Garfield Goose and Friends
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Garfield Goose and Friends was a children's television show shown by WGN-TV in Chicago, Illinois in the United States during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The host of the show was a man named Frazier Thomas, who did all of the talking. The show centered on a clacking goose puppet named Garfield Goose, who considered himself king of the United States. Several other puppet characters were featured such as Romberg Rabbit, Macintosh Mouse, and sleepy bloodhound Beauregard Burnside III. The show also featured the Little Theater Screen, on which cartoons such as Clutch Cargo and Space Angel were shown.
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[edit] History
[edit] Cincinnati
Thomas created Garfield Goose for a local program called Meet the Little People on WKRC-TV (CBS) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thomas, an Indiana native who had worked on Cincinnati local radio since before World War II, said he had gotten the idea from Catholic nuns collecting for charity. He recalled how they'd appear with a sock puppet in the form of a goose and that children were invited to "feed the goose" with donations. The name "Garfield" came from WKRC-TV's telephone exchange. Cincinnati's version was somewhat different in that Gar lived in a cuckoo clock as he'd wanted to be a cuckoo bird.
[edit] Chicago and WBKB
Thomas and Gar moved to Chicago in 1951, appearing originally on CBS affiliate WBKB-TV, then on Channel 4. At first, the goose appeared as a featured character on a show Thomas hosted called Petticoat Party but it was decided the character had enough appeal for a show of his own and on September 29, 1952, Garfield Goose and Friend made its debut, with the help of Chicago puppeteer Bruce Newton.
Gar originally communicated with Thomas via an off-screen typewriter during Newton's brief time with the show. But when Thomas and new puppeteer Roy Brown expanded the cast and renamed the program Garfield Goose and Friends, it would fall upon Romberg Rabbit to translate for Gar -- no easy task as Rom's speech, as well as the rest of the puppets, was so quiet (silent, in reality), only Thomas could "hear" them. Thomas would then repeat what Rom and the rest of the puppets were communicating to him.
[edit] At WGN
After a complicated sale of stations in February 1953, WBKB-TV became WBBM-TV, the CBS o-and-o (owned-and-operated station), and moved to Channel 2. Gar moved to WBKB-TV (now an ABC o-and-o) Channel 7 a year later. The show finally nested in on WGN-TV in 1955 and remained for over two decades, usually appearing weekday afternoons and later mornings. The program gradually lost viewership in the early 1970s due to competition (and in part because of timeslot tampering with one episode even depicting Gar as being VERY upset over this) and the show's long run ended on October 1, 1976. But this was not the end of the puppets. Frazier Thomas had taken the role of circus manager on WGN-TV's longtime hit program Bozo's Circus after the retirement of Ringmaster Ned Locke and Thomas cleverly kept his puppets on the air with a storyline that had Gar buying Bozo's Circus. The puppets would continue to make appearances until 1981, when they were retired. Thomas would continue to work on The Bozo Show until his death in 1985 and the puppets were donated to The Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago in 1987.
As was often the case for television producers in the 1950s and early 1960s (such as with The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, or the first Super Bowl game), the station did not keep tapes of the show as thrifty owners recycled them, not realizing how valuable they might have become. WGN-TV premiered a primetime special in December of 2005 titled Bozo, Gar & Ray: WGN TV Classics, which included the earliest surviving clip of the show, with Gar having scored tickets for the 1959 World Series at Chicago's Comiskey Park. Coincidentally, the White Sox had just won the 2005 World Series in their first World Series appearance since 1959 when this retrospective show first aired. The premiere was #1 in the Chicago market and the station announced plans to re-air it every holiday season.
