Friends Dvdrip
Hollie Kipps
Song lyrics: I hope the day will be a lighter highway / For friends are found on every road. / Can you ever think of any better way, / For the lost and weary travelers to go? / Makin' friends for the world to see, / Let the people know you got a-what 'cha need. / With a friend at hand, you will see the light. / If your friends are there, then everythin's alright.
Yes, it's true....DVD sets for Garfield andFriends have been released. Not cheapie DVDs of randomepisodes...total chronological box sets. Some kind of miraclemust have happened...or some really bad movie happened that needsa tie-in. This was one of my favorite shows as a kid, and I wascertain almost no show I grew up with would be released in a goodformat until my generation was in middle-age and the bigcorporations were finally interested in cashing in on ournostalgia. At least I know I won't be seeing Darkwing Duck orTalespin in collectible format until that point. And when I do,half the DVDs will be full of "games" no one plays anda music video by a 9-year-old who calls himself "Baby CoolF." But for Garfield, they were good to us.
Unfortunately, the DVD sets contain nobonus features whatsoever. That's right, no interviews,commentaries, animatics or making-of scenes. If you want to knowmore about the creative process or interesting trivia, sucks tobe you. BUT....I just happen to have a treasure trove of suchinfo! Once again, it's up to me and my site. On this page, we'regoing to bring you all the great features that should'vebeen on the DVDs!
1. The Klopman Diamond mystery
2. The real story about that farm
3. The correct episode list
4. Why were the Buddy Bears there?
5. The lost seasons
6. Screaming with Binky
7. Those bumpers with that weird squiggly guy
8. International Garfield
9. Comparisons between the broadcast versions and the DVDs
10. Ads you wish you'd forgotten
11. "Friends Are There" song lyrics
Consultants were brought in and we, the folks whowere writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain"pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time,the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: Thegroup is always right...the complainer is always wrong.
This was the message of way too many eighties'cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza andyou want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority andgo get pizza with them. There was even a show for oneseason on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which wasdedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week,whichever member of the gang didn't get along with the ganglearned the error of his or her ways.
It's funny that I've lived for 22 years andnever connected the Buddy Bears to the Get-Along Gang. I reallyshould have. Evanier actually received a complaint letter from a network standards board in regards to the Buddy Bears making fun of them. (It wasn't CBS, though.)
If you checked out Mark's list, you might havenoticed many, many later cartoons that you might not remember.The reason for that is, they were never shown again. After season5, a syndication package was put together and every Garfieldrun-through on any other station since has used this package. Thepackage contains only the first 73 episodes; there were 121. TheCawley Drops that I mentioned up there were seen on a laterepisode.
Now that the DVDs are coming, those later cartoons will be seenfor the first time in a decade, so it might make it moot thatI've had them on tape for all this time. I have seasons 4-7 ofGarfield on tape, commercials and all. The truth is, in Season 7the show started running out of ideas, reusing old plots andmaking 2-parters out of cartoons that could have had theirstories told in 1. They would have done a Season 8, ideas or not,but CBS wanted to pay less money. You know how important money isto Jim Davis....
Anyway, here's some of what you missed in seasons 6 and 7:
Most of the cartoons involving Garfield'sshow-only girlfriend Penelope
A pushy pig named Aloysius took charge of several Orson cartoonsin season 7 and bean-counted every scene, to the annoyance ofeveryone. His catchphrase: "THAT'S NOT RIGHT!!"
Garfield gained a bird friend who was apparently named"Ludloaf" if my ears are correct. He felt too sorry forthis little bird to eat it and always had to dig him out oftrouble.
The singing ants who ruined Jon's picnic in season 5 returned inseason 7. Oddly, the question Mr. Evanier is most asked on hiswebsite is, "Who did the ant song?"
The "Kitty Council" busts Nermal for being toocute to tolerate.
Season 7 kicked out the "Party" theme for some hip-hoppiece of garbage. Maybe a season 8 wouldn't have been agood idea if this had been used another year....
Click HERE to see "Diamond Cutter" and "Laryngitis," two Screaming with Binky episodes!
CBS viewers of Garfield will probably also remember the guy seen to the left. This guy was on all of CBS's Saturday Morning bumpers from 1990 to 1994. He also showed up in a Sprite ad, so he must have come from somewhere, but wherever that would be, I have no clue. According to the ad's copyright information, his name was "Fido Dido."
Click HERE to see all the Fido Dido bumpers! If you saw Garfield on some other channel, do it anyway...they're an interesting curiosity. INTERNATIONAL GARFIELD
If you lived in Latin America and turned on Garfield, you wouldget a Spanish-dubbed version of the show....which differedslightly. Some of Garfield's logo box quips were not used in theSpanish dub because they referenced CBS, Heathcliff, or somethingelse that viewers in the region wouldn't be familiar with. JonArbuckle was translated as Jon Bonachn in the dub, Liz as Lisa,Alouisus as Alagichus and Nermal as Telma. (Telma?)
Madman Murray was Loco Murray,the Weasel was La Comadreja, the Buddy Bears were Los OsosAmigosos (this is gramatically incorrect for Spanish; it's apun), and Orson was....Orson. The farm animals kept their names,but when they referred to their species ("And the winner ofthe Orson Award is....Bo Sheep!") they would say the Spanishname of that animal. The weird exception to this was Roy...he wascalled "Roy Rooster" in English for no known reason.
Most translated programs inthat time period couldn't afford translating signs and writtenwords into Spanish via computer pasting tricks...so whenever atitle card appeared or a written message showed, a Spanish voicewould be dubbed in that would tell what the words said.
For the first three seasons, U.S. Acres was called (in voiceover) "En la Granja," which meant "At thefarm." In later seasons, the voice calls it "La Granjade Orson", the direct Spanish translation of "Orson'sFarm."
The countries with Spanish astheir official language got this version of the show, and they gotit uncut. None of the cuts made to the syndicated version inAmerica happened elsewhere....viewers in Mexico can still seeScreaming with Binky on TV to this day.
Fact of amusement:In the dub, Nermal referred to himself as "La gatita msbonita del mundo" (world's cutest she-kitten). This wasn'tfixed until the final two seasons. Even the translators for othercountries couldn't tell Nermal was a guy!
Fact of amusement#2: In the Orson's Farm quickie following"Attack of the Mutant Guppies," the guppies leave withthe remark "Let's see if we can get a guest spot on theMuppet Babies, whaddya say."
In the Spanish dub they say they want to get on Sabado Gigante.Which, if you don't know by now, is a very popular varietyprogram among the Hispanic Ones that bares no relation to MuppetBabies whatsoever.
DVD COMPARISONS
The DVD versions of Garfield look somewhat different from what'sbeen shown on TV, at least in America. By that I mean, forwhatever reason they had, they used the international prints.
Was it a mistake? No.....you don't make thesame mistake five times in a row. This was intentional, and asfor a possible clear reason, I'm stumped. It might have been sothey didn't have to make completely different versions for arelease outside of the United States....but they haven't releasedthese sets outside of the US at all!
There's another major difference, but it onlyhas to do with the final season, collected in Volume 5. As I saidpreviously, in season 7 Garfield and Friends was given anew "hipper" theme song that sounded terrible. When Iplayed Volume 5, I found the bad theme was not there, replacedwith the "party" theme everyone knows. This theme wasn't used outside of America, and again, these are international copies. Or maybe the creatorshated that final theme song just as much as I did.
That's one change I can live with, really. If you're from elsewhere, or you grew up with the syndicated Garfield, you don't wantto hear what CBS used in 1994.
"Hey, how come Garfield didn't say anything at the end of that intro? Was every Season 7 episode shown like that?" No...because searching through hours of videotape is a pain, I brought everyone the first recording of this theme I could find, which was also the first time it was ever aired. That day, CBS made a mistake and left out Garfield's variable tagline. It was fixed later.
ADVERTISING
When I deliver a total nostalgia trip, IDELIVER, folks. In addition to Mr. Dido, we're also about torevisit the typical advertising that ran during a Garfield hour.The most prominent thing about this era was the sheerunbelievable volume of ads for ROBOT BABIES.
I could review ads all day, but this pagereally has to end. So to cap it all off, it's time for thecomplete LYRICS TO THE ORIGINAL THEME SONG! Too many haveforgotten it, but my and my cousin had it memorized. Withoutfurther ado, here it comes:
"He loves her. She loves him not.".While visiting his hometown during Christmas, a man comes face-to-face with his old high school crush whom he was best friends with -- a woman whose rejection of him turned him into a ferocious womanizer.
We at the 'Smoke have always been fascinated by screenplay adaptation: what a script writer takes from the source material, what gets discarded, how the two works differ from each other and what the existence of the movie itself says about the book (and vice versa.) It's "book versus movie" time, compadres.
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