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.
