#Garfield phones wash up on beach, spark hilarious reactions

Online gawkers are going gaga over a bizarre phenomenon in which Garfield-shaped phones have washed up on a French beach for over three decades.

The feline flotsam first appeared in the early 1980s, but was recently posted about on Twitter, sparking a tsunami of jokes about the lasagna-loving kitty of comics fame.

According to the tweet, which currently boasts nearly 100,000 likes, phones modeled after the corpulent cartoon cat had been “polluting the shore” of France’s Brittany region for 35 years. The Tyco-created gadget, whose eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, had once been a household fixture, with thousands manufactured and sold in the ’80s, the BBC reported.

No one knew the reason behind its beaching until 2019, when a local tipped off French environmental action group Ar Viltansou about a shipping container, circa 1980, that was wedged in a secluded sea cave only accessible at low tide.

Search teams found the cargo crate’s remnants in a fissure alongside numerous Garfield phones. The environmental group suspects that the freight container had been belching up the vintage items after getting lost overboard 35 years ago.

The discovery struck a chord among fans of the nostalgic cartoon, created by Jim Davis.

“I’m going to assume that the shipwreck happened on a Monday,” quipped one Garfield fan, referencing the cynical cat’s hatred of the first weekday.

One wit alluded to the fat cat’s famous love of pasta, writing, “The Garfields hijacked the ship in an attempt to get to Italy for lasagne-related reasons.”

“Least I know mine’s safe!” said one Jim Davis die-hard, posting a pic of the orange communications device, which fetches upwards of $100 on Ebay.

“Best part of this is imagining that the container ship, or container, is just filled with loose Garfield phones,” said another. “No packaging, no pallets. Just…thousands of phones tossed into a large space.”

However, not everyone thought the Garfield phone flotilla was so hiss-terical.

Ar Viltansou worried about the impact of the plastic doppelgängers on marine wildlife, as they likely won’t decompose in our lifetimes, according to the BBC. And, as the shipping container is currently inaccessible, experts have no way of knowing how many more of the novelty items it holds — or how much longer it will be regurgitating them into the sea.