honest man who won the 2020 Presidential Election is starting to make a little more sense to me.
A number of folks have written to ask me if I had anything to do with the new Garfield movie, the trailer for which is now online. Typical is this one from "Frank D"…
I saw a trailer for a new Garfield movie and immediately thought is this something Mark has done? I know you have thoroughly refrained from plugging any of your current work but as soon as I saw the trailer you just came to mind.
No, I had nothing to do with the new Garfield movie…nor, to answer a question others have asked, am I bothered by that. I mean, I loved writing that cat for all those years and I'm sad if that was the end of it…but I always knew it would end and am surprised/pleased it lasted as long as it did. I'm the guy who coined the oft-quoted-within-the-industry line, "Never get possessive about characters you don't own."
When we write others' properties, we're baby-sitters. We are not the parents nor, even if we do a great job of baby-sitting, do we become the parents. We're baby-sitters and it's real easy to change baby-sitters or even for the parents to not need one any longer. Name almost any character who's been around long enough to be passed from writer to writer to writer. I know someone who wrote that property for a long time and was very proud of the work they did on that property…
…and then it came as, if not a shock then at least a little jolt to realize someone else was suddenly in charge of "their" character. I had a friend who was so "into" writing Superman that for a time whenever anyone else did, he reacted at least a little like a man discovering that his wife was sleeping around.
I was maybe the fortieth or fiftieth person to write Scooby Doo and never for a moment the only one. There have been hundreds since and there will he hundreds more. You have to think of these kinds of assignments in that context.
So you don't find anything morally or ethically troubling when a celebrity (who has a large following) monopolizes someone else's poll for their own personal ends? To him (and to some of his followers) the billboards etc and ramifications may appear as one big joke. But to others who take these things more seriously….
Polls are designed to gauge people's reactions to items. Surely you would be unhappy if a project you enjoyed working on was downgraded in a poll, because of a situation similar to the above. The New York Times' latest poll shows that writers of Groo and Garfield love cole slaw.
Remember, not all polls are conducted by Dick Morris.
So let me get this straight: You're telling me that people take a poll to name The Bird of the Century seriously? And I don't think this was even a poll. It was a competition in which anyone could go to a website and vote. The word "poll" suggests some sort of effort is made to hear from people who represent a cross-section of the population.
And according to all the articles I've seen, the organizers of the contest were thrilled that John Oliver mounted his campaign and thrilled with the response. The idea of the vote was — and I quote — "…to raise awareness for native New Zealand bird species, of which about 80 percent are threatened or at risk of extinction." Oliver's stunt led to them receiving "…more than 280,000 votes in a contest that had previously seen a maximum voter turnout of about 56,000 in 2021."
It was a campaign to raise awareness for what actually is a serious matter. And Oliver raised a whole lot more awareness. I think that's great.
And I also think it would be great if the New York Times poll said that I love cole slaw. That would remind people that they shouldn't take the New York Times poll seriously when it comes to less important matters…like who'll be our next president. That might be important when we're close to Election Day…but now? Personally, I'm thinking that when that time comes, I'm voting for the pūteketeke. Unless he's convicted of one or more felonies.
A gent who, as you'll see, wanted me to call him "Doc Bedlam" wrote with the following question…
Longtime reader here who has so far not bothered you with e-mails, requests for money, or an impassioned defense of cole slaw…but I have a question. It's a weird question, so feel free to ignore it, but it is a subject in which I am interested. If you choose to reprint this on your blog, call me Doc Bedlam.
Recently, I was given a gag gift: The Little Golden Book…of Dungeons and Dragons, based on the old Saturday morning cartoon show, a thing you've mentioned on your blog a few times, to say how you had little to do with it other than hammering someone else's concepts into a form and format that fit your standard Saturday morning cartoon show at the time, and filing off some rough edges here and there.
This book was written and illustrated by people who claim to not be Mark Evanier…but in the second tiniest print on the page, it says, "Based on the episode "The Night Of No Tomorrow" by Mark Evanier."
Now, experience has taught me that the writer doesn't get any more credit than he's contractually obligated for someone to give him. My question is this: Did you get some sort of residuals for the reuse of your story concept in a Little Golden Book, and was it any significant amount? I mean, I'm not asking for your financials or anything, but would the $$$ be worth the trouble of endorsing and depositing the check?
I ask this because I'm aware you've been writing for TV for more than a few minutes now, and I have this image in my head of Mr. Mark Evanier, slipping on his shoes, strolling jauntily out to whatever he drives, and heading out to the Post Office once a week or so…and walking back out with an enormous mail sack full of envelopes.
Most of them contain paper checks…for amounts ranging from a few dollars to a few cents. Because clear back in 1980, someone signed a contract with Mr. Evanier that meant he got residuals of some sort whenever a given story was used…on a downward sliding scale based on how long it's been since the contract was signed (I've heard actors talking about how the residuals run out after a given period, and how they were getting checks for 89 cents ten years after a show was cancelled, and like that; my knowledge of how the writers get paid is somewhat sketchier).
If you're feeling indulgent, could you enlighten me as to exactly how this works?
I'll show you how observant I can be at times. When I got this message the other day, I thought, "There was a Little Golden Book adapting that script I wrote?" I started to write a reply here saying how I'd never seen a copy and certainly never seen a dime from it. But then I had the vague feeling that I had…somewhere, sometime. And then the vague feeling got a little less vague…
A few months ago, I was on a panel at Comic-Con about the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show. The dais was decorated with Dungeons & Dragons merchandise and I went and looked at a YouTube video of the entire panel. Here — I'll let you have a gander at it if you're interested…
As you'll see if you gander its way, there was not only a copy of the book as part of the display, it was SITTING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME FOR THE ENTIRE PANEL [Emphasis added to emphasize my cluelessness.] Well, at least I had that vague remembrance. But I never opened it and never looked inside and if I had, I might not have seen my name because I didn't have the electron microscope that I carry with me nearly everywhere I go. I found this image of the title page online…
If you still can't make out my name, clicking on the image will make it a wee bit larger. Or get out the electron microscope that you carry with you almost everywhere you go.
So no, no payment…yet. I may or may not be owed something but I'll have to haul out the contract to check…and with my filing system here, finding a paper from 40 years ago — and then, if any monies are due, actually collecting them — may be harder than finding one's way home from a mystic dimension based on a popular role-playing game.
The contract was with Marvel Productions, which has been sold and reorganized several times since then and I guess it's now part of Disney but not a part with any rights to the game and maybe the cartoons. It has been my experience that companies are pretty good about honoring deals that they (themselves) make. But when a company changes hands, the new hands either never receive the paperwork that delineates the contractual obligations that come with the acquisition or prefer to pretend that they didn't.
So that's part of the answer to your question, Doc. Here's a more complete answer…
From a writer's business standpoint, there are three kinds of cartoon shows — those that are covered by the Writers Guild of America contract, those that are covered by the Animation Guild contract and those that are covered by neither. The contracts for the first two are basically what we call "Minimum Basic Agreements," meaning that if the hiring entity wants your services badly enough, you or your representatives may be able to negotiate an additional contract that gives you better terms that are in the M.B.A.
So let's say that the M.B.A. specifies that for a certain-length script, you'll receive $8,000. Let's further say that your agent and/or circumstances persuade them to give you a better deal that adds in, say, $2000 more plus agreed-upon residuals or royalties or bonuses or special credits. In that case, you'd get $10,000 plus those residuals or royalties or bonuses or special credits. If you don't (or they won't) agree on an additional contract, you just get the $8,000 and whatever credit is dictated by the governing M.B.A.
If you know the story of how I came to do the Dungeons & Dragons pilot and bible — a brief version of it is in video above — you know that I had some extra clout to demand a better deal. This is what good agents are especially good at and mine got me a lot more money, a "Developed for Television By…" credit on every episode and I think there was a "series sale bonus" if/when the network bought the show plus some other rewards. I'll have to locate my copy of that contract and see if I'm owed anything more and if so, if it would be worth it to make the phone calls or turn it over to my lawyer.
It may not be. When I performed a similar service for a Disney cartoon show called The Wuzzles, they adapted my scripts into kids' books similar to Little Golden Books and also a record or two. That contract didn't promise me a cent if they did that so I didn't get money or even copies of the books or record nor was my name on them.
Marvel Productions at the time I worked on Dungeons & Dragons was a signatory to Local 839 of I.A.T.S.E., which has since changed its name to The Animation Guild. If I hadn't gotten that contract, my deal would have just been the M.B.A. of that union which, I'm pretty sure, did not allow for additional payments to the writers for anything.
And once, I worked on an ABC Weekend Special which was adapted by others into two books not unlike the Little Golden Book. My contract did not allow for this so I went to the studio's attorney and told her they should have gotten my okay and also asked me to do the adaptations. She said basically that if I made an issue of it, I would never work for the studio again. I chose not to make an issue of it but I also decided that I liked that part about never working for that studio again.
I think I've answered your basic question, Dr. Bedlam sir, but let me address your fantasy of me cruising to the post office to pick up sacks of checks. It wasn't even that way before a lot of this went to Direct Deposit. Money trickles in here and there, mostly from the two different Garfield cartoon series for which I was Producer, Writer and Voice Director…and I use the word "trickles" deliberately. There's not much there for anyone to envy.
Garfield and Friends now reruns 24/7 on some streaming services. On the streaming service called Pluto, there's literally an entire channel devoted to that show and it's on Tubi and others, as well. I worked on every episode and I've made a pact with one of the voice actors who was on every episode. At the end of this year, we're going to take all the money we've received in royalties and residuals for our work being streamed in 2023 and blow it all on one big lunch at Five Guys.
If we don't order the extra-large fries, the math may work out perfectly. This is a lot of what recent strikes in the entertainment industry have been about.
You've reminded me of one time I had lunch with the late (and loved by me) actor Howard Morris. We met at the restaurant and he hauled out a pile of residual checks he'd just received for voice work at Hanna-Barbera. I don't know (nor did he know) what period of time it covered but the stack was about an inch high, which is a lot of checks. I said, "Well, I guess lunch is on you" and he said, "Take a look at the amounts."
At the time — this was mid-nineties, I think — it was said that to process and mail each residual check cost the studios about eight bucks. There wasn't one check in that stack that was for over about three bucks. Most were well under fifty cents. After we ate, as we waited for the bill, Howie began endorsing the checks so he could deposit them at his bank on the way home. Since I could forge his signature flawlessly, I took half of them to help out.
As we reached the end of the signing process, Howie said, "This is ridiculous. When I go to an autograph show, I get twenty dollars and up for signing my name. Here, I'm signing it for —"
And he flipped over the last check he'd signed to see the amount, which was four cents. The last one I signed was for three and the whole pile added up to a little less than forty dollars. I suggested he use some of that to buy a rubber stamp for future endorsements but he feared he might lose money on the deal if he did. He said, "I'm pissed off at having to do this but if I didn't get anything at all, I'd be even more pissed."
And then the check for our lunch arrived — which he grabbed and which he insisted on paying. With tip, it was for a little less than forty dollars.
Negotiations to end the SAG-AFTRA strike seem to have hit an impasse. I don't know anything about it other than in a situation like this, one should not listen to rumors. The irresistible forces on one side have clashed with the immovable objects on the other with regard to at least one issue — probably one that is actor-specific and wasn't addressed in the new Writers Guild contract. Eventually one side or maybe both will budge. Often, one side walking away from the bargaining table for a little while is a calculated move to intimidate the other side. They'll be back.
Today's Person I'm Glad I'm Not is Senator Robert Menendez.
I am now totally liberated from the company that for many years was giving me cable service and mucho grief. I even yanked some of their wiring out myself. I've been checking out various streaming services and I'll report here when I settle on one. If there wasn't a channel on Pluto — the app, not the planet or Mickey Mouse's dog — that runs Garfield and Friends 24/7, I'd be joking here that I want to find a service that streams Garfield & Friends 24/7. But they all do because they all carry Pluto — the app, not the planet or Mickey Mouse's dog.
Lastly for now: Someone asked me, by the way, if I get paid for all those shows I worked on being rerun endlessly on streaming services. The answer is yes and I'm thinking of taking all the money they'll pay me this year and treating myself to a Five Guys burger and fries. That would, of course, be the little Five Guys burger and the small-size fries but I can help myself to all the free peanuts I like. And right there, you see one of the reasons the WGA and the actors went on strike.
Peter Wong asked me a question which a number of people have sent me. This might be a good time to answer it. Here's Peter…
Way before prime time animation took off, there was just Saturday morning animation. Why was it that unlike live action shows, renewed animation shows in that period never made new episodes beyond the initial 13 or so that were first broadcast?
This is basically not true. In most cases, the initial order for a new animated series was 13 but other numbers were possible. Quite a few shows done for CBS, NBC and ABC during this period started off with 16. At times when the networks' budgets were tight, 13 became more common and that meant a 52 week run with each episode run four times. On a few shows I worked on, the voice actors were paid up front for the initial run and three reruns.
With rare exceptions, a show would debut in September. Around February, they would have enough ratings info from reruns to assess the strength of series and to have some sense as to whether it was worth retaining for the following season. At that point, they would either plan to order thirteen new episodes or, sometimes, six or eight new ones. A number of different deals were possible but the one that I saw used most often in the latter days of those networks programming for Saturday morn would be as follows: Thirteen for the first season, then if they wanted to pick the show up for Season #2, they would order eight additional episodes and they would select five shows from Season #1 to rerun. So the second season would consist of those thirteen episodes each being run four times.
But there were many variations on this. When I did Garfield and Friends, we started as a half-hour show and the commitment from CBS was for two years: Thirteen shows for Season #1 and thirteen more for Season #2. My initial contract to write them all guaranteed me 26 half-hours.
This was an unusual deal but between the circulation of the newspaper strip, the ratings on the prime-time Garfield specials and the flood of very successful Garfield merchandise, Exec Producer Lee Mendelson was able to get a deal that was unprecedented. And it may also have helped that Lee had a history with CBS of producing successful animated projects including the Charlie Brown specials. (I believe that to this day, A Charlie Brown Christmas — which CBS lost some years ago in a bidding war — is the single most profitable half hour of television ever produced.)
We never wrapped production on Season #1 of Garfield and Friends. We just went right on producing episodes for Season #2. When Season #1 went on the air and did well and when its first reruns did well, CBS decided to turn Season #2 into an hour and ordered — I think — twenty-six more half-hours. I'm a little fuzzy on this because we never stopped for a long time. I was never fully aware when I finished the shows for Season #2 and we were doing Season #3…or then when we finished Season #3 and were doing Season #4.
And to make matters more confusing, when we were producing Episodes #27-40, we referred to them as Season #3 and CBS was referring to them as Season #2. It took a while to get all the paperwork in sync.
I think — don't hold me to this — that it was after we finished the shows for Season #4 that we were so far ahead that a deal was made for us to stop making Garfield & Friends for a while. Instead, most of the same crew produced thirteen episodes of Mother Goose & Grimm. That program fell into the grey area where the ratings were too good to give up on it but not good enough for CBS to order thirteen more so the series was renamed Grimmy and its second season consisted of just reruns from the first and only thirteen we made. So that did happen.
I believe though that we did 18 new half-hours of Garfield & Friends for Season #3 and 16 new half-hours for Seasons #4, 5, 6 and 7 with the rest of each season's airings consisting of selected episodes from previous seasons. But there were new episodes made for each season. We ended up making 121 of them which is a helluva lot of lasagna jokes.
Someone who signs his name "Davy Jones" has been sending me this question over and over under a couple of different names. It's about a character named Binky the Clown who turned up now and then on the Garfield and Friends show when I was working on it…
Why did Binky stop appearing after Season 3? I mean…he was a recurring character in Season 1 and in Season 2, he also had his own segments called "Screaming with Binky." But after the episode "Binky Gets Cancelled Again," and a few "Screaming with Binky" quickies, he had very few appearances, mostly cameo appearances, until his appearance in "The Feline Philosopher," even though he appeared for 11 seconds. He claimed that they let him back on the show, but after that episode, he never appeared again. Why did Binky have so few appearances, after season 3? I always wondered that. Were you running out of ideas for his episodes, and all you could do, was make him a cameo appearance? We could have an episode about his origin or his backstory…an episode that would explain why he became a clown. Missed opportunity. He's such an interesting character.
As I recall, we dropped the one-minute "Screaming with Binky" episodes because CBS added another minute of commercials per hour and I decided I'd rather lose that segment — which was basically the same joke over and over — than lose a minute from the episodes. And by then I think we'd all decided that Binky had worn out his welcome on the show.
I vaguely recall a conversation with Jim Davis where one of us said, "Are you getting a little tired of Binky?" and the other one of us said, "Yeah." And you have to figure if we felt that way, the viewers were probably real tired of him. So I decided to cut him back to the occasional cameo and to see if anyone would write to complain.
We made that decision 33 years ago. So far, you're the first.
As I've mentioned, the current strike by the Writers Guild is my fifth since I became a member in 1976. There have also been a number of times when the old contract had expired, a new one was looking impossible and we went through the angst and prep and worries of a strike…but it was averted at the last minute.
In each strike, I have lost something. I did not ask myself "Was what we gained worth what we lost?" because that's impossible to calculate. It's hard to put a dollar figure on work that might have happened if not for the strike and what ancillary benefits you might have derived from it if it did happen. One time, I was up for a very good job on a very good TV series but the job went away because of the strike. I have no idea how much I would have made off that job or what it would have led to.
Another time, I was writing a movie when the strike interrupted things. After the strike, I finished that script and I did get paid but by then, the folks at the studio who'd been enthused enough about the idea to hire me were no longer at that studio. Their replacements, of course, were totally disinterested in advancing a project championed by those who'd been fired so the movie was never made. I have no idea what that might have done, good or bad, for my career.
You also have to factor in what we all might have lost if taking the rotten offers that precipitated those strikes had led, as it almost certainly would have, to much rottener offers in the future. If I had more time, I'd explain how I believe the terrible deal the WGA accepted to quickly end the 1985 strike (two weeks) made inevitable the 1988 strike (twenty-two weeks) over an even worse offer.
In 2015, I had my right knee replaced. People asked me — they still ask me — if it was painful. Yes, at the time it was but I didn't have any other option. Not having it replaced would have been far more painful and would at some point have left me unable to walk at all. That's not a bad analogy to going on strike.
How do you get through a strike? Well, I got through my first four as I'm getting through this one: By not getting all my income from companies that deal in what the Writers Guild covers. The WGA does not represent writers of comic books, animation writing for certain companies, books, articles, etc. I wish it did but it doesn't. And since it doesn't, I have other sources of income.
During the long '88 strike, I was picketing and even working on the strike in various capacities…but I was also writing and voice-directing the Garfield and Friends cartoon show. My agent at the time referred to me as "Our working client" and "The sole support of the agency." Right now, I have a WGA-covered project that is "on hold" but I have other things to write. Some are paying gigs. Others are things I may — emphasis on the word "may" — sell at some time in the future. That's one of the great things about writing: If no one's paying you to do it, you can still do it. You just may not get money for it or may not get it immediately.
I also have a Comic-Con to prep for. It doesn't pay but it keeps me busy.
I do have friends or colleagues in the profession who are hurting…or who may be hurting if the strike lasts long enough. A couple of them are too new to the business to understand what I learned on or around my second WGA strike: That these things are sometimes, like getting your knee replaced, a necessity. Also — and this is important to remember and accept — when you assume the job description of Writer, it's possible to have prolonged periods of no income when there isn't a strike. That's not only possible but probable and it applies to actors too.
We all feel for those who are hurting and I'm optimistic that it will all end with an acceptable deal. I'm just not predicting when that will happen nor am I putting any stock in any of the hundred different predictions that are circulating. A couple of them must be right but we don't know which ones so we just have to tough it out.
This includes putting up with the most maddening part of it: Hearing some guy who gets paid a zillion dollars a week tell us that the business is hurting and there's simply no money to give to us. When I hear this — and we always hear this — I always think, "Your only responsibility is to make as much money as possible for your company. If it's doing that badly, shouldn't you be fired?"
While we're toughing it out, it would help to think about preparing for the next one. If we take a terrible deal this time, the next one will come sooner and be a whole lot worse.
Not only will there be a next one but there may also be non-strike periods for most of us when our incomes flow to a trickle for a time, perhaps for no visible, foreseeable reason. When you're a writer or an actor, that happens too. And by the way: My orthopedist tells me I'm going to need to have my other knee replaced in the next few years.
Livio Sellone wrote me (several times) with this question…
In Garfield and Friends, why do some animals actually talk? I always thought that Garfield and other animals could never talk in the comic strips, but in Garfield and Friends, for some reason, Mark Evanier added actual talking animals. I'm talking about those awful Buddy Bears. They are shown to speak and able to communicate with both animals and humans. Can they talk, or it depends on the episode?
For example, in some episodes, Garfield can talk to humans, such as "The Legend of The Lake," but he usually can't speak to humans. Another animal character, such as Ichabod Cricket is shown to be understood by humans (in "Half Baked Alaska"), in fact, when he yells in Jon's ear, Jon can hear him. I've always wondered why they decided to add "talking animals" in the show, since Garfield's animals were never able to communicate with humans, and they rarely were understood by humans (In both comic strips and the show, sometimes Jon can hear Garfield, but it's usually, just a gag).
The answer, Livio, is that when you have to do 121 half-hour episodes, you find yourself breaking your own rules. The original working premise of the Scooby Doo cartoons was that all ghosts and unearthly creatures were hoaxes…and also, dogs could only mutter occasional words as long as Don Messick added an "R" sound at the beginning of each word. Then later, after umpteen episodes, they were looking for ways to "freshen" the show and not do the same unmasking-the-fake-ghost story line for the eighty zillionth time. So they added some relatives of Scooby, including Scrappy Doo, and allowed them to talk and they added in real ghosts and werewolves and such.
If the show had been canceled after Season Three or Season Four, they would have adhered to the original premises. Since the show goes on and on and on, the premises need to widen. It even works that way sometimes in live-action shows. My favorite TV sitcom is The Dick Van Dyke Show. When it started, the plan was that the audience would never see the star of the show Dick's character worked on. We'd never see Alan Brady.
Then the storyline in one episode seemed to need us to hear his voice so we heard his voice (provided by producer-creator Carl Reiner) but we didn't see him. Then there were stories that seemed to demand his presence in scenes so Alan Brady (Mr. Reiner, again) was seen but you only saw the back of his head. Then they came up with ideas for good episodes that needed us to see him for real so Reiner was seen on-camera in the role. What some people feel was the best episode ever of that series — "Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth" — wouldn't have worked if we'd only heard his voice or seen the back of his head.
In the case of Garfield, the original convention was that the cat didn't speak aloud. What we, as readers of the newspaper strip, read were his thoughts. His words were in thought balloons. And Odie the dog was so dumb that he didn't "think" at all so we never knew his thoughts. Furthermore, Garfield and his owner Jon were so close, Jon could sometimes intuit what Garfield was thinking.
That was fine for newspaper strip gags that were short enough to be done in three panels. When Garfield turned into a TV star in animated specials, they had to decide what to do about this "thoughts." For Peanuts, Charles Schulz and the producer decided that Snoopy would make sounds but would not have a voice. In some episodes, we heard Charlie Brown telling us what Snoopy was thinking, which worked pretty well. But Snoopy was not carrying the plots of those stories and, of course, they were much longer than your average daily (or even Sunday) newspaper strip.
For Garfield, Jim Davis and the producer (the same producer as the Peanuts specials, Lee Mendelson) decided that viewers needed to hear what Garfield was thinking. Garfield carried the storylines and the commentaries in his thoughts were a major feature of the strip. That was why Garfield's mouth didn't move. We were hearing his thoughts because he didn't talk but, again, Jon sometimes kind of guessed what Garfield was thinking.
Also, animals could hear each others' thoughts. Garfield could hear Arlene's thoughts and vice-versa. Garfield could even hear Odie's thoughts even though they weren't articulate enough to be translated into words we could understand. As more and more of the prime-time Garfield specials were done, more and more animals turned up and each could "hear" the others' thoughts.
In 1987 when I was hired to write a weekly Garfield show for CBS Saturday mornings, we discussed all this. Jim Davis came out to Hollywood. I flew back to his studio in Muncie, Indiana. CBS asked that Jim consider having Garfield talk on this show. They didn't demand it; just ask that he consider it.
We talked a lot and finally decided to continue the policy that Garfield would not talk, per se, but we'd hear his thoughts. His lips would not move…which gave me the idea of having him say something different at the end of the opening titles of each episode. No lip movements meant it was very easy to change what he said there.
We also agreed I'd be adding a lot more animal characters here and there because, well, we had a lot more storylines to invent. The new animal characters could exchange thoughts like dialogue.
But there was another thing: The year before, Jim had started a second newspaper strip — U.S. Acres, which was also called Orson's Farm in some other countries. It was about a bunch of barnyard animals who definitely talked to one another with moving mouths. It was going to share the half-hour with Garfield…which is why the new series was Garfield and Friends. When it went on, it was such a hit that the next season, they were sharing an hour.
From the start, everyone wanted Garfield to occasionally pop up in a U.S. Acres cartoon to unite the two properties…so Garfield (who didn't talk) was intersecting with animals who did. It seemed to work fine. If anyone noticed, they didn't write in.
When I decided to add in the Buddy Bears, I decided to have their mouths move. There were three of them and if their mouths didn't move, you wouldn't have known which one was speaking. Also, the idea was that they were singing their song on TV shows and…well, I just decided it made them more effective as characters to talk. Yeah, it was kind of breaking our own rule but that's the great thing about making your own rules: If you make them, you can decide when to break them. We broke the rules a few other times as you note.
I do not recall anyone ever asking about this before or giving any indication that they noticed. And those shows have been running pretty continuously on television for thirty-five years now. We have literally gotten more mail from viewers who felt that Garfield was eating too much lasagna or who wanted to know what the deal was with The Klopman Diamond.
So I hope this answers your question, Livio. We made a rule and we decided to break it now and then for the good of the show. I hope you won't hold it against us.
I said that the next few video embeds here would feature a few of the amazing people I've met in my life. When I wrote that, I didn't realize I'd be posting an obit and video for Bill Saluga, a great comic talent who I just learned passed away last March 28 at the age of 85. But he qualifies. It was wonderful that his "Raymond Jay Johnson" character caught on and brought him fame and fortune…but it would be a shame if anyone thought that was all he did.
Bill was a brilliant improv performer with a lightning-fast mind and a knack for finding the funny in any situation. I first saw him, as many of you probably did, working with George Memmoli, Michael Mislove, Fred Willard and (sometimes) Patti Deutsch in a troupe called the Ace Trucking Company. They appeared at a lot of clubs in the Los Angeles area and the audience could throw any suggestion or thought their way and something wonderful would magically appear. Sometimes, it was the infamous R.J. Johnson but Bill could be a lot of different people.
At one point, a lot of his employment was as a shill in "hidden camera" shows…setting up the unsuspecting victim in some situation. I never cared much for those shows but they sure tapped into what Bill was good at — thinking fast and being funny. Every time I ran into him anywhere, he was thinking fast and being funny. The time he guested on Garfield and Friends, he was thinking fast and being funny.
Here's a video of a record he made as his signature character. Please forgive the disco…
What needs to be finished still needs to be finished but less of it needs to be finished than needed to be finished at this time yesterday. Rather than leave this blog looking sad and neglected, I'm posting another of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV program. It's The Dick Van Dyke Show for October 31, 1962. I remember laughing my fool head off at this when it was first broadcast and it startles me to realize I was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time.
It's a reminder of the awesome physical (along with verbal) comedy skills of the star of that series. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who has since starred in a situation comedy who could have pulled this off…maybe John Ritter? Watch it and see if you can come up with a name. I'll be back after the video embed to tell you an interesting (to me) thing about this episode…
The actor who played the hypnotist is Charles Aidman, who also played Rob Petrie's insurance man a year later in another episode. Mr. Aidman was one of those actors — as you may know, I love performers in this category — who worked constantly without ever becoming easily identifiable from one role on one series. Jamie Farr had that anonymous status before he became Max Klinger on M*A*S*H. If he hadn't landed that part, he probably would still have worked all the time but there'd be no way I could describe him in one sentence so most of you would know who I was talking about.
Aidman's career ran from about 1952 until his death in 1993 and his IMBD listing is very, very long and — I'm sure — very, very incomplete.
It presently lists his last job as a 1992 episode of Garfield and Friends but I know that's not right because when I booked him for it, we had to work around the shooting schedule of some movie he was working on. But I wanted him to be my narrator because he would give it a kind of Twilight Zone ambience. Aidman was so good at that kind of thing that he'd served as the narrator of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival on CBS. Pro that he was, he arrived at our studio right on time but with an attitude of "Are you sure it's me you wanted?" He did a lot of voiceover work but almost never for cartoons and certainly not for allegedly-funny ones.
I get asked, "How do you direct cartoon voices?" Here's a perfect example: You hire the right actor, show them which microphone to use and then get the hell out of their way. I don't think I gave him any more direction at the top than "Just forget it's a cartoon. Read the copy like it's a serious suspense film." And then the next bit of direction I gave him was, "That was great, Charles. Come out of the booth and sign some paperwork so we can pay you."
And yes, we did talk a little bit about some of the other things he'd done, including The Dick Van Dyke Show. Very nice man. Very good at what he did. If you'd like to see a little of the cartoon he narrated, it's online here. The other voices are by Lorenzo Music (of course), Gregg Berger, Thom Huge and June Foray. That's right: June Foray. Directing her or any of those folks was no more labor-intensive than directing Charles Aidman. All you need to do is hire the right people.
WonderCon 2023 starts tomorrow. I'm not sure when I'm getting there or when I'm leaving but I'll certainly be around for the panels below and at other times. Where I'll be when I'm there and not paneling is a good question. Several folks have written to ask that because they have comics they want signed.
I continue to stand on my unalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, not watching Tucker Carlson and not having a table at a convention where I'm expected to sit all day. So I'll be roaming the hall, visiting with friends and perhaps sitting at their tables now and then…and avoiding cosplayers brandishing weaponry. Just think of it as a big, live Where's Waldo? game except that I won't be wearing a striped shirt.
This will be my umpteenth WonderCon because I always have a good time at them and, from what I can see, so do all the other attendees. I believe badges are still available. It's kinda like Comic-Con except that you can get in. If you're there, check out some or all of these events…
Friday, March 24 — 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM in Room 213AB
HOW TO WRITE FOR ANIMATION
Did you ever dream of writing cartoon shows? Well, here's your chance to find out how to do it from three guys who have written hundreds and hundreds of them. The secrets of animation writing will be divulged by WonderCon special guests Tom Ruegger (Pinky and the Brain, Disney's The 7D), Paul Rugg (Animaniacs, Freakazoid!), and moderator Mark Evanier (The Garfield Show, Dungeons & Dragons).
Saturday, March 25 — Noon to 1:00 PM in Room 207
THE ANNUAL JACK KIRBY TRIBUTE PANEL
Like we do at almost every convention, we remember the man some called The King of the Comics — the man who created or co-created many of the most popular characters ever in the medium. Discussing Jack Kirby are Marv Wolfman (writer/editor), John Morrow (publisher of The Jack Kirby Collector), Paul S. Levine (lawyers for the Kirby Trust), and moderator Mark Evanier (former assistant to Jack Kirby).
Saturday, March 25 — 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM in Room 207
CARTOON VOICES
It's another one of Evanier's popular panels where he gathers a bunch of top animation voice actors to demonstrate their craft, tell how they got into the business, and destroy the script for a beloved fairy tale. Appearing this time are Joe Ochman (current voice of Jiminy Cricket), Kaitlyn Robrock (current voice of Minnie Mouse), Neil Ross (Transformers, G.I. Joe), Cynthia McWilliams (What If?), and Brian Hull (Hotel Transylvania). Mark Evanier (of course) is your host.
As always, times, rooms, panelists and just about everything is subject to change so check your Program Guide and this site to make sure. And as always, I refuse to sit behind a table at a convention for very long so I'll be wandering the hall. If you see me, say howdy. The entire programming schedule can be found online here and remember to consult the COVID policy here.
