The Garfield phone: the eighties' best-known landline, and the beach that keeps giving it back

A cat who hated Mondays, molded in orange plastic, wired to the wall, and sold to a generation of children who had just been given their first bedroom extension. Forty years on, the Garfield phone is the one novelty telephone everybody remembers — partly because of the eyes, and partly because the Atlantic Ocean refuses to let it go.

The cat arrives, then the phone

Jim Davis's Garfield debuted in newspapers on June 19, 1978, and it went on to become the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world. The licensing machine that followed was enormous — mugs, suction-cup car window cats, bedsheets, the lot — and a great deal of it was aimed squarely at children who had bedroom phone lines, a distinctly 1980s American amenity. Tyco Toys, better known for slot cars and electric trains, saw the opening.

The Garfield Telephone shipped around November 1984 and retailed for roughly $45 to $50 — real money for a phone, and a great deal more than the beige rotary the phone company would rent you. Tyco's line for it was "real phones for real fun," and the pitch was honest. It was not a toy. It plugged into the wall jack, it dialed out, and it rang. It also happened to be an orange cat lying on his belly with the handset resting across his back.

Tyco filed the phone under its Personality Phones line, and the personality did the selling. Pick up the handset and Garfield's heavy eyelids slide open, as though you have just disturbed his nap. Set it down and they close. Children found this endlessly satisfying. So, quietly, did adults, which is why so many of these lived on grown-up desks rather than in children's bedrooms.

Reading the model number

Collectors tend to lump every desk Garfield together, but Tyco revised it three times in three years, and the revisions track the telephone industry's own transition from pulse dialing to touch-tone. The model number is printed on the box and molded or labeled on the underside of the phone.

Model	Year	What changed
1205 desk	1984	The original. Pulse dial only, a wide and rather unwieldy handset. Made in Hong Kong.
1201 desk	1985	Tone dial. A slimmer, more comfortable handset that carried through the rest of the run.
1207 desk	1986	Switchable pulse/tone. The 1986 revision also moved production from Hong Kong to China, so the country of origin on the base is a quick date check.
1209 wall	1986	Garfield clings to the wall by his claws, tail removable, head turned by hand to face whichever way you mount it. Pulse/tone, last-number redial, mute. Fits a standard AT&T wall plate.
Talking Telephone	1992	Eleven built-in phrases play when the phone rings. Made in the People's Republic of China. The last of the line.

The wall phone deserves its own footnote. It is the one where the smug expression is the point — Garfield hanging on for dear life, glaring at whoever is about to make him ring — and the prototype was hand-painted by Jim Davis himself. It also carries a more complicated origin story: collector references list it as made in Hong Kong, while Garfield's own licensing history records Taiwan, so it is likely both are true across the production run. Either way, the wall model turns up far less often than the desk version, and boxed examples are rare.

The cave in Brittany

None of this would make the Garfield phone more than a fond footnote in novelty-phone history if it were not for what happened off the Iroise coast of Finistère, at the far western tip of Brittany, where the beaches face the open Atlantic.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, during a storm, a shipping container went into the sea. Nobody filed a report that anyone has found. What the people of Plouarzel noticed was that after every big blow, orange plastic came ashore — an ear here, a handset there, sometimes a nearly whole cat with its wiring still trailing behind it. It went on for years, then decades. A local beach-cleaning association called Ar Viltansoù, led by Claire Simonin-Le Meur, said that in its eighteen years of pickups it had found pieces of Garfield telephones almost every single time out. In one year alone, as many as 200 Garfield fragments were logged on the local beaches. The group made Garfield the mascot of its campaign against marine plastic, for the simple reason that nothing illustrates the point better than a 1985 cat still grinning after thirty years in salt water.

The source was a local mystery until March 2019, when the group's publicity reached a farmer named René Morvan. He remembered the storm. Afterward he and his brother had gone looking along the cliffs and found a sea cave, reachable only at low tide, with a metal container wedged in a fissure roughly a hundred feet deep inside it — packed with Garfield phones.

Volunteers went in on the next low tide. The container was still there, but it was empty; the sea had been emptying it, a piece at a time, since before some of the volunteers were born. Under the boulders at the mouth of the cave they pulled out 23 complete handsets with their electronics and wires intact. Fabien Boileau, director of the Iroise Marine Nature Park, admitted that nobody knew whether one container had gone overboard or several. Given how slowly the plastic breaks down, the pieces will keep surfacing for a very long time.

What one is worth now

The Garfield phone is common. Tyco sold a great many, and the desk model survives in quantity because it lived on desks rather than in toy boxes. That keeps the floor reasonable — a played-with, untested desk phone is a $40 to $80 object, and one price-tracking site that follows Tyco collectibles puts the average sale just under $100, with a recorded range from about $40 up to $310. A tested, working example with clean paint is the $100 phone House Digest described as the thrift-store find worth carrying to the register. The box roughly doubles it: complete, boxed desk phones are quoted around $200.

The wall phone runs a little higher on average — about $108 across tracked sales, with a recorded high of $239 loose — and new-in-box wall phones have been offered in the $350 to $500 range, which is where the true scarcity in this category lives. Prices on Etsy for the desk model have been listed near $300, though asking and getting are different sports.

Reading one at an estate sale

• Lift the handset and watch the eyes. They should open smoothly and close fully. A phone whose eyes stick half open has a worn or broken linkage under the head, and that is the one repair almost nobody does properly.
• Flip it over. Model number, Tyco name, and country of origin are on the base. "Hong Kong" is the earliest production; "China" is the 1986 revision or later.
• Check the paint on the stripes and the nose. The black stripes and the pink nose are the first details to wear, and sun-faded orange reads as peach. Original paint in good color is worth paying for; touched-up paint is easy to spot under a bright light because the sheen does not match.
• Test it if you can. A working phone is worth meaningfully more than an untested one, and the difference is a two-dollar adapter and a landline or a cheap VoIP box. Sellers who say "untested" have usually tested.
• Count the cords. An original coiled handset cord and line cord are minor but real value. Replacement black cords are the giveaway of a phone that has been through a few hands.

Why this one and not the others

The 1980s produced a whole menagerie of character phones — Kermit reclining on a wedge, Mickey Mouse holding out the receiver, Snoopy on his doghouse, a hamburger, the Batphone — and several of them are worth more than Garfield today. But none of them have become the novelty phone in the way this one has, and the reasons are instructive for anyone who collects mid-century and later Americana. It moved. A phone with eyes that open when you pick it up is a toy that rewards you every single time, which is rarer in the licensed-goods world than it sounds. It was funny in the way the strip was funny — sleepy, contemptuous, slightly overweight — rather than merely cute. And then the ocean turned it into a parable about plastic, which gave a generation that had forgotten it a reason to look it up.

Find one at a sale with its eyes still working, and you are holding the best-known telephone of the decade, a small piece of French environmental history, and a cat who, forty years later, still does not want to be woken up.