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