Inventory “You’re on television for some reason, cow from The Far Side”: 15 comics that inspired forgotten TV adaptations

1. The Far Side
As if in tacit agreement that no one reads newspapers anymore, comic-strip characters rarely leap from the funny pages to television these days—and the ones that once did can no longer find airtime if they aren’t connected to a boy named Charlie Brown. Then again, no single contemporary strip enjoys the complete cultural penetration achieved by strips like Peanuts, Garfield, or even Blondie at their creative and popular peaks. Considering that company, Gary Larson’s single-panel feature The Far Side is by far the strangest comic enterprise to ride a wave of desk calendars and T-shirts to a pair of small-screen adaptations. Helmed by “Bambi Meets Godzilla” director Marv Newland, the two installments of Tales From The Far Side are a perfect meeting of behind-the-scenes talent and source material, with each segment hitting its one joke—or, in the case of Tales From The Far Side II’s extended “Death Takes A Holiday” sequence, hitting its one joke again and again—and moving on. Positioned as part of CBS’ Halloween programming in 1994, the first special leans heavily on horror-movie spoofs and an ethereal score from guitarist Bill Frisell; its more patient, wider-ranging sequel never aired in the United States, premièring instead on the BBC in 1997. It’s little wonder—any audience accustomed to the animated adventures of Snoopy and friends wasn’t likely to warm to a special network presentation that ends with drunken extraterrestrials blasting away at Earth.

2. Garfield
Garfield creator Jim Davis is on record as citing finicky 9 Lives mascot Morris The Cat as a partial inspiration for the widely syndicated cartoon tabby. It’s only fitting that when Garfield came to television, he was accompanied by a pair of voices to match Morris’ phlegmatic purr: television writer/producer Lorenzo Music and soul legend Lou Rawls. With Music providing the fat cat’s thoughts and Rawls supplying the theme song, Here Comes Garfield was the first of 12 primetime specials starring the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating feline to air between 1982 and 1991. Halloween and Christmas installments of the franchise became perennial programming staples, and Davis—never one to give up on a profitable thing—eventually green-lit the Saturday-morning series Garfield And Friends in 1988, the same year the bizarre, Rawls-free Garfield: His 9 Lives debuted on CBS. Other specials, which never achieved the same sort of enduring popularity as the holiday entries, found the character indulging in genre exercises, though not to the extent of His 9 Lives, which features a number of thrilling shifts in animation styles (including a cameo by the characters of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat)—as well as some of the most unsettling Garfield imagery this side of the grotesque storyteller in Garfield’s Halloween Adventure.  

3. Wizard Of Id
In 1968, cartoonist Johnny Hart and puppeteer Jim Henson met to plan out a possible television series based on Hart’s Wizard Of Id. Henson found appeal in the strip’s humor and shot a test pilot in March 1969. The short pilot creates something of a plot by stringing together beats based on single strips, each joke punctuated by the characters’ “Ain’t we stinkers?” mugging—and the strength of the footage is definitely in the jokes. There are some hints of the meta-madness that punctuated Henson’s later work, but the short remains a paint-by-numbers affair. Hart pitched the pilot around, with ABC even expressing interest in a film at one point, but by then, the ever-restless Henson had moved on to other ventures, including Sesame Street.

4. Doonesbury
One school of thought says baby boomers didn’t begin to feel nostalgic for their lost ideals (and simultaneous disenchantment with those ideals) until the release of The Big Chill. Adherents to that view obviously missed A Doonesbury Special, an animated short film from 1977 whose palpable wistfulness can be traced to the broken promises of The Me Decade and the mid-production death of co-director and co-producer John Hubley. (Hubley still shares these credits with wife Faith and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, however.) An autumnal atmosphere hangs over the entire special, which floats freely through vignettes about the shifting concerns of the then-commune-dwelling inhabitants of Trudeau’s strip. Only perpetual space-case Zonker seems to notice that the leaves outside are changing color, as his impassioned plea to disband the commune simply fades away like so many memories of anti-war protests, embarrassing football losses, and Jimmy Thudpucker singles.

5. Blondie
Two elements of 1987’s Blondie & Dagwood, based on Chic Young’s long-running newspaper comic Blondie, seem strikingly off-kilter. One is the strained attempts to render Dagwood’s ultra-stylized hair in something like three dimensions, even though it already looks ridiculous in two. The other is Dagwood’s voice. The strip has always rendered Blondie simply and delicately, and her husband Dagwood as a bulbous caricature; the voice casting follows suit, with Loni Anderson using her own voice for Blondie, while voiceover legend Frank Welker renders Dagwood with a high-pitched, nasal honk. Everything else about the TV special is familiar, thin gruel, though: Dagwood makes big sandwiches, falls down a lot, slams into the mailman while running late for work, and horks off his boss, Mr. Dithers, who fires him—and just as he needed extra money to have his roof fixed, too! So Blondie has to go to work, even though her only experience is as a housewife, yuk yuk. While Blondie & Dagwood does deserve some credit for trying to stick by the strip’s roots while opening up the action to bigger, more ludicrous setpieces (like Dagwood “hang-gliding” off his neighbor’s roof after getting tangled up in his TV aerial), it’s still pretty lame and limited. But someone must have thought it went well: It was followed two years later by another half-hour animated special, Blondie & Dagwood: Second Wedding Workout, featuring the same writers and cast, and a story that has Dagwood simultaneously committed to an important work project and a 20-year-anniversary second wedding to Blondie. Wackiness ensues—but not very entertaining wackiness.

6. Pogo
Chuck Jones’ half-hour TV adaptation of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo, 1969’s The Pogo Special Birthday Special, is recognizably a Jones product from start to finish—it’s full of Jones touches, like wry eye-rolls aimed at the audience, and mighty familiar sound effects, which sometimes show up in print onscreen. (Not to mention Jones’ signature comic timing.) But while it feels more like a Jones cartoon than a Kelly strip—particularly given the vocal casting of June Foray, who does Pogo as a Southern-fried version of Rocky The Flying Squirrel—Kelly’s contributions do assert themselves to some degree: He scripted the piece, the animation holds closely to his latter-day character designs, and he even voices several of the characters, as does Jones. That said, it’s hard for an animated piece to get across Pogo’s wordplay and density, and it winds up largely being a mildly draggy goof in which Albert the alligator and Beau the dog duel over the correct words to “Deck The Halls,” while Porky Pine blushingly tries to woo “a female lady-girl” and his friends decide that as “a norphan,” he’s lonely and needs a family and a birthday of his own. It’s cute throughout, and nicely animated, but there’s definitely a reason The Pogo Special Birthday Special didn’t achieve the holiday ubiquity of Jones’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, produced just a few years earlier. It doesn’t help that no one in the Okefenokee Swamp knows what holiday the special is celebrating. 

7. For Better Or For Worse 
Lynn Johnston’s gentle family saga landed a series of seven specials in the cartoonist’s native Canada, beginning with 1985’s The Bestest Present, which featured the voices of Johnston’s own kids as Michael and Elizabeth, their fictional alter egos. More specials appeared in the early and mid-’90s, many centered on the then-toddler April exploring a world where most everything was new to her. Like the comic strip, the specials progressed roughly chronologically, so Michael, Elizabeth, and April all aged as the show went along, and changes made to the status quo in the strip were reflected in the specials. The specials were big successes in Canada, but they attracted less attention in America, where they aired on HBO and the Disney Channel. The specials did have one unexpected effect on the comic: They forced Lynn Johnston to nail down specific layouts for her characters’ home and neighborhood.