10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows

10. Garfield Has Been Dead For A Very Long Time

Back in Halloween 1989, tasked to come up with a seasonal twist for his long-running Garfield newspaper strip, Jim Davis published a terrifying week-long storyline in in which the world’s favourite tawny tubby tabby woke to find himself alone, his once-familiar home cold, abandoned, and crumbling around him.

Briefly hallucinating his family - owner Jon and gormless sidekick Odie - back in the warm, inviting and breakfast-laden home he fell asleep in, Garfield finally realises that he’s alone, and that only his stubbornly feline powers of straight-up denial will save him. Suddenly he’s back with his family again, free to hate Mondays and gorge on lasagne for the rest of his life… or is he?

The implication, of course, is that Garfield is dead, and has been for some time - a ghost, haunting a broken down house, reliving his time there in a self-perpetuating cycle of undead delusion. It’s a conceit borrowed from the Italian animated feature Allegro Non Troppo, which featured a segment showing the ghost of a cat prowling the ruins of its old home.

Of course, fandom being what it is, there’s been plenty of speculation surrounding ‘Alone’ in the past seventeen years. Chief amongst it has been the idea that this isn’t a self-contained little ‘what if’ story, but the Awful Truth behind the Garfield concept: that this isn’t a comfortable, wry little comic strip about a fat, lazy cat, but an existential jolt of caffeine satirising strips like that.

All of which would make Garfield’s small screen antics - covering thirty-four years of television, including twelve primetime animated specials, and two long-running hit cartoon series, the second of which, The Garfield Show, continues to this day - nothing but stories about a dead cat obsessively, heartbreakingly, hallucinating a time when it was alive and happy.