heathcliff (comic strip)

Heathcliff is a comic strip created by George Gately in 1973 featuring an eponymous cat. It is distributed to over 1000 newspapers by Creators Syndicate, according to whom it was "the first ever newspaper comic to feature a cat as the main character" http://www.creators.com/comics_Shell.cfm?pg=biography.html&comicname=hth, which of course is not true (eg, Krazy Kat). Heathcliff has some similarities to the more popular comic strip Garfield, which it predated. Both title cats are orange with black stripes, and noted for their bad temper; a "Beware of Cat" sign has been applied to both. Two animated TV-series with the same name were based on the strip; one by Ruby-Spears, another by DIC Entertainment.

Trivia

In Sweden Heathcliff is known as Katten Nisse and as Kattimatti in Finland.
For whatever reason, two versions of the Heathcliff theme song were made. The two only differ in the repeating chorus. The original chorus goes: Heathcliff, Heatcliff no-one should, terrify the neighbourhood, the altered version goes: Cats and company have fun, playing pranks on everyone. The latter has only appeared in the VHS releases of the cartoon.

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