Garfield and Friends

Garfield and Friends - September 1988 to December 1994

Based on the highly popular comic strip by Jim Davis, Garfield and Friends was considered the best long-running cartoon on CBS. This Saturday morning series featured the adventures of that lovable, hungry fat cat Garfield, his yellow dog friend Odie, and their cartoonist bachelor master Jon Arbuckle.

Garfield cartoons shared the spot with a new cartoon series created for this series called U.S. Acres (also based on a comic strip by Jim Davis). U.S. Acres was a cartoon about a group of barnyard animals who run a farm. The leader was Orson Pig, the bookish and perceptive pig. His friends had many different qualities: Wade Duck was the scaredy-cat duck who runs away from everything, no kidding; Booker was a crafty little chick whose main goal was to chase a worm, and his brother Sheldon was nothing more than an egg with two legs sticking out; Roy Rooster was the practical joking rooster who puts everyone in trouble with his jokes; and two sheep, Bo and Lanolin, were always bickering with each other about nearly everything. Bo being a nice guy and Lanolin a cruel girl. Each episode, they had to protect the farm from Orson's big bad brothers and a crafty weasel. Before this series, Garfield cartoons were shown as yearly specials on CBS, and the specials were so great that CBS decided to turn Garfield into a cartoon series. In the first season, each 30-minute episode was packed with three 8-minute shorts, two Garfield shorts and one U.S. Acres short.