Las 9 vidas de Garfield

The book that this animated special was based on came out in...84 or 85. Reading it was a BIG surprise for me, although a lot of it is the same artistic and writing style as the comic, it contains some stories and art that are decidedly NOT the usual Garfield thing, including some rather twisted segments. Only one of those really oddball segments made the TV special (the part where he's a laboratory cat, escapes the military facility, and changes into a dog before the guard dogs can catch him). One of the other segments from the book that does not appear in the show is called Babes and Bullets, which was of course later made as its own stand-alone (slightly rewritten) Garfield special. The show did include at least one segment that was not in the book (Diana's Piano).

If you ever come across the book, give it a read, but don't expect the entire thing to be typical Garfield. The part called "Primal Urges" contains some very...disjointed art, a la a comic book graphic novel (not the same style, but just as freaky as, say, Batman - The Arkham Asylum).