Yeah, this isn't on the level of the book but it's still a fucked up meditation on mortality in Garfield form so it's pretty good.

Also, comic book publisher BOOM Studios did a remake a few years ago that had new interpretations of some of the lives from the original book plus some new lives like Garfield as a pirate (more than just his Halloween costume), cowboy, and superhero.

Garfield: His 9 Lives is like the Fantasia of Garfield.

I suspect they wanted to keep it mostly G? I'm honestly surprised they kept in Lab Animal.

I remember liking the lives with the Vikings and the private detective, but I can see why those weren't included.

The private detective one wasn't included because they were already planning on making a separate "Babes and Bullets" TV special out of it, which they did indeed make.

It would have been especially cool if they had kept the near-photorealistic anthropomorphized cat art style of the book version of "Babes and Bullets", but that wouldn't have been possible without using the kind of CGI that didn't really yet exist when the TV special was made, so it was just black-and-white Garfield in a trenchcoat.

Was it mostly the same or did they substitute soda for scotch or something?

It's surprisingly PG, they do still mention murder and affairs, though the scotch is replaced by milk, which I suppose makes sense for a cat.

My copy of the book got stolen in 6th grade, I've been meaning to replace it.

The fact that it's supposed to be Garfield adds a whole other level to it, doesn't it?