Heathcliff

i grew up watching nickelodeon. and everyday i would watch heathcliff. what an awesome show! heathcliff was the coolest. he would get all the ladies, could beat up any cat, and always did the right things in the right situation. i guess you can call him the arthur fonzarelli of alley cats. and riff raff, haha, riff raff was great!!! i wish the show was still on the air. if you love cartoons, this one is great!!!

I quite agree with the comment that lost were the days of magical cartoons. I grew up with G1 transformers and GI Joe - no 3D special effects and lame narratives.

I was delightfully surprised to see there were people in other parts of the world who shared my curiosity on the non-co-existence of HeathCliff and Riff Raff. This is a childhood mystery that I have grown up with up to today. When I was 7 and I started watching the first few airings on HeathCliff and the Catillac Cats, my mind did not distinguish HeathCliff and Riff Raff - you see they were both sort of orange and led the 3 other cats. So I took it they were one in the same essence. But with more airings and on careful inspection, I saw they were entirely different characters. Now, it is common place for writers to bring different comic personalities in the same setting,this habit was not so for earlier generation cartoons. Perhaps a sort of code of discipline in cartoon writing. I do not think their non-co-existence was for aesthetic reasons as per personality lines, but for legal reasons; they were engineered and voiced by two different people who reaped their individual credits. I must say however, in the aftertheme, you could see Riff Raff taking off his hat from HeathCliff's head with a stick, and I was deeply and passionately drawn to that brief scene - it triggered a sort of philosophic hypothesis that although they had a troublemaking essence in common, but when fused in the same time and setting, one respectfully recedes personality to the other to avoid a sort of time-paradox...and this extends beyond mere cartoon drama, because their co-existence was and would have been, in fact, illegal and a breech of contract with respect to the production laws governing that cartoon, and for credit reasons. So formal airing of HeathCliff could never permit co-existence of those characters.

The HeathCliff theme song is very nostalgic to me.

"Heathcliff" was my fave animated series growing up. In a time (mid 80s) when we were bombarded by violent, mindless action cartoons like "Transformers," "Gobots," and "Thundercats," it was nice to have a pleasant, laid back show like "Heathcliff." The show mostly consisted of the tubby tabby's daily mischief with the owner of the fish market, the milk man, new neighborhood rivals, and the felines and canines he already knew. Other characters were big, dumb dog Spike, Heathy's babe, Sonja, and his family of Iggy, Grandma and Grandpa. After Heathcliff's story we were treated to the adventures of the Cats and Co. led by Riff Raff. It may sound odd, but I actually preferred their tales more than 'Cliffs. They seemed more inventive and fun. Riff Raff's gang consisted of spindly, wannabe tough guy, Hector, constantly rhyming Wordsworth, and brainless, pudgy, Mungo. Those three were also sometimes featured in Heathcliffs stories as well, but for whatever reason Riff Raff and Heathcliff never appeared in the same story. Guess it was to give each their own seperate time on screen. Hey, cartoon characters can have egos too I guess. But all in all, strong writing (especially for a cartoon) and harmless adventures made this a nice half hour after school.

I'm live-and-let-live when it comes to personal taste. It's just here I feel the need to bring my perspective. I think on the Garfield strips and then the cartoons, and they complement each other well with story lines that gradually build to the big comedic payoff.Not so much with the DIC Heathliff episodes. They follow Garfield episode pacing, and yes, good comedic playoffs, but that doesn't jibe with what we get from Heathcliff comics. They were single picture strips (occasionally an extra panel) with single actions and usually a single line that made it an ingenious running gag. That's the spirit of the Ruby-Spears eps; fast- paced with the comedy running in the whole plot process. I often laughed during the start, sometime in the middle, and at the big payoff. I enjoyed DIC (A biig help that they kept Mel Blanc), but Ruby-Spears' fluidity in their presentation makes it my unquestionable preference.

I remember this as 3 cartoons in one (a bit like the pink panther show) and was shown by the BBC in the mid-80s.

The first was Heathcliffe of course, who was a bit too much of a smartarse for my liking.

The third was Marmaduke. The opening theme tune was kind of sung by both and referred to them as a "team" I'm sure, but I don't recall them ever appearing together.

In between(?) was a cartoon about a family of dogs. Can't for the life of me think of the title, but it had a great theme tune.

Maybe I've confused the middle bit with another cartoon altogether, but they all seem related in my mind.