CAT AND MOUSE TALES: MGM's Tom and Jerry Cartoons 1940-1958 Part One - 1940-42 Intro - One Cat, One Mouse... Puss Gets the Boot... The Midnight Snack... The Night Before Christmas... Fraidy Cat... Dog Trouble...Puss N' Toots... Bowling Alley Cat... Fine Feathered Friend

One Cat, One Mouse, One Long Chase

     MGM's Tom and Jerry shorts may be the purest of all the classic cartoons series from American animation's heyday.  They didn't star quirky characters like Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck or Popeye and Olive Oyl.   You had Tom, a non-descript grayish-blue cat and you had Jerry, a cute little brown mouse.  Tom chased Jerry, Jerry defended himself.  With little variation, every Tom and Jerry cartoon was about Tom chasing Jerry.  Often, the cartoons would start in consectatio res, Jerry scrambling around some corner, Tom in hot pursuit.  There wouldn't any explanation of what started it - this is just what they did.

     The gags were as simple as the stories.  Pies in the face, frying pans to the head, hammers to the tail.  Tom would chuckle at a mini-firecracker handed to him by Jerry and - BOOM! - it would turn out to have the power of a stick of dynamite.  Jerry would hit a bulldog in the butt with a plank of wood, Tom would arrive, Jerry would hand the plank to Tom, Tom would get pummeled by the dog.  Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera weren't doing anything in their Tom and Jerry cartoons that the gang at "Termite Terrace" over at Warner Brothers wasn't doing in spades in their Bugs and Daffy cartoons.   

     Tom and Jerry rarely talked, and when they did, you never knew what voice would come out of their mouths, especially Tom.  In some cartoons, his voice would differ depending on the situation, such as in The Zoot Cat (1944), where he uses three distinct voices, even one that sounds mysteriously like Frank Sinatra speaking, in the course of six minutes.  There is nothing really distinctive about the character design of Tom and Jerry either.  Yes, we recognize them instantly today because they are famous stars, but really, take away their names and our memories of their classic chases, and both characters could have fit perfectly into the menagerie of nameless dogs, cats, mice and birds that populated Tex Avery's cartoons from the same studio.

     On paper, the Tom and Jerry premise sounds unpromising.  A cat chases a mouse?  Sounds good for maybe one cartoon, or possibly a handful before the gags run out, right?  Ah, but the greatest comedy can come from the simplest of ideas.  Hanna and Barbera took their simple, cliched premise and turned it into one of the alltime great cartoon series.  As Ella Fitzgerald might explain it, t'ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.

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PUSS GETS THE BOOT

(1940)

With Tom, Jerry, Mammy Two-Shoes

     STORY: Tom chases Jerry and annoys Mammy Two-Shoes.

     Tom and Jerry arrived nearly fully formed in 1940, although Tom was originally christened "Jasper" and Jerry had no name (reportedly called Jinx on the original model sheets). Tom is a little scruffier, with tufts of hair sticking out all over his body that the animators had to laboriously retrace 24 times a second, eventually leading to a more streamlined version of the character.  He also walked on all fours, not yet the humanized bipedal feline we remember today.  But from the opening shot, he is Tom, gleefully torturing Jerry out of instinct, boredom, hunger or a combination of all three.  Jerry is also essentially the mouse we know and love today, although he would soon be redesigned into a rounder, cuter rodent.  Still, in this first film, Jerry is Jerry, always finding ways to turn the tables on Tom, and when that fails, doing his best to inflict maximum pain on the cat, in this case, giving Tom his first punch to the eye.

     Puss Gets the Boot lacks several elements that would come into the series later.  It is more leisurely paced,  though no doubt still light years faster than the usual Disney-influenced 'toons MGM was usually offering in 1940. There are no screams, only cat hisses, and nobody lets loose with an explosive popeyed reaction shots. Director Tex Avery, who had been doing fine work at Warners and was one of the many fathers of Bugs Bunny, would not arrive at MGM until 1942, and although he would never direct a Tom and Jerry, his energy and sense of timing would seep into the Tom and Jerry cartoons by osmosis. 

     Finally, the violence is restricted to that one punch in the eye - the usual assortment of axes, sticks of dynamite and other implements of mass destruction would come later.  But the story is typical Tom and Jerry.  In the course of chasing Jerry, Tom breaks a flowerpot, and his owner, Mammy Two-Shoes (a racial stereotype but an admirable character) tells him in no uncertain terms that if he breaks one more thing, out he goes.  Therefore, Jerry spends the rest of the cartoon using this information to his advantage.  In the end, puss gets the boot and Jerry happily retires to his mouse hole, sweet mouse hole.  We can only imagine that about an hour later, Jerry finds himself so bored, he lets Tom back in the house to begin the chase anew.

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THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

(1941)

With Tom, Jerry, Mammy Two-Shoes

     STORY: Tom and Jerry are both in the mood for midnight snacks.  The ensuing noise while raiding the refrigerator and inflicting pain and humiliation on each other wakes up Mammy.

     After Puss Gets the Boot, neither Joe Hanna nor Bill Barbera had much thought of following up on it, as MGM did not see the cartoon as anything special.  But eventually, requests started coming in to the studio for more of those "cat and mouse" cartoons, and when Puss Gets the Boot was nominated for an Academy Award, Hanna and Barbera got the green light to revisit their original creations, changed their names to Tom and Jerry and came up with The Midnight Snack.

     It's a really cute cartoon, and that's meant in a positive way.  Set at midnight, it offers plenty of atmosphere, serves up a few memorable food gags, further explores the relationship between cat and mouse, and shows a few hints of the glorious violence soon to come in the series.  Most importantly, it manages to allow us to share our sympathy between Tom and Jerry.  Although we may initially sympathize with the mouse - one of the tiniest characters in all of animation - we can also feel for Tom when Jerry finally gets the upper hand.  He's a cat.  He's biologically engineered to want to catch and eat Jerry.  But he's just so bad at it, it always leads to pain and suffering.  How can you not feel for the guy?

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THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

(1941)

With Tom, Jerry

     STORY: Jerry's playtime around the Christmas Tree abruptly ends when he mistakes Tom for just another stuffed toy.

     Certainly not one of the great Tom and Jerry cartoons, but surely one of the most nostalgic.  Now that we are in a time where popular entertainment treats Christmas with about the same respect as they treat everything else (zero), watching a sweet, gentle cartoon like A Night Before Christmas may bring a tear to your eye.  The music on the soundtrack, featuring not only "Jingle Bells" but also snippets of several Christian hymns, is gorgeous, and the short ends with a historical moment as Tom rescues Jerry from the cold and, at least for Christmas Eve, predator and prey become friends.  A little treacly, you may say, but in these jaded times, I find treacle a lot more acceptable than I used to.

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FRAIDY CAT

(1942)

With Tom, Jerry, Mammy Two-Shoes

     STORY: Seeing Tom frightened while listening to "The Witching Hour" on radio, Jerry decides to have some ghostly fun.

     An okay "haunted house" story clearly influenced by Abbott and Costello's hit HOLD THAT GHOST of the previous year, Fraidy Cat is notable mostly for several historical moments.  Tom almost speaks and lets out his first scream, a rather tame one compared with the blood-curdling screams to come.  He also gets his first really nasty crack in the skull courtesy of a spittoon.

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DOG TROUBLE

(1942)

With Tom, Jerry, Spike, Mammy Two-Shoes

     STORY: Tom and Jerry find they have a common enemy: Spike the Bulldog.

     A well-executed short brimming with enough energy for three cartoons, Dog Trouble introduces a bulldog character whose most common name in later cartoons would be Spike. Usually an enemy of Tom's exclusively, here he chases both Tom and Jerry and shows a distinct inclination to have them both as a snack.  After Jerry helps rescue Tom, the pair call a truce and work together to get Spike in trouble with Mammy and thus kicked out of the house, Mammy's cure-all solution for any and all pet problems.  Having achieved that... the chase goes on.

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PUSS N' TOOTS

(1942)

With Tom, Jerry, Toots, Mammy Two-Shoes

     STORY: Tom's afternoon of keeping Jerry trapped in an empty fishbowl is interrupted by a visit from Toots, the pretty feline female Mammy agrees to watch.

     The competition from Warner Brothers and the arrival of Tex Avery at MGM may have now been influencing Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.  Puss 'N' Toots contains not a hint of the sentimentality found in The Night Before Christmas or Dog Trouble.  The pace is faster than anything that has come before, with little time for anything but gags, and Scott Bradley's score is bolder and brassier than usual and includes, for the first time, the recurring theme of "Darktown Strutters Ball".  The situation of Tom having the hots for Toots, even turning into a wolf for a few moments, could have come from Avery while the record player that seems to come to life feels like something out of Warners.  

     Then again, the animators at Warners were just getting up to speed themselves on their own classic characters, with Bugs and Daffy still in the same early experimental stages like Tom and Jerry at MGM.  So it could be that MGM shorts like Puss 'N' Toots were actually influencing Warners.  I'm sure there was a little bit of both - both sets of animators were so good at what they did, they were most likely completely aware, and admired, the equally excellent work of the competition.  And both knew they could not compete with Disney any more and so were simultaneously developing their own wilder brands of cartoon comedy.

     Warners was already cornering the market on characters with speech defects who loved to talk.  With Tom and Jerry, Hanna and Barbera created almost purely silent characters, and specialized in pure, old-fashioned slapstick and creative visual gags.  However, Jerry does say his first words in Puss 'N' Toots: "Help, help!" into a phone.

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BOWLING ALLEY CAT

(1942)

With Tom, Jerry

     STORY: Tom, Jerry and a bowling alley.  Balls, pins... could get painful.

     Hanna and Barbera quickly realized that a good way to keep the series fresh was to place Tom and Jerry in different locales other than Mammy's home.  So here they are at a bowling alley, where Tom throws bowling balls down the lane at Jerry and Jerry finds myriad ways to avoid them.  Jerry's now coming into his own as a character. At one point, he bites Tom on the finger and then spends a few seconds spitting the taste of cat out of his mouth. In mid-chase, he motions to Tom to hold up, and everything comes to a momentary halt.  At that point, Jerry bashes Tom on the foot, and the chase begins again - a classic gag that would be repeated endlessly throughout the series.  Later, Tom is tieing a rag around a bowling ball, hoping to seal Jerry in one of the holes.  Jerry, who is not in the ball at all, helpfully offers his finger so that Tom can make a nice pretty bow.  He's becoming quite the little miniature Bugs Bunny , this Jerry is.

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FINE FEATHERED FRIEND

(1942)

With Tom, Jerry, unnamed hen

     STORY: Tom chases Jerry at a farm.

     From inner city bowling alley to countryside farm in the space of one cartoon.  But no matter where these pair are, the story is the same - Tom chases Jerry.  In the sixties, both Gene Deitch and  Chuck Jones, who directed Tom and Jerry series of their own, would take this idea to the extreme, placing Tom and Jerry in outer space.

     In order to get away from Tom, Jerry hides under a hen.  Every time Tom tries to get at Jerry, he receives a fresh new world of hurt from the hen, who is very protective of her eggs, and completely unaware she is shielding Jerry throughout the entire cartoon. Good, solid stuff.  We finally hear Tom first full-throated cry of pain, which sounds like what you would hear if you hit Stan Laurel on the toe with a hammer while his was in mid-cry.  The other notable element is Tom and Jerry threatening each other with large pruning shears.   Soon it would be axes, and sometimes swords.