Many years ago now, I had to study Seamus Heaney for A-Level. All a bit pointless, really. Sure, “Death of a Naturalist” is all very well, but did he ever write anything as good as the opening theme to Heathcliff?
“So join in the jubilee / The cats are great they’ll all agree / You’ll find in each calamity / The cat’s superiority”. Wise words, mate.
In fact, the lyrics to the theme have been widely questioned over the years. I always thought one of the lines was “They’ll make some history”, but after some careful listening to a high quality version of theme on Shuki Levi’s website, I believe the lyrics are actually the following:
The gang will reign supreme
And no-one can deny-y-y-y
They’ll make ’em history
And always have an alibi
Which is actually more appropriate – there is a fine line between gang and gangster – but the combination of “make ’em history” and “alibi” does sound rather murderous. Don’t run into Riff-Raff after dark, he’ll tear your face off.
Anyway, I remember very little about Heathcliff aside from the brilliant Levy/Saban theme tune, and I’m not sure I paid much attention to the rest of the show when I saw it at the time. But watching the end credits of the show recently, something new struck me.
Perhaps I’m just an idiot and everyone else noticed this years ago, but I’d never realised that most of the little character vignettes are related to each credit. So the creators of the show1 get Heathcliff on his typewriter:
The character designers get Riff-Raff presenting his own crude character design:
The vocal directors and stars of the show get Mungo singing:
And Shuki Levy and Haim Saban have Heathcliff making his own music with trash cans:
All of which leads us to the final caption, and the funniest joke. What vignette do the Executive Producers get?
Riff-Raff having a nap. Amazing.
There’s one other part of those closing titles which I’d like to highlight. For a series that hardly has a reputation for beautiful animation, I’m really rather taken with the sequence of Hector kissing Cleo’s hand… and being rudely whisked away by Wordsworth on his roller skates:
Television animation’s curse is often painfully slow and literal timing. In just ten frames and a second of screen time, the above vignette clearly manages to get across the action, and sells it with strong poses, particularly with Cleo. And then punctuates the joke sharply with the cut to the next credits. I find it extremely satisfying.
* * *
The above end credits sequence was used for the first season of Heathcliff, which originally aired in 1984-85, and consisted of the first 65 episodes.2 The following year, a second season of 21 episodes aired.
This time round, the end credits looked a little different.
The actual credit captions themselves for the first season were clearly made on film. For the second season, they originated on video. Possibly for cost reasons, although I don’t really know how much money it would save when spread across the whole season, so I suspect convenience also played a part here.
The result is something that, OK, might be a little easier to read in terms of the larger text size, but is also decidedly more ugly.
Season 1
Season 2
It also has two other unwanted side effects. The size of the text means that the credits now obscure some of the vignettes. It also means that the credits are split differently, so some vignettes no longer correspond to the appropriate crew members.
For Riff-Raff rooting through the bin, both problems are apparent:
Season 1
Season 2
Mungo singing works better in terms of being used for an appropriate credit, but the animation itself is still obscured:
Season 1
Season 2
This is followed by the opposite problem – they’ve managed not to obscure the animation, but again, the vignette no longer corresponds to the correct credit. Heathcliff playing some trash cans is a witty comment on the musicians; there’s no joke when changed to Supervising Director:
Season 1
Season 2
And perhaps most sadly of all, the great animation of Wordsworth, Hector and Cleo is now completely obscured by the video-originated captions:
Season 1
Season 2
The thing is, I get it. I’ve worked in television for over fifteen years now. If perfect is the enemy of good, then sometimes you’re just grateful to have got something delivered in a transmittable state. I don’t imagine the production team of Heathcliff got too wound up about this. They got their 21 episodes of Season 2 completed, delivered, and done. Anything else is a detail.
But when that detail involves obscuring one of your best pieces of animation, and killing some of your funniest jokes… well, it’s worth a rueful sigh a few decades down the line, at least.
Yes, it’s that Chuck Lorre. ↩
In the UK, it first aired on BBC1 in 1988. ↩
31 comments
John J. Hoare on 21 July 2025 @ 7am
Incidentally, as result of this article, I now own all 86 episodes of the 1984/85 Heathcliff on DVD.
Now don’t get me wrong, I *like* that I can own all 86 episodes of Heathcliff on DVD, even if I’ll never watch them. It does, however, bring into rather sharp focus the programmes which never got a proper release…
John Hodson on 21 July 2025 @ 8am
A little closer to home, the end credits for Mr Benn were also illustrated appropriately for the role being credited, even down to there being 7 people sharing a long flute when the names of the 7 musicians were shown.
John J. Hoare on 21 July 2025 @ 8am
The opening titles to The Powerpuff Girls Movie also pull the same trick. My favourite part: amid all the shots which are easy to interpret, the Animation Direction credit is illustrated by the smashing of a clock. You had to think to get that one!
Dominic Small on 21 July 2025 @ 10am
This being Dirty Feed, I was fully expecting a detailed analysis of the differences between “Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats” and “Heathcliff Cats & Co.”, particularly the fact that the BBC broadcasts billed by Radio Times and Andi Peters as the latter opened with the “Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no-one should…” version of the theme, whilst the former twistedly adopted the “Cats and company have fun…” take, at least according to TV theme sites I’ve seen/heard from in the past…
Richard Lyth on 21 July 2025 @ 10am
I always thought Hearhcliff was just a rip-off of Garfield, but watching the credits it looks more like an update of Top Cat, with maybe a hint of Transformers in the changing vehicles. Of course being old and cynical I now know there’s no guarantee the actual episodes will resemble the opening credits in any way, but you can see how kids at the time would have got sucked in.
Gareth Randall on 21 July 2025 @ 10am
See also The Flumps for the end credits trick.
John J. Hoare on 21 July 2025 @ 10am
Dominic: I’m glad you brought that up, because I was going to write about that, but the facts repeatedly decided to elude my grasp.
For instance, one tale goes that for Season 1, DIC made the Cats & Company segments first, and then had to add the Heathcliff segments after the fact, in order to make the show more sellable with a known character. This is an irresistible story, and fits in with the idea that they did the Cats & Co version of the theme first, and then changed it to Heathcliff… but I can find NO PROOF ANYWHERE that this is the real production history, just lots of fans who repeatedly state it, and “know” it to be the case.
Without that detail, discussing the Cats & Co version of the theme seemed to be something to try and nail down later on. Another thing that’s difficult to work out: exactly when did it change in US/Canada showings from the Cats & Co theme, to the more familiar Heathcliff? Again, I’ve seen hints that it was just the first few episodes, then it changed, but that’s irritatingly non-specific. (For the record, the DVD has Heathcliff throughout, although I understand some VHS releases had the Cats & Co theme to add to the confusion…)
John J. Hoare on 21 July 2025 @ 10am
Richard: it’s probably worth pointing out that when it comes to the original comic strips, Garfield was 1977, and Heathcliff was… 1973.
However, I feel duty-bound to admit that I only found that out when researching this article, and I always thought Garfield was first too.
John J. Hoare on 21 July 2025 @ 11am
Gareth: having grown up with The Flumps… I never noticed that one either! I must have been a particularly dim child.
The Flumps even does the “sleeping character as the producer credit” joke.
J. Wallace on 21 July 2025 @ 2pm
The presence of Chuck Lorre in the credits gives me pause. It’s been suggested that for a fair few Saban productions him and Shuki Levy simply took credit for music, buying out non-union composers as ghostwriters. Given Chuck composed the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme, I wonder if he may have been involved here too.
James on 21 July 2025 @ 7pm
I still remember the early 90s 6AM Channel 4 showings of this that preceeded the Channel 4 Daily, and my parents angrily coming down to send me back to bed for being up so early watching it!
Also strange that there were actually two different Heathcliff adaptations in the 80s, the first one by Ruby Spears, the only thing the two seemed to have in common was Mel Blanc’s voice. Looking at Genome, there was a period in the late 80s where CBBC were showing both versions on different days! Were they so unsatisfied with what Ruby Spears did that they commissioned DiC to do another versopm only 2 years later?
The Heathcliff DVD seems to be pretty much the only post-Cookie Jar acqusition show to keep the original DiC endcaps, everything else seems to have had it replaced with the Cookie Jar one, including the Heathcliff episodes uploaded to YouTube by WildBrain themselves.
James on 21 July 2025 @ 7pm
I’m also sure there’s at least one episode on the DVD with the “Cats & Company” version of the theme tune as well (maybe just on the end credits?), but I’d need to watch through it again to be sure! I watched through it all last year. I could just be misremembering after seeing it online though.
Rob Keeley on 21 July 2025 @ 9pm
Loved this show, although I don’t remember any version/title other than ‘Heathcliff’ being shown here. Interesting to see all the Inspector Gadget people in the end credits.
I love the idea that Riff-Raff would spend out for a balloon based on his own face…then just grab a trash can to use as the basket.
Cleo looks like she’d be great fun to have kittens with.
James on 21 July 2025 @ 10pm
Showing your furry credentials with that last sentence there, Rob 🤣
When it comes to Garfield, I actually imported a complete DVD set of Garfield & Friends a few years back- though I’m pretty sure it’s a pirated set, cos the printing on the boxes and discs dodgy and it’s all on single layer discs with a not great bitrate (but still kept properly 60i). Still preferable to the current official DVD releases in print though, which are the “remastered” versions- cropped to 16:9 and with an awful flash recreation of the title sequence- I’d rather have low bitrate pirated copies than that!
And on a similar vein, Mill Creek, who released the Heathcliff DVDs have finally released their Blu-Ray of Bewitched this week after being delayed for nearly a year… and it has the cropped 16:9 versions, even though all the promotion, and the box itself, says it’s 4:3 🤦♂️They also screwed up their I Dream Of Jeannie blu-rays- they were 4:3, but for some reason were just upscales of the old SD masters (not even SD versions of the new masters), with some audio issues on some episodes thrown into the mix. An Australian company have released proper HD 4:3 versions of both shows this year, but they’re VERY expensive (over $100 for 2 seasons) deluxe limited edition releases- I’m sticking with my DVDs (which include imported DVDs for the black & white seasons, which annoyingly were only released colourised over here)
Rob Keeley on 21 July 2025 @ 10pm
Oh, I loathe it when titles and endcaps are mucked about. The worst I’ve seen was the DVD of the original Woodland Animations Postman Pat from 1981, which substituted the 1996 opening titles and had an awful substitute closing theme “What’s in his bag?’ Ghastly.
John J. Hoare on 22 July 2025 @ 12pm
James:
I have to be honest, I did just make an assumption that none of the episodes on the discs had that version of the theme, based on viewing a random selection. Not sure I can face going through all of them to check…
Dominic Small on 22 July 2025 @ 4pm
The Heathcliff memory-prod reminded me of the other shows that had adapted intros for their CBBC broadcast. Teenage Mutant Hero/Ninja is fairly well-documented, but having had the chance online to hear the original US Midnight Patrol theme – https://youtu.be/fSzcUHKmfjg?si=E74-JxQswjHrvCxf – alongside the Potsworth I grew up with – https://youtu.be/iZS3WdRFQc4?si=tPnEVFTTiCGnRTEX – I think the “international” theme flows a little better, the US really stretching out “pattroooool” to fit whereas we get a whole second line.
And I won’t even start down the “and company”/”and Co” rabbithole, other than that to the best of my memory Potsworth (and Aspel for that matter) were generally verbally “and Company” regardless what the titlecard showed, whilst Scratchy was always “and co”, including within the show itself…
James on 22 July 2025 @ 6pm
Wasn’t Potsworth and Co technically a UK production anyway, even if it was made by Hanna Barbera? So it’s likely the US theme tune is the changed/adapted one.
Rob Keeley on 22 July 2025 @ 9pm
The show had “and Company” but CBBC presenters used to say “and Co”.
John J. Hoare on 23 July 2025 @ 12pm
By the way, if you wanted to hear a full instrumental of the Heathcliff theme – apparently taken from the Italian dub, rather than AI’d – then here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqe7DmUZsjI
J. Wallace on 23 July 2025 @ 10pm
@James Sleepy Kids (the co-producers) were definitely British, as they ended up doing a fair bit of acquisition and production themselves. I think ultimately they became Entertainment Rights, holder of a lot of classic British IP such as Basil Brush and The Trap Door, which (theoretically) means this all lives with Universal as part of DreamWorks.
Raises the question of how many of these properties large US corporations own without awareness or desire, much like Disney with TVS.
James on 24 July 2025 @ 3pm
Potsworth and Co also has a credit for Theresa Plummer-Andrews as “executive producer for the BBC”- a credit which appears on countless 90s CBBC shows!
I do wonder who owns the rights to the show though, is it Warner Brothers or Dreamworks, or is it split between them in some awkward way that many co-productions are?
It wasn’t the first UK Hanna-Barbera co-production either, as there’d been Paddington and Superted adaptations not long before as well. With Superted, they recast Superted and Spotty, but in the UK they got Derek Griffiths and Jon Pertwee back to redub the parts.
James on 24 July 2025 @ 11pm
In fact on this video of the UK version, you can see Derek and Jon’s names very crudely pasted onto the end credits!
John J. Hoare on 25 July 2025 @ 11am
That is absolutely bloody awfully done. One of the worst examples I’ve ever seen!
Martin Fenton on 25 July 2025 @ 6pm
The credits on VT thing would have allowed them to change members of production crew without going to the considerable expense of having a new credit drawn, shot, developed and spliced into the reel. Are the first series credits all the same, or is there switching of personnel between episodes?
John J. Hoare on 25 July 2025 @ 6pm
I’d have to check. The other question is whether there are any changes between episodes of the second season, because if they’re aren’t, you’d think it’d be worth just getting it done properly again once!
As I understand things – and I haven’t researched it properly, this is just picked up from various people online – DIC was undergoing various budget cuts in 1985. Some people claim the animation in the second season of Heathcliff is noticeably inferior to the first. I’d need to poke at that a bit more before agreeing, because it’s not like the animation in the first season is spectacular…
James on 26 July 2025 @ 10am
When it comes to Superted, all I can find online of the Hanna Barbera version is the UK dub, I would be interested to see what the US version is like just to see if the voices are as unsuitable for the characters as Paddington’s was (and I say that as someone who loves a lot of Charlie Adler’s other voice work, and I have a signed picture from him, but that high pitched whiny voice is just so wrong for Paddington). Seeing as they had a 13 year old playing Superted, the answer is most likely.
Although even in the UK dub, the HB version of Superted has so many US cultural references that would have been meaningless in the UK- the episode I watched the other day was about the Grand Ole Opry which I doubt many people over here have even heard of, and there’s another based on Leave It To Beaver, which was never shown over here, it must have left a lot of viewers baffled!
DocWallace on 26 July 2025 @ 12pm
On that credits patch, there’s a similar one in Bananaman for the later series (although I think they were largely produced at the same time with voices etc). Note the slightly off timing on adding the Additional voices credit that should have been superimposed with the Goodies
https://youtu.be/tl3krPvojms?feature=shared
And that’s not to mention the awful patch wipe on Father Christmas to remove the special thanks given to the Channel 4 commissioners in an absolute no-no for guidelines. I’d post that, but only clear copies are on line (the US and UK DVDs leave it readable)
James on 26 July 2025 @ 9pm
I guess Ruby Wax’s name not being on every episode of Count Duckula is a similar thing, though it isn’t a dodgy superimpose, you just have a blank space at the bottom of the cast list on the episodes she isn’t in.
Duckula being one of those shows that always has the Thames skyline frontcap added on repeats and DVDs, even though it was never there on the original broadcast (and indeed the Thames logo had changed full stop by the time of the second series anyway… and again by the third!). Dangermouse is another (didn’t CITV stop using frontcaps quite early on, so they wouldn’t have been used after series 4), and I know it’s popped up on international airings of the half-hour Bill episodes and Mr Bean as well (the first year of the half-hour Bills would have had the skyline endcap, but never the frontcap, though the original hour long ones would have. Obviously Mr Bean would never have had either).
I know I’m going off on a tangent again here.
Rob Keeley on 31 July 2025 @ 10pm
The Thames thing is really weird – they stick the skyline ident on the start of everything (even post-1989 productions and CITV shows where it never was) but then remove the skyline from the ends of shows (or whatever original endcap) and stick modern captions on. At the end of Rumpole episodes on TPTV you get the 1990s Thames caption with the rectangle and Tower Bridge, then Pearson Television, then a modern Fremantle caption stuck on after it!
Rob Keeley on 1 August 2025 @ 12pm
Just watched the instrumental Heathcliff credits and they may well be from the Italian dub, but I had a huge nostalgia rush and I know I’ve seen them before. I think that version sometimes aired in the UK too.
Comments on this post are now closed.