Garfield is a popular comic strip character. He was created by Jim Davis and first published in 1978. Garfield is a rotund, lazy orange cat who is fond of almost all food, but most of all, lasagna.
Garfield appeared in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine strip, Garfield Meets The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, disguised as a fifth turtle, Garfello, in order to eat some of their pizza.
Garfield also appeared alongside Michaelangelo in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.
His first show, Garfield and Friends, aired on the same CBS of the 1987 show and featured some references to TMNT: one of introductory quips of the title screen was "Just think of me as like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Pussycat.", the episode "Clash of the Titans" had Garfield asking if before returning to his cartoon he can get pizza on the Ninja Turtles one, and on "Speed Trap", Garfield dismisses a questionable police officer with the quote "If this guy's a lawman, then I'm a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle." The show's sub-segment U.S. Acres once had a reworking of The Tortoise and the Hare that at first considered making the tortoise a ninja warrior, before Booker and Sheldon dismiss the concept doubting that anyone "would ever want to watch a show about it".
On August 6, 2019, Viacom announced that it would acquire Paws, Inc., including the rights to the Garfield franchise (the comics, merchandise and animated cartoons) from creator Jim Davis and that the franchise will be controlled under the Nickelodeon brand (just how 10 years prior the TMNT franchise was acquired by the same company under the same terms), thus making Garfield part of the same family of characters as the Turtles, as well as other famous characters, like SpongeBob SquarePants.
Garfield was revealed as the first downloadable content character for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl on December 7, 2021. He is also a base-game character in Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway & Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2.