I vividly remember watching "Here Comes Garfield", the first Garfield special ever, while in elementary school in the YEAR OF OUR LORD 1982.
What a year that was, man. I'm going to go into 1982 in depth later, but if you're looking for an actual fucking documentary on that year, there's this damn thing, and I recommend it 100 percent.
Anyway, the special contained the slick animation of Jim Davis' character, some snappy voice work, including the sublime stuff from Lorenzo Semple as the big cat himself. Being an owner of several of those oblong Garfield strip collection books you could get from scholastic and reader of the daily Davis pieces in the newspaper, I remember being fairly excited to see old Garfield in motion. TV was a miracle, wasn't it?
By the time the Thanksgiving special came out, it was 1989. I was in high school, and I wasn't really getting the warmth from new holiday specials anymore, let alone old ones. This was thanks to the daily battles of trying to fit into a community I'd only lived in for about a year and a half, and prepping to move back into the old one I had lived in for 6 months, that I moved to after two years in Texas. Got that?
So, I watched it on streaming last night. It wasn't bad. You still got Semple's voice, nifty songs by Lou Rawls and Garfield's abusive behaviors toward his owner Jon, and his life-mate Odie. Two things happen here, one is a trip to the vet (whom Jon is in love with, and his persistence probably needs a smackdown from the #MeToo movement. Fuck's sake) and Thanksgiving is the next day. Jon successfully gets the vet to come over to his house for Thanksgiving dinner (weird that there's no family get together here) which he manages to destroy before he's even began, because he didn't do the research.
So, our hero Garfield gets Jon to call his grandmother after practically having to use smoke signals to drive the point home to do such, and she comes over and creates a beautiful meal behind the scenes while Jon spews a history of Thanksgiving to Liz that puts her to sleep. Seriously, this rundown of the holiday puts Linus' Miles Standish routine from Charlie Brown Thanksgiving to shame.
Everyone is shocked by the gloriousness of Grandma's meal as she slips out the back door creating the lie for Liz that Jon is a great chef, and Jon, Liz, Garfield, and Odie sit down and enjoy a spare but rather sweet Thanksgiving meal together.
Liz leaves, and I hope to god, other than future vets visits, will never be seen by Jon again.
Seriously, this guy is actually a creep and Garfield deserves better than this putz.
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