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Overview

Garfield's Babes and Bullets is the tenth Garfield television special. It is based on a segment of the same name from the book Garfield: His 9 Lives.

Synopsis[]

A parody of film noir mysteries, Garfield gets the chance to play hero as he imagines himself as Sam Spayed, an ace detective who's been chosen by the mysterious Tanya to find her husband's murderer.

Plot[]

On a sunny day, Garfield goes to a closet and opens it out of boredom, only to hear saxophone music burst out of it. He shuts it quickly, then opens it again; the music starts up again, and Garfield finds a trench coat and fedora.

He then enters a fantasy world in which he is Sam Spayed, a second rate private investigator living in San Francisco in a film noir atmosphere. As Sam starts to head out to get a phone installed, he receives a visit from Tanya O'Tabby, a beautiful woman who hires Sam to investigate the death of her husband, Professor O'Tabby, who apparently drove off a clifftop road an hour and 40 miles away from the city the previous Friday night. Tanya believes it was murder, as her husband was an excellent driver, but the death was ruled as a simple car accident as the police believe her husband fell asleep at the wheel. Despite initially suspecting foul play (that Tanya killed her husband either for his money or because he was unfaithful, with the intention of setting Sam up to get clean away; Sam states it as "one of the oldest shams in the book"), Sam agrees to take the case.

No solid proof of murder comes to light when Sam visits the morgue, although he notes that O'Tabby's shirt, chest and stomach hairs have yellowish-brown stains on them and secretly pockets a mysterious, painted "stone" that the coroner overlooked. Next, after he meets up with Tanya again and tries to hit on her, and subsequently gets a beating from his landlord over late rent, Sam goes to the St. Morris university where O'Tabby worked and meets the late man's colleague and former advisor Professor O'Felix, who now runs the history department following O'Tabby's death. As they share a cup of coffee, O'Felix tells Sam how O'Tabby was on his way to visit an elderly benefactress the night he died, but dismisses Sam's idea that the professor was having an affair, saying his one weakness was instead a coffee addiction. When Sam notes the poor quality of the coffee, O'Felix also mentions a girl who made excellent coffee that left the university recently, whose chores he had to pick up in addition to his own duties.

With the phone installed by the time he gets back, Sam phones Tanya to tell her what he knows so far, with her also explaining to Sam O'Felix's past with her husband (including O'Felix being both with the university all his life and O'Tabby's inspiration), only for Sam's newly-hired secretary Kitty -who he hired the day before- to spill coffee on him when he mentions the possibility of O'Tabby being tangled up with some woman. While cleaning himself up, Sam realizes that the "stone" is actually a ceramic fragment from a broken coffee mug and the stains on the late professor's clothing and body must have been coffee. After trying to find Tanya's number and realizing that she never gave it to him, he deduces that Kitty -who told him the number- would know the number if O'Tabby gave it to her. When he remembers that Kitty spilled the coffee when he mentioned talking to O'Felix about O'Tabby's "woman trouble", he realizes that Kitty and the girl who recently left the university are one and the same and that she was infatuated with the professor, of whom she could never have. Sam therefore accuses Kitty of O'Tabby's murder, believing her motive was that she loved O'Tabby but the professor didn't love her. Kitty breaks down into tears upon hearing this, insisting that she did not kill the professor, having simply left the university because she was unable to bear the thought of working so close to O'Tabby and being unable to have him. When Sam asks her about her time there, she recognises the coffee mug fragment as a piece of the professor's favorite mug from which he always drank and explains that she did more than make coffee for O'Tabby; she was his personal assistant every Friday and one of the things she did for him was filling prescriptions for potent sleeping pills to counter his coffee-induced insomnia.

Deducing O'Felix is the murderer, Sam finds him in the university chapel and brings him to court. Afterwards, Tanya visits Sam one last time; she phoned back after Sam left and came right over upon being told he was going to nab O'Felix. When Sam suggests about a possible relationship, Tanya then makes it very clear that the romance Sam had hoped to have with her will never happen due to them being too different. After Tanya leaves (giving Sam a cheque for his time), when Kitty asks Sam how he knew O'Felix did it, he reveals the conclusion he came to based on what Kitty told him. Sam deduced that O'Tabby had to have left directly from the university to call on their benefactress the night he died because he was still drinking from his favorite mug when the crash occured; O'Felix, who substituted for Kitty after her resignation, had fixed the cup of coffee in question. O'Felix, knowing it would take an hour for O'Tabby to get to the scene of the accident 40 miles away, spiked the coffee with a couple of O'Tabby's sleeping pills, causing O'Tabby to fall asleep at the wheel (just like the police had peviously believed) and drive off the clifftop road to his death. O'Felix's motive for all this was jealousy; he was being passed over by his former student's success and in desperation got rid of O'Tabby, allowing him to become department head and get what had eluded him all his life ("the old power struggle in the university routine", Sam says). Kitty then starts to seduce Sam, only for reality to intrude via Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle opening the closet and asking what he was doing in there. After Garfield -as Sam Spayed- cryptically tells Jon why, the special closes by briefly going back into the fantasy with a shot of Sam's office door and Kitty turning the lights out as she and Sam cuddle.

Characters[]

Main characters[]

Major characters[]

Minor characters[]

Songs[]

Trivia[]

  • Jon Arbuckle only makes a brief appearance at the end of the special when he opens the closet and finds Garfield inside.
  • The majority of the special takes place in the fantasy world.
  • A wanted poster showing Jon is shown in Sam Spayed's office.
    • Odie also makes an appearance in the fantasy world as a maintenance worker.
  • In the Garfield: His 9 Lives graphic novel, the plot of "Babes and Bullets" is different. The murder victim, while also a coffee drinker who took sleeping pills, was a Greek Orthodox priest who was murdered by an elderly priest due to the fact the old priest's star was being eclipsed by the young, attractive, charismatic priest. This was most likely changed to avoid religious controversies, while still retaining the power struggle element.
  • Garfield would travel into the fantasy world again in the 1990 TV special Garfield's Feline Fantasies.
  • The strip released on the Sunday after the special's premiere featured Garfield in his Sam Spayed costume. In the first panel, he walks past a poster featuring Grimm from the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm.

Cultural references[]

  • The special is based on old black-and-white noir films, such as The Maltese Falcon. The Maltese Falcon featured a private eye named Sam Spade. Unlike Babes and Bullets, the murder in that film involved Spade's fellow detective partner Miles Archer, and while the murderer did have an "O'" last name, it was a woman named Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Unlike Tanya O'Tabby, Archer's widow was a minor character in The Maltese Falcon and did not need to hire Spade. Archer's murder was also only a subplot in the film, with the main plot involving efforts to capture a valuable maltese-colored falcon statue.

Awards[]

  • 1989 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program


Television Specials
"Here Comes Garfield" "Garfield on the Town" "Garfield in the Rough" "Garfield's Halloween Adventure" "Garfield in Paradise" "Garfield Goes Hollywood" "A Garfield Christmas" "Happy Birthday, Garfield" "Garfield: His 9 Lives" "Garfield's Babes and Bullets" "Garfield's Thanksgiving" "Garfield's Feline Fantasies" "Garfield Gets a Life"
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