Did a ‘Garfield’ Cartoon Rip-Off a Horror Classic?
Whether he’s starring in popular movies or misguided novelty restaurants, Garfield the cat is still culturally relevant. But long before he was shilling for Big Drone, Garfield starred in one of the most memorably freaky children’s cartoons to ever hit network television: Garfield’s Halloween Adventure.
The 1985 special found Garfield and Odie getting lost while trick or treating, eventually ending up in a strange old house on a mysterious island where they meet a creepy old man. The stranger tells them a scary story about a band of pirates who buried treasure on the island and vowed to return for it 100 years later, at the stroke of midnight, “even if it meant returning from the grave.”
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The man disappears, and the island is soon besieged by terrifying pirate ghosts. It was pretty intense for a franchise that typically didn’t feature anything more extreme than lasagna cramps or the occasional accidental drinking of dog semen.
But Garfield’s Halloween Adventure is quite similar to another horror story, which in no way involves super-intelligent cats: John Carpenter’s The Fog. The horror master’s 1980 theatrical follow-up to Halloween similarly involves pirate ghosts returning to the mainland to wreak havoc on mainlanders because of old treasure.
Over the years, a lot of fans have pointed out that the two projects are oddly alike — although the Garfield one is arguably way scarier.
So is it possible that Garfield creator Jim Davis took the idea from Carpenter?
While Davis didn’t cop to any specific influence, he did tell The A.V. Club, back in 2014, that the idea behind the cartoon was to “go somewhere that would at least scare 4-year-olds.” And this wasn’t without some difficulty behind-the-scenes, either. “Believe it or not, we really pushed the limits of what Standards and Practices would allow as far as being scary,” Davis explained. “As soft and as family-oriented as it appears today, we rode the line.”
And this was far from the only time that Garfield would freak everybody out at Halloween. In the week leading up to Halloween 1989, Davis sought to do something “legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary” in the Garfield strip. While Davis reasoned that “ghosts aren’t scary,” he did believe that there was horror to be found in the concept of “being alone” or “dying alone,” which is why we got a series of strips in which Garfield realizes that he’s been abandoned and will likely die all by himself, so he hallucinates that he’s palling around with Jon and Odie.
That means that, for all we know, even the recent Chris Pratt-starring movie was canonically just a psychotic hallucination while the real Garfield approaches grim death. Which will no doubt come on a Monday.
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