A 'Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds' movie is on the way

Swords at the ready... a feature-length Dogtanian movie is on the way.

According to Variety, the cult 80s cartoon, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, will be rebooted by the show's original writer, Claudio Biern Boyd.

Originally made by the Japanese studio Nippon Animation, it picked up the stories of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers – the royal guardsmen Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and their young cohort d'Artagnan.

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However, with an anthropomorphic twist, the tales were told using cartoon dogs, d'Artagnan becoming Dogtanian.

The action followed Dogtanian as he travelled from Béarn, with sidekicks Pip the mouse and Planchet the bear, to Paris, hoping to become one of King Louis XIII's brave musketeers.

Befriending Porthos, Aramis and Athos, they save Juliette, also a dog, and a maid-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Austria, and tussle with the shady Cardinal Richelieu.

It was screened in the after-school slot on the BBC from 1985, becoming a huge ratings hit with a memorable theme tune.

The first series ran over 26 episodes, with a second series, The Return of Dogtanian, arriving in 1989, which saw Dogtanian married to Juliette and living outside Paris with their two children.

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A TV movie was made in the mid-90s, but this new project will be a co production between the India and Singapore-based animation house Cosmos-Maya and Spain's Apolo Films, owned by original writer Biern Boyd.

“Dogtanian will entertain children as it used to do their parents 40 years ago, following our philosophy: make kids happy,” he told Variety.

Writing will be Doug Langdale, who's penned several of the Scooby-Doo movies, as well as the Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness series.

Amazingly, the original series still airs terrestrially in over 100 countries. It has also aired worldwide on Netflix.