Does the fiftieth of something really mark anything special? Reading magazines taught me that it does, but what do they know? Most of them aren’t even being published anymore.
But I guess writing about bad cartoons for four-and-a-half years at this point (six-and-a-half if you count my video game cartoon series) is enough of a noteworthy accomplishment to justify doing something out of the ordinary. So, rather than covering another low quality piece of animation, I’m instead going to cover a perfectly good piece of animation. Not just that, it’s good animation that reflects what I’ve been trying to do with this series all this time. Rather than critiquing the state of TV animation in a specific era, here’s an example of TV animation critiquing itself.
So, let’s talk about Garfield.
Regardless of what you think of Jim Davis, his comic strip, and its five straight decades of ubiquity in the culture, you have to give him one thing—he has always been supportive of people other than himself doing things with his signature character that the comic rarely does. That is especially true of the animated incarnations of Garfield, which from their inception have had their own spin on the tone of the strip that manages to endear even to people who hate the little orange freak on sight. Maybe it’s the atmosphere set by the swinging Lou Rawls music, maybe it’s Lorenzo Music’s voice, or maybe it’s because they tend to go beyond the formula as seen in the comics, but animated Garfield is his own animal and had a pretty high batting average when it came to quality in the eighties into the nineties.
That includes the long running Garfield and Friends Saturday morning series, which for me at least, was probably as major a contact point for Garfield as a thing as the daily comic, possibly even more so. The series began in 1988, and when I say long running, I mean it—it received seven seasons, which for Saturday morning cartoons is an eternity, and a feat accomplished by very very few in an industry that usually preferred constant churn. Even more impressively, every single segment of every episode (121 eps with 363 segments) was written by Mark Evanier, an entertainment industry lifer whose work in animation from the seventies onward (he was the writer of Yogi Bear’s All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper, for example) is just one aspect of a long and storied career, which he has regularly chronicled on his own website, an invaluable source of Hollywood anecdotes. Evanier used the show as a vehicle for old-timey slapstick and Hollywood nostalgia (just look at the list of guest voices over the show’s history) that were certainly not en vogue among kids cartoons of the time, and it became something of a pioneer in the kinds of comedy in mainstream animation that would become far more common in the nineties—irony and fourth wall-breaking gags abound—and it was almost certainly the clout of the Garfield name that allowed it to get away with going over the heads of its young audience. So, in a sense, we should be thanking Garfield for helping our cartoons get a lot smarter and more entertaining and less like…the kinds of cartoons I write about here.
The sheer contrast in the quality of the writing of Garfield and Friends and its contemporaries on North American airwaves did not go unnoticed by the show itself. There were at least two instances over those hundreds of segments where the series went even more meta than usual and provided some light but still pointed commentary on the animated trends of the time. I can imagine that having a cartoon comment on other cartoons was quite unusual! While on their surface, both these segments simply use the incongruity of having Garfield appear in “the wrong cartoon” for wacky hijinks, there’s an edge to both that makes it clear that Evanier is not just writing simple goofs, but actual mockery of what the rest of the industry was pushing on to viewers elsewhere on the dial.
The first segment, “Invasion of the Big Robots”, aired in 1989. As you might expect, this five-to-six minute cartoon has Garfield wake up to find himself in a futuristic setting and realizing he’s somehow been drawn into the wrong cartoon, one full of muscle-bound heroes, space travel, and the titular big robots. Needless to say, this is not Garfield’s preference. In terms of animation, the drawings of the Sci-Fi universe characters—a series of generic toyetic forms who constantly spout a string of Proper Nouns and intentionally ridiculous-sounding jargon—are incredibly accurate to the toy commercial cartoon aesthetic of the eighties while still blending well enough with Garfield himself that are never jarring. I can imagine that the people working at Garfield and Friends‘ studio Film Roman (eventually to become the animators of The Simpsons for multiple decades) and their overseas counterparts had worked on their fair share of animated action junk exactly like this, so their parodies of them come from a place of knowledge. For the most part, the jokes involve Garfield messing with the cliches of a Sci-Fi cartoon, with the most telling little bits of dialogue coming from an alien saying “The toy company isn’t going to like this!”
It’s relatively simple stuff, but how often did a cartoon openly call out the toyetic nature of the industry at that point in time? Meanwhile, the ending of the cartoon may actually be a far meaner critique of one of the other recurring forms of TV animation of the decade: blasting off in a giant robot head, Garfield lands in a verdant forest and finds himself surrounded by cutesy talking animals in a Disney mould, who say they’re going to teach him “to be nice to everyone and to never be mean”, to which Garfield runs off in the other direction saying “I want the giant robots back!” As bad as the cynical action shows are, this thinks that the conflict-anemic, saccharine “educational” cartoons are even more repugnant. Those final jokes are further enhanced if you’ve ever read anything where Evanier reminisces about his time in animation, with his constant battles with network Standard & Practices and parents’ groups and his moral opposition to the “pro-social” values they pushed hard into shows (I’ve also read a from-the-time interview with Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber wherein he railed against the same thing during his time on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, which Evanier helped develop.) In just just a few minutes, Evanier more or less lays out the exact sorts of sub-optimal TV cartoons that Garfield and Friends‘ smart aleck humour was responding to.
One of the things that I certainly never picked up on as a child but that I can appreciate about this cartoon now—alongside many others of the time—is the glee of the writers and animators while they skewer their own industry. Given that, as I said, most of them probably worked on a few of both the type of cartoons they’re joking about here, it feels like a decade of bitterness being unleashed on an unsuspecting audience. Honestly, based on some of the comedy cartoons of the early nineties, you get the sense that there was a lot of bitterness going around among animation professionals that they were more than happy to channel into their work. There’s always a thin line when it comes this kind of inside baseball humour before it becomes pure self-indulgence, but when you as a viewer eventually figure out what they’re doing, you do get this warm fuzzy feeling that you’re covertly taking part in their righteous crusade against mediocrity.
Some five years after “Invasion of the Big Robots”, in the series’ final season, Garfield and Friends went back to the conceit of Garfield finding himself in the wrong cartoon in “Clash of the Titans”—but, smartly, they do not simply do the same thing again. After all, the world of Saturday morning cartoons was very different in 1994 than it was in 1989, and they adapted to those changes by choosing a more contemporary target for japery: X-Men-style superhero cartoons. If you’ve read this column, you know that there were certainly a few of those running around at the time.
Unlike the previous solo Garfield outing, this cartoon features Odie and Jon to round out the cast—I would also say that the jokes here are more gentle ribbing than a display of out-and-out disdain (Evanier has a pretty notable connection to the superhero comics, as he had been Jack Kirby’s assistant.) Still, the humour finds plenty of avenues in the kinds of things that were very much of that moment of pop culture: the superhero team that Garfield and Odie run into, the Power Squad, not only look the part of Jim Lee-style overly-adorned weirdos, but describe themselves as “the new breed of superheroes…tortured, alienated…” and who “bicker a lot.” So, really, this is a lighter version of the stuff In Pictopia was criticizing in the mid-eighties, although this treatment of the material is a little less existential. The cartoon also uses its cross-genre contamination to justify going into “Duck Amuck” territory when Garfield repels an alien invasion by borrowing the artist’s pencil eraser.
Mark Hamill, himself quite familiar with the superhero cartoons of the nineties, voices both the gruff-sounding leader of the team and the much less gruff-sounding Curdman, who has the not-terribly-useful power to control cheese curds (he has a character arc where, by the end of the episode, he is put in the one situation where his powers serve a purpose.) Curdman is much more in line with how superheroes were parodied in the period, and would likely fit in perfectly with the cast of The Tick, which began airing around the same time as this episode. I guess that’s another sign of how things had changed over the course of Garfield and Friends‘ run: when it began, the kind of absurdist and parodic tone it took was not common among mainstream cartoons, but at its end, it definitely was. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the writing doesn’t feel the need to be as mean to this kind of cartoon as it had been to the toyetic and cutesy junk—it’s still mockable, but at least there were finally other alternatives to it. The existence of those alternatives salved the bitterness of the previous decade, and the show knowing that it had helped paved the way for funnier writing on Saturday morning cartoons, it could go for one last poke at the show’s “serious” counterparts, and then bow out. I mean, the show actually ended for entirely economic reasons, but you know, sometimes I prefer the more poetic interpretation of events.
“Invasion of the Big Robots” in particular has stuck with me since childhood (I’m almost certain I saw “Clash of the Titans” as well, but don’t have as strong memories of it), but I’d be lying if I said that I understood the more acidic jokes these cartoons were smuggling in at the time. No, what immediately astonished my young mind was the sheer audacity of the conceit, and the visual execution. I was watching many different cartoons of the time, the goofy comedies and the “serious” action shows, each with their own styles—but here I was seeing Garfield, a goofy comedy cartoon character, interacting with characters who accurately recreated the look and feel of the “serious” action shows. One of the basic rules of art that I had surmised from watching those cartoons, total aesthetic conformity, was suddenly being broken before my eyes—and after that, I always got a charge whenever I saw something partake in this form of rules breaking, a blending of contrasting styles that reminds you that no matter how different these pieces of fiction seem on the surface they are, as Garfield himself says in “Clash of the Titans”, just lines on paper. Knowing that, a new world of possibilities unfurled my imagination.
And if I’m ever asked why I’ve been analyzing and joking about goofy old cartoons for years on end, I can say that Garfield did it first.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 