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popculturebuffet · 9 months ago

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Here Comes Garfield: The Fantastic Funnies (A Comission For Emma Fici)

Hello all you happy people! And welcome one and all to Here Comes Garfield, my look at all things garfield. For the rest of the year this feature will mostly be a look at the 11 garfield specials, minus babes and bullets which I covered previously, as well as his appearence in Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue for last 420.

So for those just joining us: I'm a lifelong comic strip nerd, ever since my dear Aunt Paula gave me her spare copy of the Indespensible Calvin and Hobbes in the 3rd grade. From there I slowly glommed on to other strips over the years: From FoxTrot, to Doonesbury, to Get Fuzzy to Zits to Cul De Sac, to recent faviorites like Pheobe and Her Unicorn, Crabgrass, the Steenz version of Heart and the City, and Breaking Cat News, which i'm wrapping a huge retrospective of soon, and whose place this retrospective is taking on my friend Emma's Patreon slot.

I love talking about this fine art, fitting your best work in just 4 panels, all the wonderful characters many simply don't know exist, all the weird shit that happens.. it's good stuff. So naturally I also gained a love for specials based on them. And while I loved the Peanuts ones and will climb THAT massive mountain someday, as a tween.. my faviorites were Garfield's and it's how I fell in love with the fat cat, the cool cat the nobody's cool cat.

While younger me did like garfield as a strip, especially that one arc where Garfield gets caught in a window blind and it conttinues to suck in an escalating number of people

Truly the "Snoopy's Awkward Nephew" of Garifield comics. Pure art. But while I liked it, it was watching the specials on the DVD garfield as himself that sucked me into the character. The DVD"s were released around the time of the first movie and releases of Garfiled and Friends to cash in and they certainly got my money. 12 specials, all ranging from excellent to watchable, and all wil lbe covered this year.

However before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story: See while Here Comes Garfield was Garfield's first SPECIAL.. it wasn't his first apperance in animation. Two years before that Garfield lept onto screens and into the inky depths of animation with a short but scene stealing apperance in the 1980 special the Fantastic Funnies, an apperance I honestly didn't even know existed till recently, but is such a weird and important piece of garfield history I had to cover it and Emma was on board to comission it.

So what exactly IS the fantastic funnies you may ask. Well i'll tell you.. you may ask. The Fantastic Funnies was a sequel to the earlier special The Fabulous Funnies, a celebration of comic strips interviewing various creators and including a live action on animated bit with Rob Reiner. I haven't seen it but if there's enough intrest I might cover it. The special was a hit for NBC, with CBS regretting having passed over the idea when animation maestro and peantus producer Lee Mendelson suggested it. After they remembered he'd pitched it and they'd been stupid at all of course, as is the executive way. They called dibs on the next time.

The next time was 12 years and an animated series that didn't do so good later, and CBS was front and center for the Fantastic Funnies, taking the concept but spiffing it up: this time the interviews were, with two exceptions, each accompanied by an animated short, there was an animated bit to start it off, and we also got a few musical numbers and live performances from the broadway cast of annie.. well two of the broadway cast of annie bu tthat's still more of the broadway cast of annie than has been on this blog so touche Fabulous Funnies, touche. It's the most 70's thing to come out of 1980 and i'll be covering the whole thing under the cut.

Fantastic Funnies is hosted by Loni Anderson, who at the time was on CBS' hit WKRP in Cincinatti.. and what i've seen of it is excellent. She hasn't really done anything else i've seen, but she seems nice enough.

This makes it awkward as hosting wise she feels shoved into the special. The script she's given feels awkward, with her only genuine enthuasim coming from Barney Google. I honestly wish I could be as jazzed about Barney Google and his go go gooogly eyes as Loni Anderson apparently was in 1980. I AM that jazzed about Snoopy's awkard teenage nephew

But it's not the same alas.

I can't even blame her as anderson was already frustrated with her pay for the series she did do and would demand more from the network leading to a brief exit from WKRP. I can't be too hard on her for not giving a fuck about an extra gig they saddled her with she didn't ask for with a script written by a block of wood on several pounds of qualudes. She did her best under the circumstances.

The circumstances also include getting animated as a cartoon, lucky, and getting to introduce a panel of various comic strip all stars of the time.

Okay so going row by row, with the strips self titled unless otherwise stated.

Front Row: Charlie Brown and Lucy (Peanuts), Nipper (Wee Pals), Dennis the Menace (US Comic), Nancy and Sluggo and Little Orphan Annie. Second Row: Blondie and Dagwood, Dick Tracey, Barney Google (Snuffy Smith), Alley Oop and Prince Valiant

Third Row: Pogo, Tumbleweeds, miss Peach, B.C., Beetle Bailey

Back row: Michael Doonesbury (Doonesbury), Broom Hilda, Drabble, Cathy and Hagar the Horrible

And in their own section because dogs apparently don't get bleacher seats at Walden, where I assume this is taking place as the only college out of these strips, we also get the dogs and one very special cat in their own section.

So Snoopy, Daisy (Blondie), Fred Basset and Garfield who are all about to throw down when Lonnie announces they have to get back to the human world for the show. But before that a song they all prepared, and it was at this point in the special I had to ask myself the tough question:

I still don't know. But yes the song is like living in a living nightmare and I don't care for it. It's thankfully short and Broomhilda takes them all to the real world. But that's a story for another day

Sadly not that day.

For now the special settles int' it's formula: Lonnie introduces a cartoonist, they talk about how their strip came to be, we get an animated segment about it. The only exceptions to the last part are Wee Pals, which instead has it's creator voice over one of his strips directly and Prince Valliant, who gets jack shit.

It was at this point I also realized a bit of an issue. While I mentioned my love of comic strips.. most of the ones I adore come from the late 70's onward, with Doonesbury and Peanuts being the big exceptions. I don't have anything against strips from before that time, I've read what I could of Pogo and want to read more and Krazy Kat is still well loved for a reason. I've also recently gained an appreceation of popeye thanks to Randy Millholand's take on the franchise.

The thing is I started devouring every comic strip I coudl in the 2000's. It was a great time for that as every strip got at least ONE collection, so even if you didn't read the newspapers, you could get a sample of a wide range of strips in book form. Boondocks even got a hilarious title out of it for it's first book.

So I got to sample a wide range of strips, many of which I still read today: Get Fuzzy, Zits Pooch Cafe, For Better or For Worse, Baldo, La Cucaracha, Cul De Sac, Lio, Luann, Rudy Park, Adam@Home. Many strips I first found in collection and binged later. Sadly this went down in the 2010's but thankfully the kids comics boom has meant many newer strips have gotten collections. It's why I have collections for heart of the city and crabgrass on my shelf.

But as you may of noticed... most of those either started in the 2000's or in the 90's. Most of the kings features based strips simply didn't get collections and thus I didnt' notice them.. and by the time I could i'd mostly heard of them by reputation as dinosaurs that would go on till the heat death of the universe via various legacy artists who wouldn't really change a thing.

And I do GET why: a lot of these legacy strips.. are ran by family members who want to honor the legacy and may simply not feel comfortable altering the strip too much. I'm not asking that dagwood suddenly become a t-rex... i'd love that, but I get i'm not everyone's target audience. Not every strip can be Pooch Cafe and go entirley off the rails AND still be every bit the strip it always was AND be good

It's hard. So I do have some sympathy. It's not limitless: while I get not doing so say in the 2000's when handing your strip off to another cartoonist, let alone your DAD'S strip wasn't a thing unless they were going to stay the course, in the 2020's and late 2010's we've had a bunch of great reboots and soft reboots of legacy strips: Randy Millholand of Something Positive fame did such a fantastic job on popeye sundays he got a weekly slot with olive and popeye, giving other creators the chance to do their own olive oyl strip basically alongside his. Mark Tatulli got tired of doing heart of the city (Lio both continues and slaps hard) and rather than phone it in or end it, handed it over to the talented Steenz, whose work on the strip is both something entirley diffrent but something entirely fresh and fun with some tight continuity. Olivia James made people care about Nancy for the first time in decades and has a nice dry wit. And while Henry Barjas keeps the soapy stylings of gil thorpe and hasn't changed as much as his contemporaries he still isn't afraid to shake things up having Gil go through a divorce, get two new assitant coaches, a third assitant coach who was once his arch nemisis and making the teen cast far more diverse including trans and non binary characters, being one of the few creators to do so in comic stripery.

While I don't want you going after these old men, and please for the love of god DO NOT GO AFTER THESE MEN. I do not want that. I may gripe, but these seem like decent guys just ones who won't evolve and have no reason to. I'm just outlining why maybe i'd rather read strips that keep growing with age or have fresh new voices rather than "Dagwood still hasn't left the 1950's and when theyt ry to it's embarassing for everyone involved. "

I.. didn't mean for this to turn into a screed on legacy comics that never really changed but it makes it all the more special tha ta lot of these creation stories for these comics still fascinated me.

The big standout was Wee Pals, a strip I hadn't heard of as it ended in 2002. Wee Pals was created by Morrie Turner, a cartoonist and protege of Charles Schultz who bemoaned the lack of black characters in the newspapers. Charles told him why not make one, and Wee Pals came about, with Turner diversifying the cast to drum up intrest creating one of the more diverse casts in earlier comic strips as a result. Nowadays it's a tad quaint, but I can't fault the man for trying to make comic strips less white and i'm glad I know this pioneer exist. I'm also mildly annoyed his strip wasn't animated, as it was one of the funneist present, with our heroes talking about one's pet chameleon.

There were other intresting stories too: Cathy Guthwise based Cathy on her own life, just changing Cathy's job from cartoonist to "whatervers funnier". Broom Hilda, a strip about a wtich, was something his creator tried pitching as an add character first. IT's small stuff but it always fascinates me how a strip comes about.

The only outright hilarous one is Johnny Hart, who kept trying to sell a caveman character, his friends asked him to put up or shut up so in his words "He drank 4 beers and the caveman slowly came into focus." He just.. outright got hammered to fuck because that was a normal thing in 1980 and created a classic comic strip out of it that later became obessed with jesus. Amazing.

The interviews are neat and while I may not like these strips I respect their creators.. and the creator of Hagar for putting on a viking helmet. Good stuff.

As for the animated segmets.. their eh. Like I said most of these strips are pretty gag a day and it seems like the shorts just flat out animated a strip. Which can work as it does for the raeson we're all here, garfield will come soon I promise, but for the most part it just dosen't land for me

In two cases they just flat out take bits from pre existing specails: For Doonesbury they take a bit of Joanie at the daycare.

For those less drenched in the deep and complex lore of doonesbury as the werido who has a ton of print books and bought digitals of strips he already had and books he already bought years ago just to have a copy on kindle: Joanie Caucuss was once a house wife, who got tired of it and her husband clinton and hitched the first ride she could away from his sexist ass. That ride happened to be with strip lead Mike and his best friend and revolutinary Mark on a motorcycle trip to find america. They took her back with them, she joined them at their commune, and soon got a job in daycare while trying to become a law student, which is the status quo the special used. Soon after she'd become a law student, head to berkley, find the love of her life and a long LONG list of other stuff up to present day where she works as a campaign manager on occasion during her alleged retirement.

It's not a bad bhit, but I get the sense they wanted to pick the least political thing they could.. yet weirdly DIDN'T go with the musical number or the dinner the group have. Or you know just accept doonesbury is political and include frank discussions of the 60's in this special.

For Peanuts, they just include an animated bit of snoopy singing suppertime from your a good man charlie brown. It's new animation far as I can tell, as the bit wasn't in any of the specials and they woudlnt' adapt the musical till the mid 80s. It's fine I just question why they didn't recycle anything from the specials.

Finally Cathy is from it's special, but fits, with her "wanting to have it all". A very cathy joke and frankly had I not found out she has three specails, i would not have been able to tell.

As for the other material either recycled from the fabulous funnies or made for this special, i'm going in no paticular order.

Beetle Bailey: Beetle runs away from sarge to try and get out of doing the obstacle course

Hagar the horrible has a trite bit about his wife telling him to take out the garbage VIKINGS DON'T DO THAT. YOU SO SILLY HAGAR.

Dennis the Menace keeps drawing out bed time because kids do that, even immortal children who aren't all that menacing.

By now your starting to get what a mountain it was to climb this special: short interview, unfunny skit, short interview unfunny skit, rinse repeat, toss away my sanity. I TRY to be positive on this blog, try not to be a dickhead.. but this special is so damn boring half the time. The interviews are kinda neat but the animated bits are just.. so lame.

So as a break let's talk what else the special did to fill time. Loni Anderson sang the radio themes to Popeye and Little Orphan Annie. IN the former's case.. that's all you gets. No adventure, no high seas just her singing the popeye theme. We dont' even get a musical number from the popeye movie because it hadn't happene dyet. I want to hear bluto say i'm mean over and ove rand over again. I"m that desperate.

Annie DOES get the cast of the broadway show, a huge hit then and forever, to do two numbers, both iconic and both well performed: The first is I dont' Need Anything But YOu, the cute duet between Annie and Warbucks, and then of course Tommorow best sung by bill the cat.

But the kid they use here does pretty good herself. They have it sung at the only playground in budget for some reason, but they did their best.

We also get a truly batshit bumber about peopl eneeding their funnies, from reading them as they go down the fire pole to IN A MOVING CAR. Yes even serial murderers need their funnies as they mow down pedestrians. It's nature's way. I do relate to tha tboost you get from reading them every day, I do so and I have to use three diffrent sites: one for andrews mcmeel, one for king features, and one for the webbcomic kevin and kell. So I get it. Three's also a closing number I ran away form.

The final non torture bit is Johnny Fever from WKRP. Due to a news strike he's tasked iwth reading the comics and drmatically reads flash gordon. Howard Hessman is hilarous as always, the bit is fucking great, and it woke me up after several strip adaptions put me to sleep. good stuff.

Back to my cycle of torment, and we have a Blondie cartoon and one of the few animated bits in the specail that was intresting. And unintetionally hilarous as Blondie gets dagwood THIS haircrime done to him.

What makes it funny is that not only is this haircut too much even for the 70's, but Blondie LOVES it, as do the kids.. despite all three of them having never updated their styles. Granted Blondie's hair game is timeless, so I get her point but it's just a .. weird plot to pick for blondie.

Naturallyt his being blondie instead of forcusing on the problem of "his wife wants him to try a hair cut that makes him not feel himself" it's in part him worried tha this friends and co workers will laugh. I mean they will, it's as if Luke Skywalkers hair started to eat into his brain, but that shoudln't be your takeaway and him washing it out while Blondie's alseep solves nothing and isn't funny. "Haha he can't be honest with his wife and she's going to later cite this incident to thier marriage counclier". Granted I would ENTIRELY read Dagwood's hair causing a divorce between them, but i'm not sure that's an arc Blondie readers want. I do wnat reprints of golden age blondie as it apparently involved Dagwood having to get disinherited to marry blondie, getting drunk, and other soap opera stuff more intresting than Dagwood trying to single white female mark hamill. Huh now THAT'S a Disney + series i'd watch. get on it disney

The other really fun one is Marmaduke. This one's just kidna fucked up. Marmaduke want sto go sleep in the same bed with the kids, which can somehow fit all three and is adorable so I don't get why not, but the dad tries to make him go outside because that was the thing with dogs. It hasn't aged terribly with charlie brown because snoopy clearly likes having his own pad and the inside is larger than most mansions, let alone the brown house

And when the whole thing burned down in one of the more sobering strips in the series run

Charlie Brown dutifully helped him plan his new house

Honestly I could talk about Snoopy's house burning down all day but it's not what you came for. You came to hear me tell you how it relates to Marmaduke. My point is Marmaduke just has a regular ass Dog House, and just wants to sleep in bed. I get this was normal at the time, it used to be the norm that dogs woudln't sleep in bed.. but my Dog YOshi curls up on my mom' sbed every night and maddie, my other dog , only dosen't when she's not on her own bed restfully asleep as she is as I type this. what i'm saying is maybe just maybe forcing dogs to live outside at night was cruel jackassery and maybe letting the big old dog curl up at the foot of the bed or, if he prefers tucked in while old man bastard can sleep outside and think about his life choices. Also i'm shocked this wasn't the plot of either marmaduke movie. It's so perfect. One man's journey to be a better dog owner .. or Marmaduke repeadely hitting him in the nuts with a tennis ball machine and other various objects. I"m not picky. Also i'm not touching either of those films unless someone pays me the 15 dollars it'd take to comissoin it. I'll review plenty of garbage on my own time, but I have limits. Pete Davidson is very much a hard and fast one. Owen Wilson is fine though. We love owen in this house.. but even he can' save cgi marmaduke and we all know that.

Pogo also takes a bit from the then upcoming film I go Pogo.. a guy I don't know tries to take two passing critters for a ride using the old shell game.. only to have put something under every one. i'ts a nice joke and it works well, and the gorgeous claymation. Given it's both election based and based on a comic i'd like to know better, me reviewing that .. would still be 15 if anyone wants it but far less of my own personal hell. But i'm more likely to do that one on my own. Fun fact: pogo's election storyline's inspired bloom counties, which I will be covering this year or at the very least the 1984 one.

BC has some bit with a turtle. It sure does exist

Broom Hilda asks who the fairest in the land is and her mirror calls her second. She responds by breaking it. This bit.. was actually funny. I'm not sure Broom Hilda would be for me as it's main gag seems to be "Gee isn't a woman chasing men against their will funny" which

Same other way around or with non binary folks. But I did like this and her horning in on mike's close up

She looks like she's about to hit on him but adorably so and he looks just.. so done with it as he always is. I mean.. I can't have turned out worse than Mike's actual first marriage. his second is pretty ballin though.

Mama has her Son say that life is a song.. onlyf or her to sing about him neglecting him. Get it because guilt tripping is funny! This is apparently most of what Mama is.

Finally before our main event we have tumbleweeds with sexual harassment as some lady refuses to let tumbleweeds go. And that's not me being lazy that's his actual name. Though to it's creator's credit he retired rather than let it become "a zombie strip", so good on him.

Okay now for what you all came to see

Also garfield

Garfield's first aniamted special was MOSTLY worth the pilgramage here. While ti's only a few strips repeated, it's fascinating for just how diffrent it is from Here comes Garfield a few years later.

For starters the Fantastic Funnies used an early design for our faviorite cat, not the iconic entirely weird by this point earliest garfield but one more in between, not quite upright yet, but not nearly as realistic as day 1 garfield.

To the classic peanuts team of Mendelson and Mendez's credit they did a wondreful job, likely why they were chosen to produce the specials till the companies backing peanuts asked them to stop helping out rival specails, and this version of garfield heavily resembles what he was like in the strip this frame is based on

It's also telling how fast Jim Davis was evolving the special that by the time it aired Garfield had already changed his look up a bit, if still not fully to his more classic 80s look.

It's not a HUGE change, just a little thinner, with the bigger change being in how he sit's/stands

It's just a testament to how slowly but surely the character evolved in apperance over his first decade or so and part of what makes this intreresting: while the specials help chart this evolution, and helped cause it as Jim needed to draw Garfield with SKinnier legs for the opening dance number of here comes garfield, it's nice to have this bit of his evolution frozen in amber.

The voices behind the characters are intresting: to my shock Thom Huge ALWASY voiced john and basically only stopped doing it when he retired. Thom did voices for commericals and was an old frat brother of Jim Davis who Davis asked for help with this special. While the producers would recast huge for Here Comes Garfield, he sent them a tape and became THE voice of john in the same way Lorenzo Music became THE voice of garfield.

WHile that's weird enough... what makes this special stand out besides the earlier designs... is Garfield's Voice. It's not Lorenzo Music, who would DEFINE the character in my eyes and is THE garfield, no question, though Frank Welker and Bill Murray are admirable.. but Radio DJ and voice guy Scott Beach.

Beach is take is intresting as both Murray and Welker clearly take from Music, while Beach largely does his own thing. Instead of the dry, sarcastic bored tone Lorenzo perfected, Beach has that but it sounds more like Jean Shepard'ss narration in a christmas story. Shepard isn't bad but his voice for Garfield is less relaxed, mor ebooming and confident. It dosen't COMPLETELY fit and makes the short feel a tad weird.. but it's also hard to judge the voice as, like I said EVERY voice after took cues from Music. he left the perfect blueprint. The fact Chris Pratt isn't that dry, sarcastic , laid back voice the character has been defined by hasn't helped his case voicing the character at the time of this review. Beach does a good job, but he just didn't quite fit and it's hard to compare a 2 minute performance with dozens of hours worth of material from Music. Beach did a decent job, but he just wasn't the right guy for the part, simple as that. his voice just didn't fit Garfield's give no fuck nature that well.

Finally we have the specific strips adapted. nd the garfield wiki was a huge help here. Seriously fan wikis can have a bad rap but many are done by dedicated people who save me a LOT of work and do a lot of through research> Kudos guys, thanks for your help. So the wiki has each strip adapted. Excluding the "I have feet? " one we have

Not bad choices: they get all the garfiled bases: he dosen't like catching mice, likes food and Jon weight shames him a lot. Simple, quick and well done.

Overall the garfield shorts for this special are excellent. It's a short bit but it gets the character down and it's easy to see why, despite being the new kid on the block at only two years old at the time, garfield's the one who go ta specail out of the deal.

Now does he make the specail worth watching?

I mean if you like comic strip history like me, you'll get something out of it. There's a bit on the inductees into the hall of fame, but even then it's a long slog of interviews that are fairly short and shorts that are both short and tedious. The good bit here or there cannot save this.

Other than Garfield .. there really isn't much to write home about for the casual viewer or if your a fan of Peanuts and Doonesbury like I am, as both bits can be found elswhere. It's easier to either fast forward to the bit with a comic you like or find the garfield bits in their own little video, of which there are plenty. I'm glad I reviewed the special.. but it just hasn't aged well and probably wasn't that fun to begin with. Even as much as I ranted about how much I didn't know the strips.. i'ts still presented so dryly even if it had strips I liked more in it, it'd still be a bit of a slog. There's just not enough genuinely good stuff or loveable nonsense to keep this afloat. Skip the special but DO check out the early garfield stuff. It's brilliant.

Next Time: The first proper special as Garfield must save Odie from the pound.. after he grooves to Lou Rawls a bit. As is nature's way. Thanks for reading.