Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats - Iron Cats

I've been covering a lot of 90's stuff, so I figure now's a good time to cover something a little more ancient. The 80's! That's like ten years older than the 90's!

More importantly, Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats.

Heathcliff has a strange history. The comic came before the Garfield comic strip, but Heathcliff is usually passed off as the rip-off. The Heathcliff cartoon (or cartoons, a fact not many people even know about), came out before Garfield and Friends, but I've seen a disturbing amount of people say the Heathcliff cartoon ripped off Garfield. Heathcliff is like the Time Lord of ripping stuff off.

I went with this show for a couple reasons.

1. The Heathcliff: The Movie phenomenon, where they basically packaged a couple Heathcliff cartoons already made and put it in theaters. That's right, they actually put episodes that were rerunning on television and made parents charge for it. Wow. That level of just not giving a damn from a big name animation studio is pretty amazing and means I have to touch upon this show at least once.

2. The Catillac Cats, DIC creations, managed to outstage Heathcliff in his own show. I guess it was because there was more of them to bounce their personalities off of each other and therefore were more entertaining than the trickster motif Heathcliff's cartoons had, or I could address the elephant in the room and point out that Cleo, with her really humanoid body and curves, probably created her fair share of furries in the 1980's.

It's pretty easy to spot Cleo because she's the only cat with cleavage.

3. The intro was the best part of the series. Don't believe me? I guarantee that if you asked someone what they remembered from the Heathcliff show, they'll probably chime in with "Heathcliff Heathcliff, no one should, terrify the neighborhood!" or recite the part where the singers go "Oh a ohhhh a ooooohhhh oh ohhh a ohhhhh!!" It's one of those classic theme songs that will never leave your head the moment you hear it.

Since this show was split into unrelated 11 minute segments, I'll just cover an 11 minute segment and treat it like it's own episode. That means this blog will either be half the length of a traditional "holy crap that's long" blog post I normally do or nothing about the length changes.

So with that, let's watch Heathcliff! Or rather, a group of cats that has nothing to do with Heathcliff. That's right, Heathcliff won't even appear in this analysis. Not one bit.

Iron Cats