The Disappearing Dog Owner

When the Garfield comic strip started in 1978, it was about a fellow named Jon Arbuckle who owned a cat named Garfield. Jon has a roommate named Lyman who had his own pet, a frisky little pup named Odie. But after a few years, the strip's creator Jim Davis decided Lyman was extra baggage or unnecessary or something. Lyman disappeared and Odie became, by default, Jon's other pet.

Every so often since, Lyman pops up in the background of a Sunday page…or there's one Garfield video game where you prowl through a haunted house and at one point, you may find Lyman chained-up in the basement. Die-hard Garfield followers (there are a lot of 'em) have been known to speculate on the whereabouts of Jon's one-time roomie and they even write their own amateur stories about what became of him.

Well, I like Garfield so I wrote my own amateur story about what happened to Lyman…and since I'm also one of the producers of The Garfield Show, it airs this Friday. It's an extra-long episode that fills two half-hours of the series and they air one after the other on The Cartoon Network. In most time zones, the first half hour airs at 10 AM and the second follows at 10:30.  If you miss it, Cartoon Network will be running these two half-hours again.  And again and again and again and again and again.  But for reasons I won't pretend I can understand, they won't always be running them back-to-back like this.

The voice cast consists of Frank Welker as Garfield, Gregg Berger as Odie, Wally Wingert as Jon, Julie Payne as Liz, Laura Summer as Minerva and Drusilla (or maybe Drusilla and Minerva), Stan Freberg as Dr. Whipple, Fred Tatasciore as Dirk Dinkum, Misty Lee as Angie, all of those people in other supporting roles —

— and in the role of Lyman…well, some of you may recall my frequent plugging of my pal Frank Ferrante, who tours America with an uncanny show in which he plays Julius "Groucho" Marx. I decided Frank might make a good Lyman. So Lyman he is. He was quite good in the role even if you don't take into consideration that it was his first real cartoon voice job.

I don't plug a lot of what I do on this site but I'm plugging this. Hope you catch it and like it — in that order.