Trivia / U.S. Acres

• Banned in China: The comics are never available in print in newspapers in Malaysia unless the paper needs a strip as filler for Garfield, and even then the strip is censored when shown. The main character, Orson, is a pig — and although there's no requirement not to show pigs, any paper stuck with him will edit him out anyway.
• Contest Winner Cameo: The contest instigated here◊, and the winning submission was "Max, the Skateboarding Bird". He only lasted one week, but he seemed to be intended as a recurring character◊.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Before the official Garfield website reran the comic, the majority of the strips were archived here, courtesy of Platypus Comix. Now it's only good for the original version◊ of the October 13, 1986 strip, the covers to the collections and the final few Sunday strips, which Paws has declined to republish... however, after Viacom decided to move the Garfield website to the Nickelodeon website, they neglected to move U.S. Acres with it, once again plunging the comics into this territory. Thankfully, every strip is accounted for on the Garfield Wiki.
• What Could Have Been:
  • There were two characters named Chuck the calf and Jodie the horse◊ that were marketed but dropped from the strip before it started. Nothing is known about their personalities or why they never appeared. Both Chuck and Jodie (albeit with the former character being recolored black) appeared along with the rest of the U.S. Acres gang in the banner of the Garfield August 7, 2016 strip.
  • The sequel to the live-action Garfield film was originally going to be a U.S. Acres crossover, but the project was instead reworked into A Tale of Two Kitties due to the failing health of Howard Morris, Wade's voice actor in the U.S. Acres segments of Garfield and Friends.
  • Mark Evanier wanted to include the U.S. Acres cast in The Garfield Show, but the closest he got was a cameo by Orson in the episode "Down on the Farm" that had to be cut because of international laws prohibiting cartoons from featuring talking pigs out of concerns of offending Malaysian audiences. Another factor was the fact that Wade's voice actor, Howard Morris, had died three years before the series was released, as well as Thom Huge (Roy's voice) seemingly dropping off the face of the planet after Garfield voice actor Lorenzo Music's death.
• Written for My Kids: According to this interview, Jim Davis created the comic for his son so that he could write a kid-friendly comic strip for him.

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