For reasons I am currently unable to explain or even understand, I loved Garfield as a kid. I loved the comics, the cartoons, the merchandise, everything. It wasn't even that I found him that funny, I was just enamored with his whole universe. I couldn't get enough Garfield, and every time I looked at a piece of it, I felt enraptured inꦛ something far bigger than myself. I don't know why, I guess the character designs are just incredibly appeꦫaling.

I don't mean to imply that Garfield is good, by any means. It is awful. It iꦗs openly and unabashedly unfunny. The jokes get recycled constantly, the punch lines are predictable, and they always go for the incredibly low hanging fruit. I'm talking dragging in the dirt low. But even now, when I am super critical of the whole mess, I still find every single visual aspect totally appealing. Garfield's silly little round body, John's excruciating blandness, Odie looking nothing like a dog, Nermal looking so disgustingly cute it makes me hate myself. What is it about these comics that look so good around a product that feels so bad?

Well, maybe there is a secret to this whole Garfield craze. I decided to look into why we love Garfield, and while I never found an answer (I have to assume it is a form of Necromancy at this point) I did uncover an alarming number of secrets our favorite rotund fuzzball is hiding. So grab your favorite Pooky teddy bear, because some of thꦚese secrets get a little weird.

30 🧜 Suspiciously Missing ꧟

Garfield, as a franchise, is a merchandising giant, and will shell out almost anything to gain a little more cash.  So I found it surprising that for a long time, there were some titles missing from the Garfield website. The animated television special Bullets and Babes was suspiciously omitted from the library, as what the collected series known as Garfield: His 9 Lives. That second book𝓰 is actually pretty controversial, for reasons we will talk about💃 elsewhere in this article, but that first one seemed innocuous enough.

It's a cute little Garfield crime caper.

In the story, Garfield wanders into a closet in his home, bored out of his mind. There he begins playing pre﷽tend as the detective Sam Spayed. What happens after is a very Garfield-e💛sque retelling of a classic detective film noire. Why it got dropped from the library for a time is anyone's guess, but lucky for all Garfield fans, it is currently back up on the website. I guess the desire to make more money finally won out.

29 💃 ༺ GARFIELD, NO!

This is my favorite piece of Garfield trivia ever, because it goes so completely off the rails. In Garfield: His 9 Lives we are treated to nine different stories, drawn by different artists, 🐎telling how Garfield has come up into existence through the ages. Sometimes he's in the stone age, sometimes he gets sent up into space, as Garfield is wont to do.

But then things get really weird.

Garfield's seventh life is as a house-cat named Tigger. As he is happily doing cat stuff, he comes across a primordial, evil force (there's one in every home) which causes Tigger to revert back to his feral form. No explanation as to how this happens is ever given, and I love it. Then, to end on a high note, Tigger attacks his elderly owner. Her fate is ultimately left a ꧂mystery, but it is heavily implied she met a cat induced end.

28 🔜 ღ It Was All A Dream

That is ﷽the comic in its' entirety, so I recommend you give it a read. If you didn't, I'll give you a quick recap: nothing is real and Garfield is slowly starving. Yes, in this Hallo꧅ween special from 1989, Garfield wakes up to find his home not lived in for years. He hallucinates Jon and Odie for a moment, who hand him food, only for it to disappear out his cat fingers.

He understandably begins to freak out.

Unable to deal with the fact that his real life is awful, he enters a state of denial and just begins reli♛ving his years with Jon. Is this Garfield's true fate, or was it a nightmare? I like to imagine that every comic since then has all been inside of Garfield's slowly withering mind, which explains why the jokes have become steadily less funny. It also explains why Jon puts up with all of his garbage.

27 ꦍ That Sounds Familiar

Ever since Rick & Morty it's pretty common knowledge that the same person who did the voice of Garfield, Lorenzo Music, also provided the voice of Peter Venkman on the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters. What most people don't know is that Bill Murray seemed to have it in for Lorenzo, for reasons that only make sense to the greens keeper from Caddyshack.

Murray has Music fired from Ghostbusters.

Reportedly, Bill Murray didn't watch the actual cartoon for a while, simply from having no interest. When he finally did watch an episode, he heard Lorenzo doing him and hated it, saying he "didn't want to sound like Garfield." Apparently, Bill made some calls and demanded that Lorenzo get replaced. All of the remaining seasons have Venkman being voiced by Dave Coulier, who played Joey on Full House, and more importantly, Animal on Muppet Babies.

26 A Tiny Mix Uꦇp

At this point, I'm next to certain that Bill Murray had it out for Lorenzo Music. Not only did he have him fired from The Real Ghostbusters because he didn't like his character being affiliated with the voice of Garfield, he went on to actually voice the fat ca🍌t in TW♒O live action movies. I don't blame you if you don't remember these misfires, as I repress most of my mental trauma too.

Apparently, Murray claims that he never actually intended to star in something so bad, but signed on when he saw the name of the person who wrote the movie. The live action Garfield was penned by a writer named Joel Cohen. Already you can see where this is going. Murray thought it was being written by critically acclaimed film writer and director Joel David Coen. Honestly, I'd sign up for a version of Garfield created by The Coen Brothers in a heartbeat.

25 𝄹That's Good Adv🌞ice

When you've been around as long as Garfield has, you are bound to go through some redesigns. At the beginning of the co꧃mic, he walked on all fours (like a cat, can you imagine?) and was a lot fatter. Also, his head wasn't a weird bulb shape, and he had normal sized eyes. To say that I prefer his earlier character designs is an understatement, I think by the year 2089 Garfield is going to look like a giant orange eyeball that lords over all of us.

Jim Davis was struggling with sketches of Garfield, trying to figure out a way to make him bipedal, as he figured that would make the character more appealing to a wider audience. In walks Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, who casually suggest that he make Garfield's feet bigger, to make it easier for him to stand and✱ to also make him look more cute/cartoon like. And that's why Garfield now looks like Snoopy.

Also, reportedly, Schulz hates Garfield.

24 🍎 Knock It Off ⛎

Original ideas can be really hard, you guys. It's so much easier if you just take somebody else's idea adn just tweak it a bit, like when you cheated on your Georgraphy homework in school. It's Geography, you're never going to use it, that's what maps are for. So Garfield didn't exactly steal an idea, so much as make a play on it for humorous effect, when they started running a segment of strips called Believe It... Or Don't.

The whole thing was to make fun of Ripley's Believe It Or Not by suggesting the🅰 insane things that happen inside the Garfield universe are totally unbelievable. That all came to an end when PAWS Inc., the company that runs the Garfield syndication, got a Cease and Desist order from the Robert Ripley ෴Estate. I suppose they didn't like the idea of their name being attached to something that tacky, which is funny, considering their material.

23 Going T🎃hrough Changes

In the comic strip, Garfield has a quasi-love interest by the name of Arlene. She svelte, pink and has a space in her teeth. She is also constantly exasperated with Garfield, who is too dumb or lazy to be a good boyfriend, although he doe൲s have his moments. She doesn't appear much, but she's appeared often enough that she has a clear cut character and design that audiences are used to.

When it came time to make a Saturday Morning Cartoon about Garfield, the producer's kept making suggestions about how to change her, to the point where Jim Davis revoked the right to use the character at all in the show. So they created a brand new character, Penelope, who embodied all of the changes the studio wanted done to Arlene. Pe🎃rsonally, I prefer Arlene, because she is 𒆙sassy and she isn't afraid to occasionally beat up Garfield for being a jerk.

22 The Only Real Motivator ꦯ

Why people continue to love Garfield will forever remain a mystery, but what motivates someone to create such a middle of the road comic🔯? Jim Davis has always been very upfront about why he created his characters, and why he designed them the way he did. And no, it isn't some kind of uplifting story where he was inspired by the antics of his childhood cat and his brain damaged dog.

Jim Davis created Garfield solely to make money.

He studied the market of comic books while he was developing Garfield, and noticed the intense popularity of Snoopy. So with the framework of the later years of Peanuts (when it stopped being funny ♑and was just about Snoopy sleeping on a dog house) he developed 🃏a clear cut design of a cat that people would like. He loves lasagna, he hates Mondays and he is fatter than he needs to be. So basically, he's a mirror.

21 Wꦓhat Never Was

Before Bill Murray sucker punched us in the childhood with his live action abomination, there was supposed to be a full length animated movie about Garfield way back in 1988. This was pretty much at his peak, so it might have actually been pretty good and not just coasting by on its' own laurels. Investing in anything Garfield was esse🐈ntially printing money, so ꦜwhy wouldn't this cartoon get made?

Because Jim Davis tried something new.

Jim wanted to tell a story where Garfield was trying to warn the world about an impending flood, like a feline Noah. There are little details onto what the script actually contained, so I have zero answers for you as 🐈to why Garfield had this knowledge above everyone else. What I do know is that the script was deemed too dark for a cartoon (with the imminent drowning of hundreds of people) so the studio had to pass.