The Garfield aquarium: the fish tank where the fish live inside the cat

Hawkeye Corp. molded a two-gallon fishbowl into the stomach of a cartoon cat famous for eating anything that holds still. Half the listings online date it to 1978. The box says otherwise.

The fish live inside the cat

Novelty aquariums usually settle for putting a character next to the water — a figurine on the rim, a decal on the glass. The Garfield Aquarium commits to the harder joke. The bowl is the cat. Garfield sits about 18 inches tall, paws clamped around a transparent sphere where his stomach should be, wearing the heavy-lidded expression of someone who has already decided how this ends. Your fish swim laps inside the one predator in the house with a documented appetite problem.

It works as an object because nobody involved winked at the camera. The molding is faithful to Jim Davis's line — the split ears, the yellow muzzle, the pink oval nose — and the glossy orange body reads as ceramic from across a room, though it is all lightweight plastic. Lift the head off and there is a light fixture inside it, so the whole thing glows from the top down after dark, which is either charming or ominous depending on how much you identify with the fish.

The 1978 that isn't

Spend five minutes shopping for one of these and you will find sellers confidently dating it to 1978 — "vintage 1978 Garfield fish tank" is practically the standard title. The tank does carry a 1978 stamp, but it is the copyright date for the character, who debuted in newspapers that June. It says nothing about when the aquarium was made.

The box settles it. Original packaging is marked Garfield © 1978 United Feature Syndicate — 1990 Hawkeye Corp., which puts actual production at the start of the nineties, square in the middle of Garfield's merchandising peak. Because so few boxes survived — an 18-inch corrugated carton is exactly the kind of thing that gets thrown out in January — the misdating has become self-perpetuating: sellers copy the stamp, buyers copy the sellers, and a 1990 pet product ages itself twelve years every time it changes hands.

If the box didn't survive to date your tank, the catalog record did: the aquarium in the 1991 Sears Wish Book, photographed from our copy.

The catalog record runs a year behind the box, which is exactly where it should be: a tank stamped 1990 by Hawkeye turns up for sale in the 1991 Sears Wish Book — an object we have written about in its own right — which is how most of these reached American living rooms in the first place: circled in ballpoint sometime in November, unwrapped in December, and holding a bewildered goldfish by New Year's.

What came in the box

Hawkeye sold this as a functioning starter aquarium, not a display piece. The complete kit included the two-gallon bowl, an air pump, airline tubing and an air stone, an undergravel filter plate, a cover plate for the bowl opening, and the light system in the head; packaged examples also turn up with the original sachets of fish food and dechlorinator. Gravel and the light bulb were left to the buyer — the box art shows both, which has confused more than one person opening a "complete" example.

Two gallons was an ordinary size for a kid's first aquarium in 1990 and is considered cramped by modern fishkeeping standards, which is one reason most surviving examples have retired from active duty. The ones that come through our door tend to have spent their second act as coin banks, candy dishes, and Halloween props — jobs the belly bowl handles with equal indifference.

What to check before you buy

• The head light. The fixture lives inside the removable head, wired to a cord that dangles behind. It is the most commonly missing or damaged part — cords get cut, chewed, and lost — and a tank without a working light is a body without a head, value-wise. Ask for a photo of it lit.
• Leaks. Ask whether the bowl has been fill-tested. Plastic seams from 1990 do not owe anyone anything, and a slow seep only reveals itself with water in it.
• The bowl itself. The clear belly scratches and hazes far more readily than the orange body. Light interior scuffing mostly disappears once the bowl is filled; deep exterior scratches and clouding do not.
• Seams and warping. Where the head meets the shoulders, the halves sometimes sit slightly proud or warped. Minor misalignment hides when the head is seated; check that it still seats.
• The box. Rare enough that many collectors have never seen one. It carries the only date that matters and multiplies the price accordingly.

What one is worth now

The market has been steady and unglamorous, which is roughly what you want from a plastic cat. Complete, tested examples cleared around $300 at the start of the decade, and boxed survivors are asked well above that today.

Incomplete tanks — no light fixture, no pump, no cover plate — trade far lower and mostly sell to people who want the sculpture rather than the aquarium. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. It just should not cost $300.

The rest of the orange empire

By 1990, licensing Garfield was less a decision than a reflex — the cat was on telephones, plush store displays, suction-cup car windows, and, evidently, life-support systems for goldfish. If this corner of the catalog interests you, we have covered the Garfield telephone and the Breton beach that kept coughing them up, and how to date a Dakin Garfield plush by the space between his eyes. The aquarium sits comfortably in that company: a licensed object that outlived its function and kept its face.