I love greatly appreciate Garfield. Who doesn't? One of my favorite things to come out of Garfield were the various cartoons and TV specials, one in particular being The Garfield Show, probably one of my guiltiest pleasures ever.
The show has its fair share of detractors, mainly those who see it as "inferior" to the 80s' Garfield and Friends, which is also great. While I do see where they're coming from, and although I am much more fond of the more formative years of the character than most of the modern stuff, I think on its own terms The Garfield Show is a pretty amazing series both ironically and unironically and here in this post I will just be talking about random tidbits I know from the series that are probably obscure? Maybe? I don't know.
This is something I'm sure many foreign viewers of Cartoon Network and Boomerang are quite familiar with. You see, in many European territories, The Garfield Shorts were broadcast as sort of like a filler between actual episodes of the show proper, kinda like those Quickies way back from G&F. The first season shorts usually involved Garfield or some other character doing some WACKY shenanigans, sometimes they would be based off of actual episodes too. Like for example, this one has Jon falling off the ceiling multiple times, reusing footage from "Pasta Wars."
This short also uses footage from that episode, though now there's a camera crew or something. Did I mention how weirdly meta this show always got?
Also this short seems to be in both English and French at the same time, don't know why
Season 2 changed things up, and were essentially just PSAs where Garfield and other characters explain how important it is do go outside or recycle or whatever. It's just as lame as you expect. Also I don't think Garfield would be the type to tell people to exercise or eat healthly but that's just me.
Here's one about looking both ways before crossing the street...exciting.
The later seasons would just have little music videos of songs from the many specials this show had. Worth noting is that most of the shorts are lost now and I could only find a handful of them on YouTube. Fun.
ignore the broken images
Moving on to a more interesting subject, the show used to have its very own little website separate from the main Garfield.com site, which featured behind-the-scenes content, blogs, games, character trivia, etc. Known as "The Garfield Show Diary" site, it appeared to have been online from mid-2008 to January 2019, though the site itself stopped regularly updating around 2014 or so, which by that point the show was already on its last legs.
Among the many treasures of this site are the various wallpapers and screensavers you could download. Like these!
Don't forget there's printable masks you can cut out and wear. I'm personally quite scared of this one.
The games tab feature these lovely renders of the funny orange cat, and the games themselves...well...
One of them is a Pac-Man clone
This one has Garfield skateboarding
aaaand this is a Breakout clone...looks like something i would've seen on Scratch back in the day
The behind the scenes stuff is what you'd expect: Interviews with Jim Davis and crew, how they actually make the show, etc. Unfortunately none of these seem to be archived. Poo.
Overall just really interesting how much they wanted this to be a big thing
Other things of note...well the official YouTube upload of Part 1 of "Home for the Holidays"'s audio is horribly distorted and static-y throughout the whole thing. Why they left it like this without checking or fixing it in any way I'll never know, but I guess if you're a fan of getting your ears destroyed you can watch it for yourself here.
Also, a bit more infamously, various prints of the episode "Land of Hold" (my personal favorite episode) has a scene where they just forgot to put in the finished animation, so now there's just a part where everything's unrendered for a bit. Again, strange. (it occurs around the 1 minute mark)
Even stranger, the error was even present on Netflix and other services, though when the show was airing on TV years ago, the scene was actually rendered and completed.
The rubber chicken in Jon's hand got deleted in the process.
- fly