A plague of landlines featuring the iconic cat Garfield have been washing up on the shores of Brittany, France, from the 1980s to the present day.
Hundreds of yellow plastic Garfield landlines began to appear in the region, but for decades no one knew where they came from.
The iconic “Tyco Garfield” landline phone, which has since become something of a collector’s item, was a tribute to the cartoon character’s sleepy nature, as his eyes remained closed until someone picked up the receiver.
An accessory of choice for any fan of that lasagna-loving Garfield, but not exactly something anyone expects to find on a beach.
Yet that was exactly the sight Brittany residents were forced to witness for three decades since the 1980s, when the first Garfield orange plastic breadcrumbs turned into phones littered the French coastline. Some years saw hundreds of phones appear, but where did they come from?
The great Garfield mystery was solved with the help of a farmer whose memory was revived by a renewed campaign on the phones of a beach cleaning crew in France. When the press picked up on the story, he got in touch to say that he remembered seeing a Garfield phone after a storm in the early 1980s, and what’s more, he knew where they came from.
As often happens when a large number of strange items start appearing in a specific area, Tyco Garfield phones escaped from a shipping container that got lost on a freighter at sea.
A similar example is the case of Friendly Floatees, which saw a shipment of 28,000 rubber ducks released into the ocean after a shipping container broke loose during transit from China to America.
Bath toys first made their way to Alaska, but with so many loose, thousands continued on to the Bering Strait, where they froze in Arctic ice, only to thaw a few years later and continue on to the UK.
Being bath toys, they were exceptionally well-suited for traveling across the seas, but Garfield’s phone wasn’t so seaworthy.
The shipping container they had come from was hidden inside a hidden sea cave; its location was known only to the farmer who reached out in 2019 to finally solve the case of the Garfield phones in Brittany.
When the teams went to explore the cave they found the container destroyed, as well as some lingering phones.
“I saw pieces of Garfield and containers all over the cave,” Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the local beach-cleaning association, told Ouest-France. “But most of the phones are gone, the sea did its job for 30 years. We arrived after the battle.”
Although Garfield the cat’s phone container has been located, it is in a place that is too difficult to remove. With an unknown volume of cargo still hidden inside, it’s expected to be a little longer before locals keep coming across Jim Davis’ creation on the beaches of Brittany.
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