Okay, I'm gonna plug some shows I worked on. The folks at Fox Home Video are in the home stretch of releasing all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends on DVD. Needless to say, you want to own all five volumes but just in case you're going to pick and choose, here are some of the highlights of each, plus Amazon links…
- Volume 1 features guest voice work by Larry Storch, Chuck McCann, Lennie Weinrib, Stan Freberg, Dick Beals, Pat Buttram, Robin Leach and some other fine people. (There's a story about the Robin Leach episode over here and I swear, it's true. I have witnesses.) My three favorite episodes on this set are "Garfield Goes Hawaiian," "The Lasagna Zone" and "Magic Mutt."
- Volume 2 includes voices by Chick Hearn, Frank Buxton, Jesse White, Shep Menken, Carl Ballantine, Stan Freberg, Kenneth Mars and others. This set includes "Invasion of the Big Robots," which is the one where Garfield makes a wrong turn and finds himself in an episode of a show that looks a lot like The Transformers. We hired Transformers artists to do some of the graphics and Neil Ross, the voice of Slag and Springer from that show, to do the extra voices and the whole thing went waaaay over budget. Also on this set is "Video Airlines," which is one of the ones people keep asking me about. It's the one where Jon and Garfield go to see the movie, "Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage II."
- Volume 3 contains episodes with guest voices by Jonathan Winters, Jack Riley, Marvin Kaplan, Paul Winchell, Rod Roddy, Pat Buttram and others I'm forgetting. The "budget buster" in this set was "Mistakes Will Happen," which was the episode where we tried to see how many errors we could make in one cartoon. We actually had to redo some scenes because the animators screwed up and did them right. Also on this set is a U.S. Acres cartoon called "Big Bad Buddy Bird," which is the one where I got the Standards and Practices department of another network (not CBS, which aired the series) mad at me because I criticized the silly "pro-social" values they had been forcing us to put into cartoons.
- Volume 4 includes guest voices by Victoria Jackson, Paul Winchell, John Moschitta, June Foray, Jewel Shepard, Bill Kirchenbauer, Don Knotts, Buddy Hackett, Carl Ballantine and others I'm leaving out. This is the volume that includes "Picnic Panic," which is the episode with the ant song that everyone asks me about. (I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music and did the voices of the ants.) This set also includes "The Garfield Rap," the animation for which was so complicated that the guy in charge of budgets at the studio glared at me every time I went in for a month.
- Volume 5 is scheduled for release on December 6 but you can order now. When you get it, you'll find the rest of the episodes — and by the way, the ones on Volumes 4 and 5 and a few on Volume 3 have never been syndicated since their original network airings. This last volume includes guest performances by, among others, Shelley Berman, Brinke Stevens, Bill Saluga, Mark Hamill, Imogene Coca, Eddie "The Old Philosopher" Lawrence, Arnold Stang, George Foreman, Kevin Meaney, Tracy Scoggins, Rip Taylor, Harvey Korman and John Byner. There's a sequel to the "ant" episode and one where we parodied Barney the Dinosaur (voiced by Stan Freberg) and got an angry letter from that character's proprietors. It also has "The Man Who Hated Cats," which is my all-time favorite episode — a mini-musical with the great George Hearn in the title role.
In addition to the guest voices, all of the sets feature the superb vocal acting of the late, wonderful Lorenzo Music as the title cat, plus Thom Huge as Jon, Gregg Berger as Odie and hundreds of other people and animals, and the talents of Frank Welker, the also late and wonderful Howie Morris, Julie Payne, sometimes Gary Owens and Desiree Goyette, and other folks not mentioned here. There are no special features apart from some ads, including some for the live-action/CGI Garfield feature…and by the way, a sequel to that film is in the works and no, I'm not working on it.
I might also point out that Amazon has these tremendous package deals if you look around a bit. For instance, Volumes 1 and 2 bought separately cost $31.98 each. Purchased in a bundle, they go for $63.96, which saves you…well, let me call up the calculator since I've forgotten how to add and I'll do the math on that for you. Aha! I see that if you order both at once, you save…absolutely nothing. Well, I guess you have to click one less time so that's something. Anyway, if you order any, I hope you like 'em. This show was the most fun I've had in close to 30 years of writing animation.