Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry is an American animated media franchise and series of comedy short films created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Best known for its 161 theatrical short films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the series centers on the rivalry between the titular characters of a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Many shorts also feature several recurring characters.
This article is about the animal cartoon series. For other uses, see Tom and Jerry (disambiguation).Tom and Jerry
Puss Gets the Boot (1940)
1940–present
List of shorts (1940–1967, 2001–present)
Spike and Tyke (1957)
In its original run, Hanna and Barbera produced 114 Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM from 1940 to 1958.[1] During this time, they won seven Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, tying for first place with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies with the most awards in the category. After the MGM cartoon studio closed in 1957, MGM revived the series with Gene Deitch directing an additional 13 Tom and Jerry shorts for Rembrandt Films from 1961 to 1962. Tom and Jerry became the highest-grossing animated short film series of that time, overtaking Looney Tunes. Chuck Jones produced another 34 shorts with Sib Tower 12 Productions between 1963 and 1967. Five more shorts have been produced since 2001, making a total of 166 shorts.
A number of spin-offs have been made, including the television series The Tom and Jerry Show (1975), The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show (1980–1982), Tom & Jerry Kids (1990–1993), Tom and Jerry Tales (2006–2008), and The Tom and Jerry Show (2014–2021). In 1992, the first feature-length film based on the series, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, was released. 13 direct-to-video films have been produced since 2002. In 2021, a live-action/animated hybrid film was released. In 2019, a musical adaptation of the series, titled Tom and Jerry: Purr-Chance to Dream, debuted in Japan, in advance of Tom and Jerry's 80th anniversary.
Plot
The series features comic fights between an iconic set of adversaries, a house cat (Tom) and a house mouse (Jerry). The plots of many shorts are often set in the backdrop of a house, centering on Tom (who is often enlisted by a human) trying to capture Jerry, and the mayhem and destruction that follows. Tom rarely succeeds in catching Jerry, mainly because of Jerry's cleverness, cunning abilities, and luck. However, on several occasions, they have displayed genuine friendship and concern for each other's well-being. At other times, the pair set aside their rivalry in order to pursue a common goal, such as when a baby escapes the watch of a negligent babysitter, causing Tom and Jerry to pursue the baby and keep it away from danger, in the shorts Busy Buddies and Tot Watchers respectively. Despite their endless attacks on one another, they have saved each other's lives every time they were truly in danger, except in The Two Mouseketeers, which features an uncharacteristically morbid ending, and Blue Cat Blues, where both sit on a railroad track at the end after being jilted by girlfriends. The cartoon irises out with the whistle of an oncoming steam train.
The cartoons are known for some of the most violent cartoon gags ever devised in theatrical animation: Tom may use axes, hammers, firearms, firecrackers, explosives, traps and poison to kill Jerry. Jerry's methods of retaliation are far more violent, with frequent success, including slicing Tom in half, decapitating him, shutting his head or fingers in a window or a door, stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron or a mangle, kicking him into a refrigerator, getting him electrocuted, pounding him with a mace, club or mallet, letting a tree or electric pole drive him into the ground, sticking matches into his feet and lighting them, tying him to a firework and setting it off, and so on.[2] While Tom and Jerry has often been criticized as excessively violent, there is no blood or gore in any scene.[3]: 42 [4]: 134
Music plays a very important part in the shorts, emphasizing the action, filling in for traditional sound effects, and lending emotion to the scenes. Musical director Scott Bradley created complex scores that combined elements of jazz, classical, and pop music. Bradley often used contemporary pop songs and songs from other films, including MGM films like The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, which both starred Judy Garland in a leading role.
Even though Tom and Jerry almost never speak, the shorts also often had dialogue from other characters. Minor characters are not similarly limited, and the two lead characters speak English on rare occasions. For example, the character Mammy Two Shoes has lines in nearly every cartoon in which she appears. Most of the vocal effects used for Tom and Jerry are their high-pitched laughs and gasping screams.
Outside the United States
When shown on terrestrial television in the United Kingdom, from April 1967 to February 2001, usually on the BBC, Tom and Jerry cartoons were not edited for violence, and Mammy was retained. As well as having regular slots, mainly after the evening BBC News with around two shorts shown every evening and occasionally shown on children's network CBBC in the morning, Tom and Jerry served the BBC in another way. When faced with disruption to the schedules, for example when live broadcasts overran, the BBC would invariably turn to Tom and Jerry to fill any gaps, confident that it would retain much of an audience that might otherwise channel hop. This proved particularly helpful in 1993, when Noel's House Party had to be cancelled due to an IRA bomb scare at BBC Television Centre. Tom and Jerry was shown instead, bridging the gap until the next programme.[55] In 2006, a mother complained to Ofcom about the smoking shown in the cartoons, since Tom often attempts to impress love interests with the habit, resulting in reports that the smoking scenes in Tom and Jerry films may be subject to censorship.[56]
Due to its very limited use of dialogue, Tom and Jerry was easily translated into various foreign languages. Tom and Jerry began broadcast in Japan in 1965. A 2005 nationwide survey taken in Japan by TV Asahi, sampling age groups from teenagers to adults in their sixties, ranked Tom and Jerry No. 85 in a list of the top 100 "anime" of all time. Their web poll taken after the airing of the list ranked it at No. 58 – the only non-Japanese animation on the list, and beating anime classics like Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, A Little Princess Sara, and the ultra-classics Macross and Ghost in the Shell. In Japan, the word "anime" refers to all animation regardless of origin, not just Japanese animation.[57]
Tom and Jerry serve as the long-time licensed mascots for Gifu-based Juroku Bank. Unlike some other Western cartoons such as Bob the Builder, whose characters had to be doctored to have five fingers in each hand instead of the original four,[58] Tom and Jerry aired in Japan without such edits, as did other series starring non-human protagonists such as SpongeBob SquarePants.
Tom and Jerry have long since been popular in Germany. The different shorts are usually linked together with key scenes from Jerry's Diary (1949), in which Tom reads about his and Jerry's past adventures. The cartoons are introduced with rhyming German language verse, and when necessary, a German voice spoke the translations of English labels on items and similar information.
The show was aired in mainland China by CCTV in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s and was extremely popular at the time. Collections of the show are still a prominent feature in Chinese book stores.
In the Philippines, the series was aired on ABS-CBN from 1966 until its closure due to the country's declaration of martial law in 1972, with the later Hanna-Barbera shorts from Barbecue Brawl to Tot Watchers and all of Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones shorts. RPN aired most of Hanna-Barbera shorts from 1977 until 1989. ABS-CBN would later return to the air after the restoration of democracy in 1986 and air the same shorts as in the pre-martial law era. This lasted until the end of 1988.
In Indonesia, the series was aired on TPI (later re-branded as MNCTV) from the mid-1990s to early 2010s and RCTI during 2000s.
Even though Gene Deitch's shorts were created in Czechoslovakia (1960–1962), the first official TV release of Tom and Jerry were in 1988. It was one of the few cartoons of western origin broadcast in Czechoslovakia (1988) and Romania (until 1989) before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.
The Pakistani ice cream brand Omoré has launched a chocolate bar ice cream based on the show.[59]
Tom and Jerry
- Fred Quimby (1950–52)
- Kelly Jarvis (1989–94)
Ended
April 1, 1950
March 13, 1994
Editors Press Service (1989–94)
Humor
In other media
Comic books
Tom and Jerry began appearing in comic books in 1942, as one of the features in Dell Comics' Our Gang Comics. In 1949, with MGM's live-action Our Gang shorts having ceased production five years earlier, the series was renamed Tom and Jerry Comics. That title ran 212 issues with Dell before being handed off to Western Publishing, where it ran until issue #344 in 1984. Tom and Jerry continued to appear in various comic books for the rest of the 20th century.[82] Tom and Jerry comics were also extremely popular in Norway, Germany, Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and Australia.[83] A licensed European version has been drawn by Spanish artist Oscar Martin since 1986.
The following cartoons won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons:[108]
These cartoons were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons, but did not win:
References