Heathcliff ( Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats, known as Les Entrechats in French) is a French-Canadian-American animated television series that debuted on September 5, 1984. It was the second series based on the "Heathcliff" comic strip and was produced by DIC Audiovisuel. It ran in syndication until 1988 with a total of 86 episodes. The first show based on the comic strip was "Heathcliff and Dingbat/Heathcliff and Marmaduke", which debuted in 1980 and was produced by Ruby-Spears. The Catillac Cats characters were created by Jean Chalopin and Bruno Bianchi. Animation was outsourced to many Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean studios including TMS, Studio Korumi, Wang Film, Cuckoo's Nest, Mushi and others for the first season before DIC utilized their own, private Japanese studio to avoid paying other companies.