The Stuff You Gotta Watch - Tom and Jerry: 1947-48

CAT AND MOUSE TALES:

MGM's Tom and Jerry Cartoons

1940-1958

Part Four - 1947-48

Intro: Toms, Jerrys, Cats and Mices... Cat Fishin'... Part Time Pal... The Cat Concerto... Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse... Salt Water Tabby... Mouse in the House... Invisible Mouse... Kitty Foiled... The Truce Hurts... Old Rocking Chair Tom... Professor Tom... Mouse Cleaning...

Toms, Jerrys, Cats and Mices

MGM was not the first studio to launch a cartoon series featuring a team named Tom and Jerry. That honor belongs to the Van Beuren Studio, which released about two dozen black and white animated shorts from 1931 to 1933 starring two guys, one tall, one short, named Tom and Jerry. Later on, when these cartoons made it to television, the characters were renamed Dick and Larry so as to avoid confusion with the more famous MGM cat and mouse characters.

Abbott and Costello fans who have the DVD of the 1952 Colgate Comedy Christmas show know that there was also a human team named Tom and Jerry who were acrobats.

There was once a musical team who called themselves Tom and Jerry. In 1957, they had a minor hit single titled "Hey Schoolgirl". The recording career of Tom and Jerry was shortlived, ending in 1958. However, a few years later, they re-emerged in the folk rock scene and recorded an acoustic album under their real names: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Simon and Garfunkel would go on to have many hits including "The Sounds of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". Like the cartoon Tom and Jerry, they fought a great deal, though they never used axes or polo mallets. That we know of.

Herman and Katnip In 2004, as part of a German-American experiment to accurately map the Earth's magnetic field, two satellites were launched into orbit. One satellite was named Tom, and you can guess the other. No reports that they are currently chasing each other through outer space.

No doubt MGM's Tom and Jerry remain the most famous of all Tom and Jerry's, and are the best remembered cat and mouse team in history. In the 1940s, as Tom and Jerry became popular, Paramount's Famous Studios (formerly Fleischer) launched an obvious "copy-cat" series featuring Herman and Katnip. Herman was voiced by character actor Arnold Stang, while Sid Raymond voiced Katnip. Unfortunately, these cartoons are not easy to find today, and the one example I have seen was heavily edited for violence.

Cat and mouse games Then there's Itchy and Scratchy, Matt Groening's long-running cat and mouse duo as seen on The Simpson's. Itchy and Scratchy take the violence of Tom and Jerry and multiply it by approximately a thousand, with Scratchy the cat being bodily mutilated in scores of stomach-churning ways during the show's history. Although most people assume Itchy and Scratchy are based on Tom and Jerry, producer-director David Silverman has said they are actually modelled after Herman and Katnip. On The Simpsons, when Krusty the Clown loses the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons to a more popular children's show, he opts to show a sample of yet another animated cat and mouse, "Worker and Parasite" (from Eastern Europe, Krusty informs us.) After an appropriately surreal, existentialist ten-second clip in which nothing happens in a variety of ways, Krusty's sole comment is "What the HELL was that?".

CAT FISHIN'

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry, Spike

STORY: Tom goes fishing, using Jerry as bait.

Let sleeping mice lie Ever wonder how many different ways Jerry could do damage to Tom's tail? This is the cartoon that answers that question. A series of slapstick food gags with Tom using Jerry as an all-purpose utensil (corkscrew, soup cooler, cigar cutter) and Jerry exacting his revenge on Tom's face, tail and backside in ways that are both funny and cringe-inducing.

I've seen two versions of this cartoon, one with the original Mammy Two-Shoes voice, one dubbed. The difference in dialogue is minimal:

ORIGINAL: "Boy, that's a beautiful table. Sure hope nothin' happens to it before the company gets here."
DUBBED: "My, that's a beautiful table. I sure hope that nothin' happens to it before the company gets here."

"Boy" is changed to "my" and "Sure hope" becomes "I sure hope". And the new voice sounds more refined. Seems like an awful lot of work for a few seconds of completely non-offensive Mammy Two-Shoes wordage. I guess you could call it a case of Political-Grammatical Correctness.

PART TIME PAL

(1947)

With Jerry, Tom, Mammy Two-Shoes

STORY: Jerry discovers Tom to be a true friend, but only when the cat is drunk.

"Well, slap my face if this ain't a mess!". So says Mammy Two-Shoes when she discovers the refrigerator has been not just raided by the contents redistributed all over the kitchen floor. Copping a plot device from Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS (the friend who is only a friend when drunk), Part Time Pal is amusing but never really takes off. When under the influence, Tom's true nature seems to come out - he likes Jerry, wants to live as carefree a life as his little mouse pal, and has a whole lotta resentment toward Mammy. But some of the gags are short-circuited by Jerry stopping Tom from harming Mammy.

THE CAT CONCERTO

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry

STORY: Tom plays Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, Jerry interrupts.

The Old Mice-Stro In what is either a very strange coincidence or a case of one studio stealing an idea from the other, The Cat Concerto was released the same year as Warner Brother's Rhapsody Rabbit. Both films feature established characters (Tom, Bugs Bunny) playing the Hungarian Rhapsody #2 at a packed concert hall, only to be harassed by a mouse living in the piano. The Cat Concerto won the Academy Award for best animated short over Rhapsody Rabbit, which, unfortunately for Warners, was screened for voters after The Cat Concerto.

Watch them back to back and the difference in style is immediately obvious. Tom enters from the wings, sits down and starts playing. Bugs, being Bugs, has to execute five gags (and one audience member!) before hitting his first note. Some of the other gags are similar. The mouse in the Bugs film begins pounding out a boogie bass line on the piano, inspiring Bugs to dash off some tasty blues licks of his own. In The Cat Concerto, Jerry interrupts Tom's Rhapsody with a few syncopated bars of "The Acthison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", but Tom doesn't join in.

But who cares which one came first? Both cartoons are classics. This is, however, the farthest to date that Hanna and Barbera have humanized Tom. He has stepped completely out of the world of cat and mouse and is functioning more like Bugs, Daffy and Donald, characters whose species have little relation to their actions.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. MOUSE

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry

STORY: Tom's poisonous concoction for Jerry has unexpected consequences.

The third in a series of films that have ditched the ultra-violent gags (for the most part) in an effort to explore what else can be done with the characters, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse is obviously inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's horror story, as well as the many film versions of it. The scene in which Tom creates his concoction, disguised as a bowl of milk, is a beautiful, shadowy pastiche of horror films. Of course, the milk doesn't kill Jerry, it only makes him stronger. Like Dr. Jekyll himself, Jerry must whip up more of the stuff when it wears off, but Tom drinks Jerry's concoction instead - with equally unexpected results.

SALT WATER TABBY

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry, Toodles

STORY: Tom and Jerry... at the beach.

Within the first thirty seconds, Tom has already been bashed through a door and covered in garbage... and Jerry hasn't even shown up yet! Fast paced, funny and painful, Salt Water Tabby presents nothing new except for the setting. The only real novelty is a rather angry crab who is annoyed at both Tom and Jerry for disturbing his peace. Otherwise, Tom breaks his teeth on a clamshell sandwich, Tom drinks a cup full of sand, Tom gets hit in the face with a shovel... you know, all the usual good stuff.

MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry, Butch, Mammy Two-Shoes

STORY: Mammy lays down the law: the cat that catches the mouse stays. The other one gets the boot.

The funniest part of this cartoon is the initial search for Jerry, with Jerry helping. (It takes the cats a while to catch on). Otherwise, it's an average short that once again shows that no matter how many cats you send after him, Jerry is smarter. Tom and Butch, who live in the same house for this cartoon, spend more time beating the hell out of each other than trying to catch Jerry.

And I have to say - that Mammy has one gigantic house!

INVISIBLE MOUSE

(1947)

With Tom, Jerry, Spike

STORY: Jerry falls into a jar of invisible ink, which, as everybody knows, renders anything it touches invisible.

Cute, deftly animated but ultimately pointless short. Not that it isn't funny, but there is little Jerry does to Tom while invisible that he couldn't have easily done otherwise. The best parts are when Tom outthinks Jerry, rendering him partially visible with flour and later a blanket thrown over him... and Jerry still gets away unharmed!

KITTY FOILED

(1948)

With Tom, Jerry, a canary

STORY: Tom chases Jerry but soon has to deal with a canary too.

You wonder how stupid those TV censors over in England have to be when they object to scenes of Tom smoking cigarettes but say nothing about a scene in which a canary holds Tom at bay at gunpoint. Not to mention a scene where Jerry breaks all of Tom's teeth with a hammer.

THE TRUCE HURTS

(1948)

With Tom, Jerry, Spike

Story: Spike calls a truce. It doesn't last much past lunch.

Crunchy on the outside, soft in the middle. The first and last 30 seconds of The Truce Hurts features the three lead characters bashing the hell out of each other with a baseball bat (Spike), a frying pan (Tom) and a lead pipe (Jerry). The entire middle of the film is all about the negotiated peace treaty ("With this treaty we won't tinker, the one who does is a stinker") and how hard all three try to live up to it. It's cute, in a good way, with lots of great character moments.

OLD ROCKING CHAIR TOM

With Tom, Jerry, Mammy Two-Shoes, Lightning

Story: Mammy gets a new cat who is more effective at chasing Jerry.

A deft combination of gags, story and character, OLD ROCKING CHAIR TOM is six minutes of perfectly executed cat and mouse mayhem. The new cat, Lightning, is indeed fast as lightning and an expert at getting Jerry out of the house. Jerry figures this out and at one point, he even kicks himself out into the backyard, saving Lightning the trouble. But Lighning is also the Eddie Haskell of the cat world - all sophistication and charm when Mammy Two-Shoes is around, but a troublemaker when she's not. Tom and Jerry's plot to get him in trouble involves an ingested iron and one of those super strong magnets that only seem to exist in the cartoon world.

For younger readers who stopped reading at "Eddie Haskell", look up the Leave It to Beaver television show.

PROFESSOR TOM

With Tom, Jerry, unnamed young cat

Story: Tom's attempts to teach a young cat how to catch mice fall short.

Standard entry with the twist of having Tom having a protege. The little guy has a lot of personality for a one-off character; he's got tons of spunk and energy, even if he is always running off in the wrong direction. It feels so natural for the little cat and Jerry to get along famously we don't even question it. As for Tom, it seems his teaching skills are as sharp as his mouse-catching skills. Sad to say.

MOUSE CLEANING

With Tom, Jerry, Mammy Two-Shoes

Story: If Tom doesn't have the house clean before Mammy gets home, out he goes!

A solid cartoon built on a surefire premise, as Jerry finds just about every way imaginable to get Tom to accidentally mess up the floors, curtains and walls. The master shot of a living room covered in Tom's inky footprints (including the ceiling and walls) is a classic. Unfortunately, this one, in its uncut version, ends with a racial gag in which Tom, face dirtied by coal, pretends to be Stepin Fetchit.