Every so often the last week or so, I take a break from work, turn on PlutoTV and catch some episode of Garfield and Friends that I haven't seen in more than twenty years. I just watched one that had the above title card in the end credits. As usual — and as negotiated with his agent — Lorenzo Music got special billing and then we listed the other folks who did voices in this half-hour. The additional cast for this one was Thom Huge, Gregg Berger, Howie Morris, Arnold Stang and George Foreman.
Yes, that's the George Foreman who was a two-time world heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist, and current grill entrepreneur. And that's Arnold Stang, the great comic actor who was in dozens of movies and TV shows and who voiced many a cartoon superstar including Herman the Mouse (in the Herman & Katnip cartoons) and Top Cat. The two men were not in the same Garfield cartoon, nor were they in the same recording studio, nor were they recorded on the same day.
How did we get George Foreman to do the voice of a prize fighter who can't stop eating? We had the same attorney. He told me George wanted to do a voice in a cartoon. I told him, "I think we can arrange something" and then we arranged something. George is a very funny, sweet man and it's difficult to believe that his main profession once was beating the crap out of people.
He took direction well and proved to be a pretty good actor. The rest of the cast was delighted to have him there and Lorenzo brought in a pair of professional boxing gloves and got George to sign them.
How did we get Arnold Stang to do what he said was his first cartoon job in many years? I called his agent and booked him but it wasn't that simple. Arnold lived on the East Coast — in Connecticut, I think. One season late in the run of Garfield and Friends, our producer Lee Mendelson was nice enough to indulge me and spend the extra loot it cost to have me record some New York voice actors for the show and one of them was Arnold.
I was in a recording studio in Manhattan with the guest stars who came in one at a time, each to be in a different cartoon. The rest of the cast was in our recording studio in Los Angeles and we were connected so well that you couldn't possibly tell from the finished cartoon that someone was 3,000 miles away. (Nifty Coincidence: The amazing Andy Morris, who ran the studio we used in L.A., picked out the studio he'd connect with in New York. When Arnold arrived, he said, "Hey, this is where I used to record Herman & Katnip!")
Arnold was our first guest voice of the day and being a seasoned pro, he arrived an hour early. I was delighted because that meant we had an hour to sit and talk, mostly about his participation in my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I was further delighted by stories of working on Top Cat and on Milton Berle's legendary TV series, and especially by the fact that Arnold Stang looked and sounded exactly like Arnold Stang.
The lovely and brilliant Howie Morris was in the L.A. cast and he and Arnold had a very nice reunion via the phone patch. Back when Howie lived and worked in New York — and sometimes since — he and Arnold were always seeing each other at auditions. Being two funny, tiny guys, they were constantly up for the same parts. Both were up to voice the title character in the 1963 Beetle Bailey cartoons and Howie got it. Both were up to play Hysterium in the national touring company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Arnold got that one…and so on.
I wrote more about that day here. If you click over there, you can hear the answering machine message that Arnold recorded for me.
I have a lot of writing that needs to get done this week but every so often, I can't resist clicking on PlutoTV and seeing what memories it evokes. George and Arnold were two good ones.
