After waking up and forcing Jon Arbuckle to get up in order to feed him, Garfield is tossed outside along with Odie when the two pets get into a skirmish and they decide to chase after an old neighbor's dog. Enraged at this, the neighbor, Hubert, calls the pound on them and, while Garfield manages to escape, Odie, being as clueless and naive as he is, gets caught and is taken away. Initially not seeming too distressed at what's happened, Garfield goes home and tries to tell Jon about it but is unable to get it across. Finding himself bored without Odie around, even when he treats himself to a very big midnight snack, Garfield decides to head to the pound and bust him out. Though he manages to get in, he's ultimately captured himself and learns from another cat there that Odie is going to be euthanized come morning. Not knowing what to do to save Odie, Garfield comes to realize just how much he really values the dog's companionship and becomes determined to save him, no matter what.
Looking at the production of this special, it's interesting how much the Peanuts actually played into Garfield's leap from the comic strip to television. For one, Phil Roman, who directed this, along with all but the last of the specials, and who would also act as a producer on Garfield and Friends, had worked extensively with Bill Melendez on the Peanuts specials, having co-directed some, including the latter Peanuts features, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!), with him, as well as having directed his fair share of them by himself. For another, because both Garfield and Peanuts were owned by the United Media newspaper syndicate, Melendez and his frequent producer, Lee Mendelson, would co-produce the special, as well as the second one, Garfield on the Town. However, what's really interesting to note is that, when Jim Davis was in California, trying to determine the best way to animate Garfield dancing to the opening song, it was Charles Schulz himself who suggested that he do this by giving Garfield much bigger feet than he'd had in the strip up to that point.
Deciding to go down to the pound and break Odie out, Garfield ends up getting caught and put in the cell with him, where he learns from another cat, Fast Eddy, that the dog's going to be put to sleep the next morning. In spite of this, Garfield reassures Odie that he'll be okay, but during the night, as the dog sleeps, he remembers the good times they had together, and when the guard comes to take Odie away, he's unable to stop it, shedding a silent tear as he watches him get dragged down the hall. But, when a family comes by to pick out a pet to adopt, Garfield takes the opportunity when they open the door to escape, along with the other animals, and free Odie. The two of them manage to escape the pound completely, along with the others, and make their way back home, where they immediately begin enjoying each other's company again and things soon go back to normal, while Jon is none the wiser about what's happened.
As I said, this first special is very much a prototype in a lot of ways and not just because of the rough, early character designs (which I'll go into presently). For one, in his first performance as Garfield, Lorenzo Music is fairly subdued and low-key in how he voices him, never sounding very excited and always coming off as something of a lethargic boor. It's not a bad performance at all and it's now doubt how Music figured Garfield would sound, both from what he saw in the comic strips and also from what Jim Davis and Phil Roman may have told him, but it's very low energy and Garfield, thankfully, would become more lively as the specials and shows went on. What's more, save for the opening, where he dances to the theme song, Garfield always walks on all fours like a normal cat and, while he sits up plenty of times and is clearly anthropomorphic, he only stands on his hind legs in a couple of instances. I'm so used to Garfield often walking around on two legs and being treated more like a little person rather than a cat by Jon and everyone else that it's a little odd to see him like this. Speaking of which, it's also odd to see him actually eating cat-food. He's clearly not thrilled about it when Jon serves it to him at the beginning but he still eats it, something I don't think I've ever seen him do elsewhere, as he often goes for people food more often than not, especially good old lasagna.
Another thing I noticed is that Garfield, while still likable, feels more mean-spirited in his antics than he's usually depicted. Granted, he's always been portrayed as being rather irascible and cynical, and his pushing Odie off the counter for no reason other than because he can and the way he forces Jon to get up and feed him are staples of his character, but in addition to that, you have the moment where he tells Odie, after he barks and startles him, "Good morning, Odie. You're not gonna to live to see your next birthday, you know that, don't you?" On top of that, when Odie startles him again while he's eating, causing him to face-plant into his food, Garfield grabs him by the neck and smashes the food bowl right into his face. He does a similar thing to Jon at the end of the special, when his begging for food only gets him a plate of bacon and eggs, as opposed to the piece of steak that it netted Odie, and there's also a moment where Garfield knocks the door down on top of Jon when he doesn't answer it right away, growling afterward, "When I want in, I want in now!" I didn't remember Garfield coming off this unapologetic in the other specials and in Garfield and Friends, and I've since learned that his character was still a work in progress for his at the time, as this is more in line with how he was originally depicted at the beginning of the comic strip. Much like how the typically good-natured Mickey Mouse started off as something of a rascal, Garfield's personality was gradually softened to make him more appealing to the mainstream.
Henry Corden, who's best remembered at having taken over from Alan Reed as the voice of Fred Flintstone, has a brief role here as the voice of Hubert, a crotchety old neighbor of Jon's whose little dog runs afoul of Garfield and Odie. Irritated at the two of them harassing his pet, Hubert warns them to stay away but his warnings fall on deaf ears, prompting him to grab his cane and attempt to whack them with it. This only leads to him getting a plant pot on his head and he angrily has his wife, Reba (voiced by Hal Smith), bring him the telephone so he can call the city pound, leading to Odie being taken away. Down at the pound, when he gets caught and thrown into the cell with Odie, Garfield meets a few interesting animals, including Skinny (voiced by Hal Smith), a cat who asks him if he has any cigarettes on him. When Garfield asks why he'd ask something like that, Skinny answers, "I don't know. It's just a question you're supposed to ask when you're in the slammer." He then meets Fast Eddy, a brown, long-necked, streetsmart cat and his "associate," a dumb bulldog named Fluffy (both voiced by Hank Garrett). Eddy tells Garfield that he'd best be nice to Odie, since he's the next animal to be put down since no one's come by to claim him and it'll happen come morning. He then tells Garfield all of them ended up in the pound: Fluffy because of his dumbness and inability to be housebroken, Eddy as a stray on the street, a dog named Fido because he wasn't on a leash, a pink cat named Rocky for beating up a neighborhood dog, a brown cat named Charlotte for sharpening her claws on something priceless, and a dog named Weird Lonny for impersonating a moose (he happens to be wearing a moose head when Eddy speaks about him). During this scene, you see how Fluffy's idiocy gets on Eddy's nerves, to where he slaps him and forces his face into the floor. The next morning, when Odie is being taken away to be euthanized, Eddy tries to stop Garfield when he rushes to the door, telling him that he'll end up the same way, but is unsuccessful. Afterward, he tells him that a family is coming by to adopt a pet and could be their ticket out, giving Garfield the idea that ultimately leads to him saving Odie.
Besides voicing Odie, Gregg Berger also plays the role of a TV salesman who has a big, grinning envelope of a mouth and whom Garfield cannot escape when he's flipping TV channels and his dialogue, which changes between each flip and which he says all in the same tone, is pretty funny, especially when combined with Garfield's growing irritation with each channel flip: "You know Pleasure Motors is conveniently located right here in Downtown." " Of course, if you can't make it around Downtown, okay, we have new locations under construction in Midtown..." "Uptown," "and in the Loop." "To Pleasure Motors, your business is our pleasure." "For our pleasure is your business." "Then our pleasure is none of your business." Finally, there's a brief appearance by a little girl (voiced by Angela Lee) who is the member of the family at the pound who chooses Garfield to adopt. Garfield remarks that she has good taste and when the guard opens the door up, it gives him and the other animals to escape from their cell.
As you've had to have noticed by now, the prototypey nature of the special that I mentioned earlier is especially clear in the look of the main characters, as they're not as refined as they would eventually be. It's to be expected, as this was still in the early days of the comic strip, which began in 1978, and Garfield certainly looks more like his more familiar, contemporary self here than he did in the first strips, but he's a lot chunkier, with more fat in his face, cheeks, and neck, and his body has more mass to it. Plus, again, because he almost never walks on his hind legs, he comes off more like an actual cat than as the small person he would feel like in later years. Odie also looks really weird because of how elongated his neck is, as well as how narrow his head is and how utterly vacant and "dur" his eyes are often drawn. Jon is the one whose look seemed to change the least over time but his face and head still look a little different, though the oddities are so slight that I can't quite put my finger on what they are. If I were to try to explain, I think it's because the details of his features look less pronounced than they would later be, with his face looking more flattened, if that makes any sense. The other characters all look appropriate and fit in with that Jim Davis style, although the one guard at the pound is the exception, as he has more realistic details to his face than you typically see in these cartoons and he was clearly meant to be particularly menacing when he throws Garfield into the cell and when he tries to stop the animals from getting out (he's akin to the creepy old man in Garfield's Halloween Adventure in that respect). It's also always interesting to see these character styles applied to other dogs and cats and see how they come out. For instance, the other dogs at the pound look much more true to life, while the cats come off as more like variations on Garfield's design, especially the cats named Rocky and Charlotte, while Fast Eddy looks like you took Garfield, dyed him brown, gave him liposuction, stretched his neck out, and gave him a lot more pronounced fur on his face. And finally, I have to admit that the little dog that belongs to Hubert and who annoys Garfield early on threw me, as I thought it was another cat, given its look!
Animation-wise, the Garfield specials have been known for being simple and not the most fluid but still appealing to the eye, with some having particularly good instances of it (Garfield's Thanksgiving comes to mind). With Here Comes Garfield, it seems like all of the animation budget went into the opening, where Garfield dances to the theme song, as that's really good, fluid, and rather life-like, but the rest of the special is comprised of standard television animation, and it's a little stiff, at that. While not nearly as limited as Hanna-Barbera's early TV work or Rankin-Bass' forays into cel animation when they weren't doing stop-motion, it's still not quite as graceful as it would become as the specials and cartoons went on. The special's actual look is also different from what you normally expect from Garfield in animation, as everything's drawn in a "harder" style, rather than the fairly soft feel you often got. Undoubtedly, that results from this having been produced by Mendelson-Melendez Productions, rather than Film Roman, which would be created in 1984 to produce the third special, Garfield in the Rough. Regardless, it's just as appealing to look at as any of the other specials and cartoons, with rich colors (especially in Garfield's flashbacks to when he and Odie were first introduced, giving them a very idyllic, fanciful feel) and the environments and settings ranging from having that simplicity of just a colored background, with only a few foreground elements, to being more detailed and lit in a way to create something of an atmosphere, particularly the sequence where Garfield sneaks into the kitchen for a midnight snack and the section at the pound, which looks really miserable, compounded by the rain falling outside and the dawning realization that Garfield may never see Odie again (in fact, it really feels more like a prison). Although, one thing I have to say is that always I hate it when, in animation, they put a character behind bars and yet, draw a wide enough space between the bars to where the character could logically just slip out, and this special is certainly guilty of that in a few instances. I shouldn't take it so seriously but it just bugs me.
When I first watched Here Comes Garfield, I was a bit taken aback at how it starts off light-hearted and playful, as you'd expect it to be, but then, when Garfield goes to the pound to bust Odie out, things suddenly get deadly serious. We've gone from the silliness of Odie's stupidity getting him taken to the pound and Garfield realizing how boring life is without him to the very dark and true-to-life issue of unclaimed animals at the pound being euthanized. Once Garfield is faced with this horrific turn of events, the special becomes rather downbeat and sad, as it feels like there's no hope for Odie, with Garfield unable to think of a way to save him, and as the hours pass into dawn and the rain falls outside, Garfield thinks about all the fun times the two of them have had. It then comes time for Odie to be taken away and Garfield, despite charging for the door in an attempt to stop it, is unable to do so. He forlornly tells him, "I'll see you, Odie... sometime. Somewhere," and the two of them touch paws, Garfield telling him, "So long, old friend," before Odie is dragged down the corridor to his doom. Garfield can do nothing but watch, actually shedding a tear as he does, and the whole scene is played to some rather sad music and a melancholy song that makes it all the more downbeat. You don't usually think of Garfield as something that gets rather dramatic and tugs at your heartstrings but this is an instance where that's very much the case and it definitely wouldn't be the last, given the meat the second special's, Garfield on the Town, story, and moments in other ones, like the subplot with Grandma Arbuckle in A Garfield Christmas Special.
The special opens up with a shot of the sun rising over some mountains in the background of a countryside, with the camera pulling back to reveal that it's outside of a house's window, under which Garfield is snoozing in his little bed, with a ticking clock on the floor beside him. A blue bird lands on the sill of the open window and begins twittering, something that Garfield doesn't care for at all. He grabs the alarm clock and tosses it up at the bird, causing it to let out a panicked yell, accompanied by the sound of smashing glass. Garfield then sits up with a yawn and stretches, before beginning to dance as the title song by Lou Rawls begins playing. There's no other way to describe this other than to say it's really quite enjoyable to see this tubby tabby, who usually won't move an inch if he can help it, get up and dance in front of and around his bed to this very upbeat and rather catchy song, which is all about how cool and witty of a cat he is. As I said earlier, the animation of this first bit is really well-done and fluid and it's cool to see Garfield move around so gracefully and sure-footed, in spite of his girth. Of course, once he's done and the song draws to a close, Garfield immediately collapses face-first back into his bed.
Following that, the special truly begins with Garfield still lying in bed, grumbling about mornings, when Odie comes in and barks, causing him to jump up off-camera and come slamming back down. After threatening Odie's life and saying that he hates dogs, he decides to have breakfast since he's awake, only to find no food in his bowl. Realizing that Jon is still asleep, commenting, "It's hard to find good help these days," he goes into his bedroom, pulls the cover off of him, and climbs up and walks across his front as he sleeps. Sitting on his chest in front of his head, Garfield opens up one of Jon's eyes, but when he gets no reaction from that, he jumps up and dances atop his face. This does nothing either, so he gets back on his chest and shakes Jon's head until he finally awakens with a yell. Garfield tells him, "Good morning, sunshine. Welcome to another fun-filled day with your favorite pet," and Jon says he supposes he wants breakfast. Instantly excited at this, Garfield jumps off and runs out of the room, as Jon tiredly intones, "I'm so happy to own a cat." Walking into the kitchen, he finds Garfield eagerly waiting by his food bowl and hopping excitedly when he walks up. Asked what he'd like, Garfield says, "Oh, a cup of coffee, danish, morning paper." Jon's decision? "Okay, one bowl of cat-food coming right up," prompting Garfield to remark, "Nobody listens anymore." After Jon brings him his breakfast, and the two of them trade barbs on why he doesn't chase mice like other cats, Garfield notices Odie run past them on the counter. Excusing himself, he follows Odie and pushes him off the counter from behind, adding, "I'm not known for my compassion." Walking back to his bowl, Garfield sniffs the food and remarks, "The bouquet leaves something to be desired," but starts eating it anyway. Odie then pops up behind him and barks, startling him and causing him to plant his face into the food. Aggravated, Garfield grabs Odie by the neck and slams the food bowl right into his face. Odie, seeming to see this as playful rather than vindictive, tackles Garfield and the two of them start skirmishing on the counter, stopping when Jon suggests they go outside to continue their brawl.
With that, he tosses them out the door, into a pile of flowers, and the two of them continue their tussle, jumping around and hurdling, with Garfield flinging flowers into Odie's face at one point. Garfield's tail flops out of the flowers by a little gray, shaggy dog with a bow in its hair, and said dog proceeds to bite him. Enraged at this, Garfield threatens the dog, sending it yelping back to its house, and suggests to Odie that they chase and catch him. The dog runs to the porch, where its owner, Hubert, is sitting in a rocking chair. It runs and hides beneath the chair, and when Hubert learns that it's scared of Garfield, he sees him and Odie peek out from behind a nearby bush. He warns them to get off his property but, in the next cut, they're now at his birdbath, with Garfield standing behind it, while Odie is in the bath itself. Hubert then warns not to come any closer but, in the next cut, they're now behind a couple of plastic flamingo lawn decorations. Deciding that's it, Hubert yells for his wife, Reba, and demands to know where his stick is. Reba then points out that it's right next to him, on the porch. Grabbing it, he sees Garfield and Odie are now right in front of the porch and he tries to entice them over, saying he wants to pet them, before swinging wildly at them. He misses them each time, as they run around the porch, and he ends up breaking things and knocking a plant pot hanging from the ceiling onto his head, just as he has Odie cornered and is about to whack him. Garfield and Odie give each other five, as Reba comes back out onto the porch and, seeing the pot on his head, remarks, "Potted again." Now thoroughly angry, Hubert, claiming he's been assaulted, demands she bring him the phone, before telling Garfield and Odie that he's going to fix them good now; the two pets simply mock him with stupid faces in response. Getting the phone, Hubert calls the city pound and asks for a truck to be sent over. One immediately pulls up (though Hubert asks what took them) and he tells them to get Garfield and Odie. Seeing the dogcatcher approaching, Garfield warns Odie and runs for it, hiding in a bush. Odie, however, is too dim-witted to realize the trouble he's in and just sits there, panting, ignoring Garfield's warning to run. He's scooped up with a net and carried over to the truck, continuing to pant with a vacant expression on his face. Thrown into the back of the truck, he looks out through the bars when Garfield runs up to him and tells him that he's in so much trouble that he may not see him ever again. Odie simply licks his face in response, right before the truck drives off, as Garfield watches. He remarks, "Oh, well. Good riddance, Odie. I never liked you much, anyhow. Ten thousand dogs in the city and I have to live with Twiddle-dee, the wonder dummy."
Coming back home, and knocking the door down on top of Jon when he doesn't let him in quickly enough, Garfield is asked where Odie is. Garfield mimes what happened but Jon, being somewhat slow and dim, simply asks him if he has fleas, prompting Garfield to say the classic Cool Hand Luke line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." Later, unable to find anything on TV to watch other than an inescapable commercial for Pleasure Motors, Garfield sits in the chair and absentmindedly claws at the tip of the arm, bored out of his mind. He realizes he misses Odie, as shocking as that notion is to him, and after he scratched a massive chunk out of the chair's arm, he thinks back to when the two of them were just a puppy and a kitten. But, this idyllic memory is shattered when Odie is netted and taken away in the fantasy. Disturbed by this, Garfield gets off the chair and walks to his bed. Later that night, he's sleeping but is woken up by the aroma of food in the kitchen, much to his delight.
This leads into the sequence in the special that I feel goes on longer than it should: as Jon sleeps, Garfield sneaks down to the kitchen, as Lou Rawls sings a song called, Long About Midnight, which is all about what you're seeing (in spots, Rawls does literally describe in song what Garfield's doing). It's not a bad song and it has a catchy, funky beat to it, but this sequence really starts drag after a while. Garfield creeps his way to the stairs, makes his way down, actually walking back up a few steps at some point, enters the kitchen, jumps up on the table, and turns on the light to find food all around him. Instead of just eating it, he starts playing with it and the silverware, pretending he's a soldier, diving into the bowl of potato salad (which he instantly regrets), puts spaghetti on his head to look like a woman and mimics Scarlett O'Hara, "Rhett, Rhett, whatever shall I do? Wherever shall I go?", and acting like an alien, saying, "Take me to your leader, Earthling, or I'll atomize your face," in a stereotypical alien voice. With that, he starts eating, chowing on bananas, a leg of lamb, toast and jam, before falling backwards into the bowl of potato salad. Rawls then keeps singing, as we watch Garfield lay there, turning blue at one point to go along with a verse of the song, before he gets up, walks over to a ham, and is about to eat it, when he sees "nature's most perfect food": lasagna. Acting like an Italian lover, he says, "You know I can't resist you when you wear garlic in your meat sauce. Would you like to come to my place for dinner? Oh, very well. I'll just... have dinner right here." He proceeds to stuff his face with the lasagna, eating every last drop, before crawling into the pan and laying there, as Rawls keeps on singing. The shot holds on him laying there for a bit before slowly pushing in, as the song finally comes to an end. Garfield grumbles, "I'm bored. Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored. I'm bored." He then decides to go down to the pound and break Odie out, declaring, " Look out, pound, here comes Garfield!"
Arriving at the pound, Garfield sneaks his way towards the main door and struggles to jump up and reach the knob, only to feel like an idiot when he realizes that the door is not only unlocked but is loose. Heading inside and finding where Odie is being held, he spots a set of keys, gripped in the hand of a sleeping guard. He then attempts to pull the keys out of the guard's hand but his overzealous way of doing it wakes him up and Garfield is promptly thrown inside the cage with the other animals. After Skinny randomly asks him for cigarettes, Garfield meets up with Odie, who happily licks him but who he admonishes for getting him locked up too. They then meet Fast Eddy and Fluffy, the former of whom tells Garfield that he'd best be nice to Odie, seeing as how he's set to be euthanized come morning, a revelation that chills Garfield to the bone. After Eddy tells him how he, Fluffy, and some of the other animals ended up in the pound, they decide it's time to go to sleep. Garfield assures Odie that he'll be okay, which is enough to pep the dog up, but it's clear from the expression on his face that Garfield doesn't know how to keep that promise, as Odie settles down to sleep.
Later on, as rain pours outside the barred window, Garfield walks over to it and looks out, shivering from the cold air. Looking back at Odie, he sees that he's shivering as well and walks back there, lying down beside him and warming him up. Night passes into early dawn, and as the rain slows to a drizzle, Odie's snuggling against Garfield wakes him up. Looking back at the window, he brushes his hand across Odie's back and pats him, as the sad, melancholy song, So Long, Old Friend, by Desiree Goyette, begins. He walks back to the window and thinks back to when Jon first brought Odie home to him when they were young, revealing that, despite his teasing, he actually did like Odie, a notion that the song emphasizes. After some playing around in the living room, the two of them run out the door and chase each other around a tree in the yard, with Garfield leaning up against it while Odie continues circling it aimlessly. Garfield also thinks back to how fun the little skirmish he and Odie had in the flowers earlier really was, sighing as it really hits him that he's going to lose this dear friend of his, as the song ends on the lyric, "I never knew I'd have to say so long." Garfield then turns his head when he hears the cell door open behind him and he watches as the guard picks up Odie up. Panicking, Garfield rushes to the door, ignoring Fast Eddy, who tries to stop him, but gets the door slammed in his face, which he's unable to open. Before Odie's taken away, Garfield tells him that he'll see him... sometime, somewhere, and is licked in response. The two of them touch paws before he's dragged down the hall, Garfield shedding a silent tear as he watches, with the last lyric of the song being replayed.
While he's lamenting, Fast Eddy snaps Garfield out of his funk, telling him that a family is coming by to adopt a pet and that this could be their ticket out. He lines up with the other animals in the cell, trying to make himself look presentable, as the little girl of the family tries to make a decision. To Garfield's surprise, she picks him, prompting him to remark on her good taste, and once the door is opened, he makes a run for it, followed by the other animals. They catch up with the guard who's dragging Odie and Garfield bites his hand, making him let go and allowing Odie to join them in their flight. The two of them run down the halls, only to run into the one guard from before as he stands in front of the bolted main door. However, when the other animals catch up, they all snarl at the guard and charge him, forcing the door down behind him and allowing them to escape into the streets. As they run free, with Garfield and Odie heading home, the much more upbeat song, Together Again, sung by Goyette and Lou Rawls, about friends reuniting, is heard. The two pets knock the front door down on top of Jon again as he's trying to screw it back on and run through the house, jumping onto the table, with Garfield slipping off the edge of it from momentum. He quickly gets back up there and he and Odie continue playing, when Jon walks over and tells them, "Well, I suppose you boys had a big night, singing on the fence, chasing cars, while sat home and worried myself sick over you." The two of them exchange glances and nod but then, much to his surprise, they both kiss him on either side of his face, with Garfield saying, "Home is where they understand you."
I've said it before but it's worth repeating: Desiree Goyette (who also served as the model for Garfield's dancing at the beginning) and Ed Bogas are just as instrumental to the lasting endurance of these Garfield cartoons as Phil Roman and Jim Davis himself, as their music gives them their own individual voice and identity, if a bit harder to pin down style-wise than something like, say, the music for the Peanuts. As with everything else in this special, though, the music here is a bit different in style from what would follow. For instance, the first thing you hear is a whimsical, idyllic piano bit for the opening shot of the picturesque landscape, which is heard again when Jon is shown to still be sleeping in bed, but as Garfield is gradually introduced, we get a saxophone bit that alludes to his lazy and sluggish nature. An instrumental version of the opening title song becomes something of a leitmotif for him, as does its style, while Jon gets an off-kilter horn piece that alludes to his put upon nature, and what would become Odie's theme throughout the cartoons, this sort of low-key, trumpet bit that alludes somewhat to fox hunts and the like, is heard for the first time here, as well. When Garfield and Odie are tossed outside to continue their roughhousing, you get a more upbeat horn theme; a harmonica rendition of the tune, No Place Like Home, is heard when Hubert is first introduced, leading into a fast-paced, sneaking harmonica bit for when Garfield and Odie slowly approach the front porch, and an old-timey, saloon-style piano bit for when Hubert tries to clobber them; a more urgent-sounding saxophone theme is heard when Odie is thrown into the back of the dogcatcher's truck; and the scenes in the jail have some very bluesy music, made up of a piano and mouth-harp, played to them, akin to something you'd hear being played by somebody locked up in the slammer. What's most surprising about the music, though, is how melancholy and sad it gets at points. You first get a taste of it when Garfield starts to miss Odie at home and you hear a soft, piano version of what would eventually be the song, So Long Old Friend, with the lead-in to the actual song being a very downbeat mixture of piano keys and a somber violin. By the time you hear the song itself, you'll be more than ready for the very upbeat Together Again when they manage to escape and which closes out the special over the credits.
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