Screaming With Binky: Baseball

HEEEEEEEY BLOG READER! I've just obtained CBS premieres for episodes 26 and 27, so feast your eyes upon this clip as Binky the Clown screams at a baseball player for the first time since 1989!

Check it out at the official Garfield Restored page on Facebook, or take a look at the screenshots below!

My Collection

Here's the list of everything I have. Will update it as my collection expands.


CBS Airings (55/121)
Show 1
Show 3 (U.S. Acres quickie & title card only)
Show 6 (U.S. Acres quickie & title card only)
Show 12
Show 22-27
Show 34-35
Show 38 (incomplete, ends during U.S. Acres title card)
Show 40-45
Show 64
Show 68-69
Show 74-75
Show 78-79
Show 82-88
Show 90
Show 92-93
Show 95-104 (Show 98 and 103 are incomplete)
Show 106-117

Syndication Airings (50/73)

Cartoon Network (3/73)
Show 59-61 (missing quickies and credits)

Local TV (30/73)
Show 15-17
Show 19-20
Show 23
Show 27-37
Show 40-53

Nickelodeon (1/73) -- [Show 81 is listed in some papers]
Show 60

Toon Disney (31/73)
Show 1-5 (Show 1 is missing U.S. Acres title card)
Show 10
Show 15-16
Show 19-27
Show 29-36 (36 is incomplete, ends after U.S. Acres title card)
Show 75-78
Show 80
Show 82-83

The REAL Correct Episode Guide: A Work in Progress

For a while, it seemed like this was the correct episode guide. Having come from show writer Mark Evanier itself, it seems like it'd be darn near perfect right?

Unfortunately, as it turns out, recent research shows that even this episode guide has some inaccuracies. At least 3 quickies are missing from the episode guide. Because I want this project to be as complete as it possibly can, I'll need to obtain CBS airings (preferably premieres) for every episode. And thus, the project is just a smidgen more ambitious than I had planned.

Nevertheless, I'm going to finish what I started and seek the aid of collectors and traders to help me track down what I need and add corrections to Mark's episode guide as I go through the series. As for what I need, I'm working on a list of my current collection holdings and what I'm missing which should be posted shortly.

U.S. Acres Quickie Screens (Season 1)

To make up for the lack of posts in the past few weeks, here are all the original U.S. Acres Quickie screens from Season 1, courtesy of the German dub.

And as an added bonus, you check out three of them in action!

The Saga of Season 7

Alright it's not so much of a saga as it is a catchy title, but it drew you into this post, right?

Anyway, today we'll go over the history of the final season in Garfield and Friends which, as it turns out, is just as altered as the previous seasons. Let's start off with the most obvious thing, the one any longtime fan will remember...



As I mentioned earlier in the blog, Season 7 originally featured this rap-styled theme song as a replacement for the more familiar "Ready to Party" song. However, as you can see in this video, two notable things that remained the same throughout the many theme song changes are curiously absent here. The first change is pretty obvious. CBS goofed on the original broadcast of Show 110--the first episode to use the rap theme--and thus Garfield is missing his witty tag at the end. According to Peter Paltridge, this was corrected later on for Show 110, and as we can see below, the premieres that followed had Garfield's end tags properly reinstated.



The second change, as you may have observed, is a significant decrease in U.S. Acres clips with a total of only 6 clips from those segments being used. The reason for this isn't certain, although my best guess is that with the Garfield-centric theme song, they figured including too many non-Garfield clips would be awkward.

Now, let's move on to the credits. If you watched the video start to finish, you saw the Season 7 credits at the end, albeit with an annoying advertising voiceover over nearly half of it. Unfortunately, this is the only full copy of the Season 7 credits that I have been able to track down. If anybody has a "clean" copy of the Season 7 credits audio, please share!

Now let's go over the episodes themselves. By Season 7, the quickies were almost entirely phased out of the show to the point where only 4 episodes in the entire season used quickies. As a matter of fact, Show 113 was the final episode to use quickies. However, such is not the case on the DVDs! As it turns out, even though the final episodes of the show had no quickies, the DVDs lift quickies from previous episodes and repeat them in the show's final episodes anyway! So, how do the quickies on the DVDs compare to how they originally were presented? That is an answer for a later post...

The quickies weren't the only victims. The original premieres for Shows 120 and 121 were originally switched around for reasons unknown, and the ordering on the DVD set reflects that. Here's how they're listed on Mark Evanier's episode guide.

Show 120 - The Ocean Blue / The Monster Who Couldn't Scare Anybody / Arbuckle the Invincible
Show 121 - The Horror Hostess Pt. 1 / Newsworthy Wade / The Horror Hostess Pt. 2

The former's segment order raises a mystery. Although Mark's episode guide lists "The Ocean Blue" as the first segment in the episode, a snippet at the end of this recording of the Season 7 theme song suggests otherwise.



As we can see here, "Arbuckle the Invincible" is the first segment, revealing that the DVD set's ordering of the episodes was also used by CBS. This could mean one of three things--the first, this ordering may be a mere error on Mark Evanier's part. The second, the episode may have been originally produced in this order, but had its segments switched around by CBS before the premiere. The third, the episode may have originally premiered with Mark's order, with reruns using the switch. Of course, without a copy of the premiere, there's no way of knowing for sure.

That's about all there is to say about Season 7 for now. But, because you're probably craving more original title cards, here's the original for "Thing in the Box."



Image Credit: Mimitchi33

U.S. Acres - Season 1 (Original Title Cards!)

Today's post is a special one -- for the first time since Boomerang briefly aired Garfield and Friends in 2006, here are all of the original title cards from Season 1--almost. Unfortunately I don't have actual English copies of four of these originals, but thanks to the German dub (which mysteriously uses the U.S. Acres logo for the first 12 episodes), I've been able to make recreations that accurately show how the original title card looked.

Ladies and gentlemen... the originals!



Image Credit:
MySpleen: Wade, You're Afraid
Me: Banana Nose, Shell Shocked Sheldon, Wanted: Wade, Unidentified Flying Orson
YouTube: The Bad Sport
Big Cartoon Database: The Worm Turns, National Tapioca Pudding Day, Shy Fly Guy
German/English Mixes: Return of Power Pig, Keeping Cool, Short Story, I Like Having You Around!

Title Card Oddities

Here is a typical U.S. Acres title card. The design seen here and in many other establishing episodes of the first season set the groundwork for future title cards. Aside from the obvious differences in artwork, everything remained the same for each episode... or did it?



Here for the first time in over 20 years, we can see that in Season 6 (starting with this episode), the logo used in the title cards was modified to remove the characters, leaving just the U.S. Acres name. Notably, the stripes on the letter S are switched around. As this image comes from the original premiere, I can't say whether or not this was corrected during any reruns until I get a copy of one.

Of course, with the syndicated episodes all using the better known logo variant, it makes sense that fans who hadn't seen the unsyndicated ones would have made mistakes.



And now, here's the actual original title card, taken again from the premiere.



The title cards continued to use this characterless logo throughout the rest of Season 6. But when Season 7 rolled around, the characters were added back in.



Strangely though, towards the end of the series, at least one episode returned to the Season 6 variant. Unfortunately, I do not have any premieres beyond this episode, so I can't say whether this was just an exception or if the last 4 episodes also used the character-less logo.



Perhaps the most interesting title card oddity comes from Season 5's "Who Done It" in which the original U.S. Acres logo is overlaid on top of the international Orson's Farm logo! Anybody have any theories on how this might have occurred? Once again, I have no way of knowing whether it was corrected or not until a rerun copy shows up.



Image Credits:
Me: Banana Nose title card
Mimitchi33: A Little Time Off recreation
Peter Paltridge/Platypus Comix: All other images

My Mission

Here's the episode guide I'm using for this project, courtesy of Mark Evanier (one of the show's key writers).

Although Garfield and Friends originally premiered in an hour long format for the majority of its run, my goal is to maintain the half hour length as that is how they were produced and thus how they would appear on a proper DVD set.

So what is proper?

The DVDs, while excellent sets, utilize the international masters. As a result, the U.S. Acres segments and quickies go by their international rename, "Orson's Farm," and two Screaming With Binky segments are missing. Additionally, instead of using the less popular rap-styled theme song, Season 7 uses the more universally liked "Ready to Party" theme song which was originally used from Season 3-6.

While some fans may be satisfied with what we got, I believe that these episodes were made exactly how we were meant to see them, and thus I started this project in September 2013 to recreate the episodes as they were originally produced. Over the past year, I have obtained over 90 original U.S. Acres title cards and more than 15 U.S. Acres quickies thanks to my own personal recordings, eBay hauls, and the generous donations of traders. It is my hope that through this project, Garfield and Friends will once again see the light of day in its originally intended format.



Until then, I'll continue my efforts and keep track of them here.

(Images in this post are courtesy of Peter Paltridge, aka Platypus Comix)