Garfield is the titular protagonist of The Garfield Show. He is a fat and lazy orange cat who enjoys eating lasagna and hates Mondays, with him going on several comedic and surreal adventures.

He is voiced by Frank Welker.

His Good Ranking[]

What Makes Him Admirable?[]

• Despite being a shameless jerk to them most of the time, Garfield still does genuinely care for Jon Arbuckle and Odie in a number of episodes, as he is willingly able to be friendly and helpful with them when needed.
• He genuinely cares about his toy Pooky, never subverting this in any of his appearances in the show.
• He is an ally towards mice, as he willingly helps them on numerous occasions to not be seen by Jon Arbuckle and has absolutely no interest in eating them.
  • As seen in the episode "A Game of Cat and Mouse"; where he uses a detective outfit, staged the event of Garfield ordering the mice to jump into a mouse bag by making a deal with Squeaks and his family & friends in exchange for cheese and peace, and pretends to be the exterminator Jon hired so he couldn't hire that mouse exterminator Jon was about to do in response to Garfield not being able to take care of mice on his own.
• In the episode "The Pasta Wars", he scared the Meatball Aliens to the point of retreat (with the help of a recording of Garfield eating lasagna), which helped Garfield stopping them from committing a mass invasion (and enslavement) on Earth and stopped them from trying to kill him and Odie.
• In the episode "Desperately Seeking Pooky", he disguised a robot bear that looks similar to Pooky and pretends to speak as a motherly creature so Hercules, the chihuahua who stole Pooky because of not being loved by anyone or anything, could be loved again and have something to feel attached to.
• In the episode "Mother Garfield," he openly admits to not having any interest in eating birds anymore (unlike his comic counterpart, who sadistically murdered several birds on numerous occasions) and he even willingly helps a pair of abandoned eggs not be eaten by Harry.
  • This is even expanded upon in the episode "The Bluebird of Happiness," when he also selflessly protects several Bluebirds from being eaten by Harry.
• In the special "Home for the Holidays," Garfield went out of his way to selflessly help Arlene in giving several stray pets a good Christmas, with him even helping said pets get new owners by the end.
• In the episode "Freaky Monday", when he switched bodies with Odie, Garfield constantly made sure to keep him safe from Odie wandering around mindlessly in Garfield's body, especially making white-lies to Rottweiler and Doberman (his bullies he and Odie both encounter throughout the show) when they tried attacking Odie in Garfield's body, and Garfield used deceit and misdirection to trick them into going the wrong way a few times, had to save Odie from being shipped illegally to another state, and wanted to hold Odie close when he and Odie get surrounded by a butcher, the mailman and the two dogs who wanted to harm Garfield once they had him and Odie in a corner in the city.
  • Plus, before he got his body back, he even showed remorse and regret by apologizing to Odie for all the times he's bullied, tormented and mistreated Odie in the past (ex. intentionally leaving Odie outside to be stuck by himself in this episode in particular), he expressed this act genuinely when he thought he was going to be put in a fate worse than death (or through something just as unpleasant), Once the alien can switch them back, and saved Odie from being stuck in the situation and left Garfield to deal with those he annoyed unintentionally, he (fearfully) accepted the fact things are back to normal and gets himself beat up by the four characters who lashed their anger on Garfield. Once he came back home in bandages and a crane, he asked for a chair for two since he allowed Odie to sit on the chair and just wanted a break.
• In the episode "Fame Fatale/Virtualodeon", he contributed to helping Jon and Odie stop and defeat a tyrannical yandere computer virus from putting all of them in harm's way with technology-powered malefic because of her obsession with Jon.
• In episodes such as "Planet of Poultry", "Blasteroid" and the special "The Mean Machine," he willingly goes out of his way to save humanity from bigger threats, making him even more admirable in the process.

What Makes Him Inconsistent?[]

• Despite all of his redeeming qualities, throughout the show he is often shown to be really smug, egotistic, arrogant, facetious, over-sarcastic, and typically a reclusive jerk towards everyone when he does or doesn't get his way, especially towards Jon and Odie (his friends and family members who he usually loves to frequently tease, mock, mistreat, jeer, inconvenience, poke fun at and bully a lot in condescending, demeaning, humiliating and patronizing ways for no other reason other than his own petty enjoyment in making fun of them).
• He is oftentimes very mischievous and sneaky in a rather chaotic, malicious and childish fashion due to often pulling the cheapest pranks on several people he knows just to annoy them; this includes pulling constant pranks on the mailman Herman Post (who fears and loathes Garfield and also sees him as a pest and a nuisance as a result), and sometimes toyed with eating Squeaks and his friends and family for his personal amusement.
  • A solid example of his mischief includes the show's intro where he consistently throws Odie's bone to where the hostile canine bullies Hercules and Rottweiler were, just so he could always trick Odie into getting himself unintentionally put into a predicament with being chased around by them with violent intent, and it's shown as if Garfield does this all the time to him in every single episode of the show without a care, which he has never subverted in the slightest.
• He's extremely greedy and gluttonous, always wanting to get a quick meal and typically for nobody else but him to have to himself, especially taking a ridiculous amount of pizza boxes to eat more than 10 orders of pizza that Vito Cappelletti cooked in his restaurant Vito's Pizzeria (who also thinks Garfield takes his love for his food rather excessively), and he has eaten 7,322 fish.
• Despite having every single right to mistreat, prank and inconvenience his cocky rival Nermal in the show for being very insufferable and a narcissist about his "cuteness", Garfield can be extremely abusive and mean-spirited to Nermal even if he doesn't do anything bad to him, as Garfield likes harming him such as sending him off to space with a rocket to spite him and constantly attempts to send him to Abu Dhabi.
• He is also a hypocrite since he doesn't like when he is bullied but does so with several people, he finds worthy of making fun of.
• He is hardly taken seriously in universe as a hero since he is often incompetent and always a lazy egomaniac who breaks the fourth wall to make snarky/snide remarks that relate to meta humor (almost) all the time.
  • True to his character in the comics, he's extremely lazy to the point of that he'd rather find things that are ridiculously simple and easy to do, which usually backfires on him and has to deal with things the hard way as a result.
• He is on & off due to his sadistic, selfish, hedonistic, dishonest and opportunistic tendencies he's shown throughout the show, considering how much he's shown himself to be a manipulative liar and con artist who often takes advantage of others with nearly a thought of the long-term consequences.
  • In the end of the episode "Mother Garfield", when he infamously threatens the viewer of knowing where they live when he selflessly helped a group of birds, which he possibly did just to mess with said viewers, though this is more played for laughs than anything.
  • He is openly cruel about murdering spiders, as in the episode "Time Twist" he openly admits to knowing that the spiders are harmless and despite that, he still attempts to kill them with delight.
    • He shows sadism in killing spiders again in the episode "The Lion Queen", as when he and Odie stumble across a cave inhabited by a colony of spiders, he voices his intention to gush them all, only to be stopped by a giant spider who chases after the two.
  • In the end of the episode "High Scale," he tortured a sentient scale by attempting to murder them by having an elephant painfully crush them nearly to death (with Garfield even admitting what he did was cruel, and yet shows no remorse for it all because of him having to do exercise). While the scale was a jerk about his weight, it was only due to them being incorrectly set to "Pintsize Parakeet," as they stopped insulting Garfield once being set at the right setting, making what Garfield did even less justifiable, and even if the scale never did stop insulting him, this still doesn’t justify what he did.
    • What’s worse is that in the episode "The Six-Can Solution," it is shown that the scale is genuinely traumatized by Garfield and shows extreme pain when Garfield weighs himself on them. Even though the scale never insults Garfield in this episode, he still tortures the scale for doing nothing wrong, likely for sadistic reasons.
  • In the episode "Fish to Fry," Garfield attempts to eat the various fish in his house despite Jon warning him that he will punished for doing so. While the events of the episode were a dream and that Garfield does admit that he will not eat another fish for the time being, he still says that he will continue eating fish next week.
  • In the episode “Mailman Blues”, he constantly torments Stu, a rookie mailman who was substituting for Herman Post while the latter was on vacation (likely to get away from Garfield’s tormenting), in various ways, with him topping it off by siccing a pack of hyperactive chihuahuas on the poor mailman. He then warns the audience not to witness the carnage before turning his attention to Stu and watching with sadistic glee as the mailman gets presumably mauled by the chihuahuas. This proved to be the final straw for Stu, as he begs the postmaster to reassign him so he’d never have to deal with Garfield again. Worst of all, Garfield shows absolutely no remorse for any of the torture he puts Stu through.
  • In the episode "Garfield Gets Canned", he and Odie attempt to eat Mrs. Ferret in retaliation for her eating all the food in the Arbuckle household.
  • In the episode "The Spy Who Fed Me," Garfield emotionally manipulates Jon Arbuckle by pretending that he is going to Japan, when in reality he snuck into Jon’s car in order for him to get him off his diet. What makes this worse is that Garfield gets zero punishment for basically scaring Jon into thinking that he was leaving.
  • In the beginning of the special "The Mean Machine," Garfield uses a tape recorder in order to manipulate people into giving him more and more food.

External Links[]

• Garfield on the Heroes Wiki
• Garfield on the Garfield Wiki