A Garfield Christmas (1987)

A Garfield Christmas Special aired on CBS on December 21, 1987, and it did something nobody expected from a cartoon about a fat orange cat who hates Mondays. It made people cry. Not the kids, necessarily. The parents. The grandparents. Because buried inside the lasagna jokes and the Odie slapstick, writers Jim Davis and Lorenzo Music built a story about grief, memory, and the things people leave behind when they die.

That's a strange sentence to write about a Garfield cartoon. But it's true.

The Setup: Garfield Goes to the Farm

The plot is straightforward. Jon Arbuckle drags Garfield and Odie to his family's farm for Christmas. Garfield is miserable about it. He doesn't want to leave his warm house, his television, or his food. The car ride is a comedy of complaints, and the first act plays exactly like you'd expect from a Garfield holiday special: the cat is sarcastic, Odie is oblivious, Jon is hapless.

Jon's family is broad but not mean-spirited. His mother is warm. His father is taciturn. His brother Doc Boy is an easy target. And then there's Grandma, voiced with gravel and affection by Pat Carroll, who steals the entire special the moment she appears on screen. She's sharp-tongued, physically tough, and immediately bonds with Garfield because they share the same worldview: food is important, sentimentality is suspect, and love is best expressed through action, not words.

The Songs Actually Work

Garfield specials always had original music, and the tracks in A Garfield Christmas are better than they needed to be. Lou Rawls performed two songs for the special, and his voice gives the production a warmth that pure comedy couldn't achieve. Ed Bogas and Desirée Goyette wrote the songs, including "Christmas Is Here Again" and the gentle "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" riff that underscores the quieter moments.

But the real musical standout is Garfield's own number, where he fantasizes about all the gifts he wants. It's pure Garfield: greedy, self-aware, and funny. The animation during this sequence is looser and more inventive than the rest of the special, almost like the animators were having fun with the absurdity of a cat composing a Christmas wish list.

Grandma's Letters

Here's where the special earns its reputation. On Christmas morning, after the presents are opened and the jokes have landed, Garfield sneaks off and finds a gift for Grandma that he'd hidden earlier. It's a collection of old love letters written by her late husband, Grandpa, which Garfield had discovered in the barn.

Grandma reads one aloud. It's simple. Her husband tells her he loves her, that she's the best thing in his life, that he's no good at saying this kind of thing but he wanted to try. Pat Carroll's voice acting in this scene is remarkable. She plays it quiet, with small cracks in the delivery that suggest a woman who has been missing someone for a long time and just got a piece of him back.

For a 24-minute animated special based on a comic strip about a cat who eats lasagna, this is a genuinely affecting piece of storytelling. The special doesn't linger on the sadness. Grandma thanks Garfield, the family comes together, and the story moves on. But the weight of that scene hangs over the ending in a way that transforms the whole special from a holiday cash-in into something more honest about what Christmas actually does to people: it brings back everyone you've ever shared it with, including the ones who aren't there anymore.

Voice Cast and Production

Lorenzo Music voiced Garfield for every animated appearance from 1982 until his death in 2001. His delivery, a dry, half-asleep drawl with perfect comic timing, is inseparable from the character. Thom Huge played Jon Arbuckle with just the right amount of earnest cluelessness. Gregg Berger voiced Odie, mostly through whimpers and barks, but sold the physical comedy through sound alone.

The special was produced by Film Roman and directed by Phil Roman, who had been animating since the Peanuts specials of the 1960s. You can feel that influence. A Garfield Christmas doesn't try to be visually spectacular. It trusts the writing and the voice performances to carry the emotional load, and uses the animation to support the comedy rather than overwhelm it.

It won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program in 1988, beating out competition that had bigger budgets and flashier animation. The Television Academy got it right. The craft here is in the script, not the spectacle.