I presumed the opposite, that they would have all been fully assembled and boxed, ready for retail. I can’t imagine the cost of labour in France even in the 1980s would have been able to compete with China. But the cardboard would have disintegrated as soon as any water leaked into the container, so within a day or two, the cardboard would be irrelevant.
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Oh, is that the story they’re going with? A broken shipping container? The Illuminati are getting complacent since Golden Dawn got involved.
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After hearing Garfield and shipping, I figured this was some sort of revenge - a plot to make that lasagna-loving feline seem like an enemy of the environment. My theory is that NermalCorp is somehow behind this, and those containers “fell” off a ship registered in…Abu Dhabi. 
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Trying not to imagine an entire shipping container stuffed with severed feet. First because WTF second because what the hell would anyone do with that
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Jim Davis supposedly looked at all licenced merchandise and limited what and when it was made.
In order to keep demand for Garfield products at maximum and extend Garfield’s “life”, Jim Davis limited the number and quantity of each product officially licenced. It always seemed like the products were always around, but apparently he was a master of maximizing saturation with in given product categories. Will post primary link if I can find the story (unless somebody else can find one).
Source: Today I Found Out, Youtube The Real Reason Why Garfield Isn’t Funny
A little background at 7m 24s (video below starts here), or 8m 17s (specific reference starts here)
Edit: Why would I post this. I had a lot of trouble, and still do, reading. I bought a Garfield book as a kid and laughed and read the whole book. This amazed my parents who then went to every garage sale they could for weeks until I had every book that had been printed. (This after my father commuted 90 miles on the Greyhound bus home for the weekends.) They bought me a Garfield stuffed animal, and I read to it and of the stuffed animals they saved, it was one of the few, scuffed eyes and all. I would have swam out to sea or scoured the beaches every day after school if I could have gotten a Garfield phone back then, even though I had nobody to call.
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This would be from the missing container of promotional material for the movie Footloose.
Everybody cut, everybody cut…
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35 years.
200 phones (as reported in article)
envelope math says 0.47 phones/month
Hardly a blight.
Though some might argue that ONE plastic Garfield phone in 35 years was a blight upon France, which I feel is a fully defensible claim.
Also - The translated version of the article used the word imputrescibility !
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If they were severed feet of PIGS, it could be a reason. Making Zampone sausage needs porks feet to me stuffed with ground pork meat and rind, added with flavours and spices.
The article says that the phones have been washing up for thirty-five years. Mainland China was not yet the go-to place for cheap electronics. in the mid-1980s, so the phones were probably made in Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea.
The phones were washed up in Brittany, so the ship had probably sailed down the English Channel (the world’s busiest shipping area) or was about to do so. The final destination probably wasn’t France.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/news/article.cfm?c_id=7&objectid=12205877
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I am not sure, because until 1993 Texas Instruments had a calculator factory in Italy, and Roland had some production in Italy too. Moulinex and Peugeot grinders are made in France, so it’s possible that getting shells from abroad and end assembly in France made sense, it’s not only the raw hourly cost of work that matters, but also logistics and supply chain…
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I’ve belatedly realised that the gif for this article on the Boing Boing main page shows the original ninja Garfield phone.
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I see what you did there.
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Good points! Ebay says it was made by Tyco in Hong Kong, one listing even has manufacture date of 0187. A new model came out around 1992 that was made in China. See photo:
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The “mystery” pre-dates sneakers. But it’s still the same answer: an upside-down boot can float quite awhile too.
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It certainly is true manufacturing in the 1980s was still quite different. From 1983 to 1986 or thereabouts, even some Hot Wheels were still made in France, though I don’t know how many and cannot determine precisely where that would have taken place. (Former Solido factory maybe, or maybe Majorette? There’s also Norev…)
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So what about the mystery of why he haunts me in my dreams?
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Zut alors! C’est Harvey dans l’espace!
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