Garfield’s Halloween Adventure Restored: Candy, Costumes & Ghost Pirates, Oh My!

Garfield’s Halloween Adventure Was Cute, Creepy and Genuinely Scary

We may have missed last year’s milestone anniversary for one of our favorite Halloween specials, but when you’re relaunching a website, we can still celebrate a year later. The lovable Garfield.

And for those who didn’t have the privilege of seeing this as a kid in the 1980s, Garfield’s Halloween Adventure was not just Garfield in a costume collecting candy. It starts funny, cozy and very Garfield — and then slowly turns into an honest-to-goodness ghost story.

Originally titled Garfield in Disguise, the 24-minute animated special first aired on CBS on October 30, 1985. It was written by Garfield creator Jim Davis and directed by Phil Roman, with Lorenzo Music as Garfield, Gregg Berger as Odie and Thom Huge as Jon Arbuckle.

The setup is pure Garfield. He wakes up, discovers it’s Halloween and quickly realizes the holiday comes with the possibility of free candy. Naturally, he ropes Odie into trick-or-treating with him so there will be two bags instead of one, digs through an old trunk for costumes and lands on matching pirate looks.

There’s plenty of music along the way, including “What Should I Be?” and “Yo Ho Ho Ho,” sung by Lorenzo Music, along with Lou Rawls on “Scaredy Cat.” For the first half, it feels like the warm, slightly sarcastic Garfield television specials CBS viewers already knew.

Then the special takes a hard left.

Garfield and Odie climb into a rowboat looking for more houses — and therefore more candy — but wind up drifting downstream and washing ashore near an abandoned house. Inside, they meet an old man with one very creepy story: a band of pirates once buried stolen treasure beneath the floorboards and swore they would return for it exactly one hundred years later, at midnight on Halloween, even if they had to come back from the grave.

Yes. This is still a Garfield cartoon.

The old man disappears, the clock strikes midnight and a ghost ship appears as spectral pirates rise from the water to reclaim their treasure. The comedy suddenly pulls back, the colors get darker and the entire special becomes genuinely eerie. Jim Davis later explained that he wanted the ghosts to be scary enough to frighten at least the youngest viewers. Mission accomplished.

Garfield and Odie hide while the pirates tear into the house, but the pair are discovered and forced to escape into the river. Odie ultimately saves Garfield from drowning, and Garfield — for once — rewards his little buddy by sharing the Halloween candy.

The ending even leaves one final little chill. Back home, Garfield turns on the television and somehow sees the mysterious old man again, now introducing a late-night pirate movie marathon as if nothing happened.

For kids watching network television in the 1980s, that was part of the magic. You didn’t pull up a Halloween special whenever you wanted. You caught it when CBS scheduled it, usually around the same time as seasonal staples such as It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and then you waited another year for Halloween television to roll around again.

The special became more than just a nostalgic favorite, too. Garfield’s Halloween Adventure won the 1986 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. Not bad for a half hour that begins with Garfield scheming for extra candy and ends with undead pirates digging treasure out of a haunted house.

Watch the Fan-Restored Garfield’s Halloween Adventure in 1080p

And this is the version to check out. A fan restoration of the entire special has been color-corrected and cleaned up to look remarkably fresh while staying close to the original broadcast presentation.

The restorer started with the NTSC DVD, corrected its heavy green cast against the original broadcast colors, adjusted brightness and contrast for cleaner whites and blacks, and used material from a PAL broadcast to restore the original opening scene order and missing audio. Scene timings were also adjusted to better match the old television broadcast fades.

From there, the corrected standard-definition frames were upscaled with RealESRGAN’s AnimeVideoV3 model and finished as a 1080p encode. So if your memories of this special come from a fuzzy VHS tape, an old television broadcast or a worn DVD, this restoration is quite the glow-up.

The complete restored 1985 special is embedded below from the Internet Archive.

Source: Garfield’s Halloween Adventure; Television Academy; Internet Archive fan restoration. Image restoration: INYIM Media.