For more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from?
The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion.
From the stray curly wires and the occasional dial pad, it was clear that the pieces came from the once-popular Garfield telephone, made by Tyco in the early 1980s, several years after Jim Davis first colored the famously lazy cat into his hit comic strip. The phone parts were in remarkable condition, considering they had been belched from the ocean, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansou, told The Washington Post. Even Garfield’s black stripes were still painted onto his back, where the phone hooked.
She had been searching for the origin of Garfield for years, she said, out of concern for the damage the plastic phones may be doing to the ocean – and this month, after a chance encounter on the beach, she was about to get some answers.